My first 100 days in the crypto community
It’s already been 100 days. What a ride it’s been. I created this account and joined this sub not long after I bought my very first ETH. That’s right, I skipped Bitcoin and my first foray into crypto was Ethereum. I was never sold on BTC and even when it was booming back in the day I didn’t feel like I missed out on anything. I just don’t believe in it if I’m being honest. I respect everything about Bitcoin and Satoshi (whoever you are) sounds like a genius and a revolutionary but I don’t see the use case potential with it. I consider Bitcoin like the Metallica of crypto, a little analogy for myself. I’m a big fan of bands like Tool and The Deftones and I give credit where it’s due to Metallica for paving the way for them to be able to make new music. Bitcoin started the movement but I was sold on the progressive thinkers that followed it. Ethereum is my main commitment and always will be. Vitalik is a very weird person and that is what drew me to it initially. I saw a Vice documentary when I was first looking into crypto to understand and they also included a bonus bit with him. Those were enough to spark my interest and it sort of sent me into a wormhole of research. That was back in March.
I like to think I’ve come a long way. Since I was unemployed I decided to spend my spare time studying crypto. I started with exchanges. Being from Canada my options definitely seemed limited, as a noob at least. Google helped most of the way by putting in things like “Ethereum explained” and “How to store crypto” which brought up a lot of useful information. Overwhelming to say the least. But I didn’t stop at the basics. No, no, no. It made me fascinated with blockchain as a technology beyond cryptocurrency. I read the Ethereum Whitepaper after the Bitcoin whitepaper because everyone should read that one. Satoshi started this, if you don’t understand why he(or she or however they identify) created Bitcoin then you will never understand cryptocurrency fully. Then it came time to buy some.
I initially tried eToro and was immediately hit with the “service not available in Canada” issue. So I searched exchanges in Canada and found Coinberry, Shakepay and amazing already defunct Quadriga. Thankfully the quadriga news was easy to search so it didn’t take long for me to become paranoid about my investments. Coinsquare was also an option that turned out to also be a scam. After eToro I tried Coinberry and I submitted my KYC info and all then crickets they ghosted me. I’d been in contact with customer service prior to submitting and they seemed fine until then. I persevered. Shakepay was next. Fingers were crossed going into this one. I chatted with Shakepay customer service for the better part of an hour on my first day. I asked all of the technical questions and also the stupid ones. I wanted transparency and got it from them. So I bought 1 whole ETH. Next I had to figure out a wallet.
This was difficult. I didn’t need a hardware wallet for 1 ETH, that was overkill. I learned early that the exchange isn’t safe “not your keys not your coins” is a common expression. So I found that middle ground in Atomic Wallet. I did a lot of searching before settling on them. Metamask was the other thought but when I had taken a solidity crash course I struggled with it and didn’t try again. The other wallet options I considered were Exodus Wallet and Guarda. I don’t want to break this down to a full wallet review but I will say that I use both Atomic and Exodus and they are great. I’ve never had an issue and the customer service communication has always been great. They’re transparent and helpful as long as you don’t try to attack them and blame them when you have issues.
What I liked about Atomic when I first looked into it was the very helpful knowledge base they’ve created. The embedded links are to the wallets respective educational resources. If you asked me I’d say people don’t spend enough time reading at least the FAQ of a wallet, exchange or app that they use. Personally, I have read just about every article on both Exodus and Atomic (aside from the ones that repeat the same thing) so that I don’t have to ask everything. If you do take some time, and not that much, you will see they state “We will never ask you to enter your seed for any reason” and that would prevent so many phishing scams, which is what happens when people think they’re hacked. I think it’s important that everyone takes a moment to read about how to avoid being phished. Also check this one about things like pump and dumps and ICO scams.
Now about the community. This place is awesome and I’m glad that I found this sub. It is certainly one of the best subs I’ve joined. I’m also subscribed to just about every single other crypto sub you can find, I like to know what’s going on in every project. I have my favourites and there are a few I’m certainly opposed to but I try to remain as unbiased as possible. I don’t let my investments influence my arguments because that makes it too emotionally driven. I argue with what I’ve read and learned about and am always willing to be told I’m wrong. The moons were such an important factor to that. When I first started into crypto I thought that moons would impact ETH price because I though “reddit is huge, everyone will want ETH after” but I was stupidly wrong. I would never think that again but I wanted to admit so everyone knows that we all start without basic knowledge in this. I wanted moons but my new account wasn’t allowed to post. I had to wait 50 days. What did I do? Engaged in other communities. I learned from other projects. Knowledge is power and it’s by learning and by gaining that knowledge before I could post it only took me 4 weeks to earn 35,000(nearest makes no difference) moons.
During my pre-posting time I read multiple whitepapers for projects like NEO, Ripple(to which I am known to be opposed to but bias aside I’ve listed), Stellar, Komodo, Vechain, [Cardano(not really a whitepaper more of a “why” paper)](https://[cardano.org/why/) and so many more.
I just wanted to link some so that people can read some varying whitepaper to get the differences in ideas. It’s tedious but these are the best ways to understand what’s going on and what the potential of blockchain is. I also got comfortable with reading charts because it’s important for learning trends. I don’t know all the technical terms and buzzwords for patterns but I recognize rhythm and patterns in things and combine that with my own best guess to figure out what to move for. I like statistics so it isn’t boring to me to read them. I mostly use Coingecko for tracking coins and the news section is great. I have made a list of favourites(my own top 40) and I check them daily. Multiple times daily to be honest. I also use Cointelegraph for news, I like their artwork. I also use decrypt because they tend to have more Ethereum and Altcoin news.
Anyway, this has gotten beyond long enough. I hope it is helpful to some. I kind of wish I had found a resource with everything I needed to know to get started in one easy place. There isn’t. But this is a good way to get started.
Thank you for reading. Everything I say is open to constructive criticism but let’s keep it sensible and respectful.
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