The Easiest Way I've Found To Get Started With Bitcoin & Litecoin

First off, I want to say that i'm no expert. In fact, i've only recently began to delve into the world of cryptocurrency. 

"How recent" you say?

2 days ago. 

I had heard about bitcoin many times before, but I just treated as one of those things that didn't really pertain to me. That is until I came across a friend of mine's post about how he had invested and had more than doubled his money over the course of a year. Of course, I was skeptical so I started digging around and found this website: whatifbitcoin.com

It's a simple website that has a few forms that basically help you answer the question "If invested $[amount] in Bitcoin on [insert date here] , how much would it be worth today?"

The default date is New year, 2011, I inserted $500 as the amount and this is what it said:

"If you invested $500 in BITCOIN on 2011-01-01

You would have made 1,433,233% ROI, that's $7,166,167 in profit."

I had to do a double take, I checked some more numbers and verified that it was true. Needless to say I've been sleeping on bitcoin (and all the other popular cryptocurrencies) for far too long.

Within minutes of finding out that I had lost out on millions of dollars, I started searching for everything I needed to know about bitcoins and how to acquire them.

One of the first things that I learned on this quest for coinage was that if I wanted to mine bitcoins or litecoins, I was out of luck unless I had some expensive hardware or bought cloud mining contracts which would allow me to leverage other people's hardware. But, I could mine other coins and exchange them for bitcoins (win!)

Since i'm just getting started I decided to do the latter. 

I began by creating an account at coinbase.com , it's a wallet that you can use to hold your bitcoins & litecoins. It's a must that you have a wallet, but there are many others out there. Coinbase struck me as a company thats been around for a while, so I decided to go with them.

Then I signed up at minergate.com (that's an affiliate link, it's good karma if you use it :) )

Minergate is a fairly popular mining pool that allows you to mine various coins from your computer and exchange them to bitcoins. It's great if you want to learn more about mining and see how it all works. 

They also provide a cloud mining service that allows you to mine bitcoins directly using their hardware, i'll probably be using it eventually. 

By far the best tool I found for stacking up some coins is litecoinminer.ga (affiliate link) It is a cloud miner for litecoin. What makes it so great is that you can get started for free, it mines 24/7 & you can cash out (or coin out?) at 0.01 litcoins. The free version brings in 0.0035 litecoins a day, but you can upgrade to get up to 12.5 litecoins a day. To give you some perspective, that's currently around $560.

If you're an expert or have more than 2 days of cryptocurrency experience, feel free to drop some coin knowledge in the comments so we can all learn.