introduction

You may ask yourself. Why is a post like this important? Well, it is important because there is a ton of people that jumped into crypto head first without doing any kind of research as to where their money was going. I am not afraid of saying I was one such person not too long ago. I got older and wiser and have chosen to share my grains of wisdom with whoever might want to learn from it.

The currency

First off, it is important to realize that crypto is not just a “currency” crypto is a broad term for a lot of different things outside the currency coins. We, of course, have the cryptocurrency. These are coins whose sole purpose is to transfer wealth from point A to point B. The value of these coins depends on supply and demand. Here is a small example of such coins.

• Bitcoin.
• Litecoin.
• Vertcoin.
• Monero.

The Platforms and Networks

Then we have the Crypto Platform or Network coins/tokens. These are tokens or coins that allow develops to use the different networks with their projects. For example, Ethereum is a platform that runs smart contracts as they are programmed without any downtime.

“Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.

While Ripple is a platform that wants to connect banks to crypto and its consumers.

“Ripple connects banks, payment providers, digital asset exchanges and corporates via RippleNet to provide one frictionless experience to send money globally.”

Here are some platform tokens/coins.

• Ethereum.
• Neo.
• Ripple.
• Stellar.

The Equity or Company Tokens/Coins.

Then we have the Equity coins/tokens or ‘company’ tokens/coins. I call these company coins because a lot of these coins only have use cases with some websites or services. These coins/tokens are by no means bad or should be ignored as often these can be a huge profit if the website they are linked to take off. KUCoin Shares (KCS) is in this category, KCS went from 0,5$ to 20$ at an all-time high and are currently sitting on 2$. Often these coins offer a benefit from owning them, KCS offers a revenue share model, this means that for every 1$ KuCoin makes a % will be split out to token holders. More websites/companies are starting to adopt this model.
Some example of utility coins/tokens are.
• KCS.
• COSS.
• PFR.
• NEON.
• STEEM/SBD.

Why?

Why is it important to know what type of coin/token you are buying you may ask? The answer is simple, if you know what you are investing in you have a bigger chance of knowing when your investment will go up or down. For example, if you have invested in a platform token and the platform you have invested in have an upgrade announced then you could reasonably expect that token to go up in value.
If a company coin/token you have invested in and that company now have a partner of value for their company or offer a new service with their coins/tokens, then you could expect it to go up in value. By knowing your investments, you can more easily predict the market.
And if a currency coins have been accepted as a payment to a well-known site or had some updates that further improves the coin it will almost always go up in price.

Benefits!

By knowing what you own you can be safer when playing the market, as well as deciding on when to buy more or exit. I have often heard people say ‘I will buy X because the graph is low’ graphs don’t really mean anything when it comes to crypto, what means the most is the publicity and use cases for what you have invested in! by having the knowledge of what you actually own it makes it so much easier to make money in this space. not everything will moon but if you choose your investments well there is a lot of money to be made no matter what.

Thank you all for reading this far, this is my first real in-depth post of many to come. I have decided to turn my life around and post at least 1 steemit post daily! (i will have another post out with more information later today)

please leave a comment with feedback if you have any it can be good or bad I am trying to improve :)