Tales of a Cryptocurrency Newbie

This article is about my experiences and returns on staking various cryptocurrencies over the past year or so. Unfortunately, my timing was not so great, as many of these coins were purchased in the first half of 2018 and all have lost considerable value since then, some as much as 85%! This taints the experience a bit. So, to counteract those unfortunate circumstances, my discussion of any returns in this article (both parts), will be focused on gains in number of coins I own, leaving out their value vs Bitcoin, USD, or any other currency. That being said, onwards! =========== Most folks have at least heard of the concept of mining Bitcoin (otherwise known as Proof of Work ), though they may have no idea what it means. Basically, it's a way of using computer processing power to help process Bitcoin transactions and in return, receive newly minted coins as a reward. However, this method of cryptocurrency generation and maintenance has rapidly devolved so that it is only...

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...