Part 1
So, before you get into Crypto you're going to want to know that it's like the wild wild west of investing. The vast majority of the market is driven by speculation and promises of software delivery, as opposed to actual product, so you should anticipate violent fluctuations in your portfolio on a daily basis.
Here are your initial steps:
1. Create an account on Coinbase.com
2. Create an account on Bittrex.com
3. Download the smartphone app "Blockfolio"
Once you have these things done, look online for a bitcoin wallet. A wallet is software that stores your cryptocurrency values, i.e. where all your investments are going to be stored. For bitcoin, I prefer using electrum- it's simple and intuitive. So download electrum; installation should be pretty straightforward. Save your password (and your other wallet passwords) on physical pieces of paper OR you can use a software called Keepass, which is pretty useful when you have multiple wallets with long passwords.
Once you have your BTC wallet set up, you're going to want to go to Coinbase and buy Bitcoin with a credit/debit card. You'll have to establish your card as a method of payment first, pretty straightforward. Once you have BTC in your account (your bank might throw a fit first, because to them using your funds to a cryptocurrency trading site is sketchy), send the BTC you have to your electrum wallet. The address you send to is the long string of characters you see in Electrum under "Receive" tab. Make ABSOLUTELY SURE that the address is correct, or else that BTC is gone. Once the BTC is deposited into your electrum wallet, go to your bittrex account -> wallets -> click on the + sign for Bitcoin, copy the address for that wallet (another long random collection of characters), go to Electrum -> send to that address you see on Bittrex
Part 2
The more interesting part about all this is picking what coins you want to invest in. In the cryptocurrency space, there are two types of coins: mainstream, stable coins (BTC, ETH, LTC) or smaller, riskier coins known as alt coins that have higher potential returns. When constructing their portfolio, a lot of people like to go 50% stable coins, 50% alt coins. I personally went 100% alts because my portfolio money is money I would have used gambling, but I quit gambling after a particularly bad run in Vegas earlier this year.
Investing in stable coins is pretty straightforward. I would consider picking ETH as your stable coin, because of it's massive growth this year- it indicates that it'll be over $1000 in 1-2 years, which is a nice and steady 2-3x return on your investment. Investing in altcoins, however, is far more interesting. My general guide for picking alts is browsing the /biz/ catalog and seeing what's shilled, then going to the website for each alt coin and reading their whitepaper/what their coin does and what it plans to do. I then go to reddit and find the subreddit for that coin and read the general information posts they have on the coins there, then I check twitter for tweets on that particular coin, and finally I look up youtube videos for each coin. /biz/ is about 50/50 on shilling good coins; NEO, OMG, ARK, IOT, XMR have all been excellent buys. But for each good buy /biz/ shills there are also slightly bad buys (BNT, CFI, RDD, XVG, DGB) and also some absolutely awful buys (MYST, KIDSCOIN). It all comes down to your own research and very carefully picking the right coins.
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Part 3
Once you know what you want your portfolio to look like, go to Bittrex, go to the BTC markets, enter the symbols for the coins you want to buy and open a buy order. This process should be fairly intuitive but if you're having difficulty google a couple youtube tutorials for buying on Bittrex. Once your buy orders have filled, make sure to download wallet software for each coin you purchased and move your coins from Bittrex to the wallets; DO NOT LEAVE THEM ON BITTREX because on Bittrex your coins are only listed as IOUs instead of coins you actually own and you will not have actual ownership of said coins until they are securely in their respective wallets. Once your coins are in your wallets, check out blockfolio and add the coins + quantity so you can track their price over time. Good luck!
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