Tales of a Cryptocurrency Newbie

After the shocking Pre-Christmas dip in my holdings, I decided it was time to spread my investments about some more. Diversification and all, you know. But many exchanges seemed shady or had complex setups involving wallets and keys. These were things built for the hardcore users. Not for a casual investor such as myself. I was still not ready to get into the whole wallet thing, especially since I was looking at buying a number of coins. I also did not want to lose what coins I did have due to a hack or botched transfer. I needed the interactions with the exchange to be intuitive and clear. And most of all, I needed to feel like I could trust the exchange in question. Binance , an exchange based in Singapore, was oft-mentioned as a preferred trading spot. So on Christmas evening, I took a look. The website was in English and looked clean, professional. I stepped into the account creation flow and after a surprisingly easy and painless setup, I was ready to go. The number of avail...

In the summer of 2010, while on a plane trip, I happened across a magazine article that talked about this strange new technology called Bitcoin. Though I had no idea what a blockchain was, nor did I fully understand how one could trust a non-centralized, distributed payment system, nonetheless, I was still intrigued by what I had read. Perhaps I would look further into this at a later point. And mining sounded like an interesting avenue for exploration. After all, it was free coins, right? But alas, crap did befall, my worldly possessions were at an unknown position in transit for two weeks as I moved halfway across the country, and Bitcoin slipped entirely from my mind. ... Many years later, another article did catch my eye. This time it was of the online variety, and it spoke of how Bitcoin had surpassed $1000 in value! Holy crap, Batman! If only I had invested $100, or even $20 back in 2010... but then I try to think more rationally and realize that I had I indeed invested 7...