Lessons learned during my journey in cryptocurrency (Part 1)
These are some lessons/ tips I garnered during my short few months into cryptocurrencies:
I) Some good things in life are indeed free.
Many people who have benefited immensely from investing in cryptocurrencies are very willing to share their journeys as well as recommendations/ analyses to anyone who are interested, often for free. I've joined FB groups and well as youtube channels which provide in-depth quality analyses about certain cryptocurrencies. Granted, there are those who belong to the pump and dump group so it's really up to the individual to sieve out which are genuine and which are phonies.
II) Don't shoot the product just because the salesman is an asshole.
I remember a person within the closed FB group I am a part of heavily posting on how good Monero was and how other coins were basically "shitcoins". Boy were we glad when he finally left the group (possibly kicked out, who knows?). Monero was pretty much out of my radar as a result. When it was still heavily promoted, I still remember the price to be $2. Soon after, it shot to 10+ dollars and I did not get into it till it was in it's early twenties. What a bummer!
III) More might not be better.
When I started buying more bitcoins and dash, one of my first priorities was to get them off the exchange and into wallets as soon as I could. That was pretty much recommended by anyone who were veterans in the crypto field. I chanced upon an online wallet which offered storage for a number of different coins. Great! Or so I thought. I started to deposit them into the wallet. That was before the sharp rise in the price of Dash. When Dash shot up, I had tons of trouble trying to transfer the coins out to sell. I suspect it was because the wallet was not ready for such a spike in the price of Dash. They took forever to raise my drawing limit and from time to time the coins would not be available for withdrawing. By the time I was done with all those issues, Dash had fallen significantly off it's highs. While it still maintained quite well in the 80s and 90s, I had potentially lost thousands of dollars. It was later that I learned I could have a wallet installed into my PC which functioned way better than the internet wallet. What an expensive lesson! Now, forsaking convenience, I download wallets for those coins which I intend to hold longer term. Granted, there might not be wallet downloads for every single coin. But I make it a point to keep individual coins in their respective wallets. This will mitigate the risks of an online multi-wallet crash. I sleep much better now.
If you are new in the space, I hope these tips/lessons help. While they are expensive to learn for me, I hope no one else makes such costly mistakes. You have been forewarned.