How I bought Bitcoin for my first time
This is the personal journey of one man and his attempts to purchase Bitcoin and alt currency. In late 2017, I wanted to try buying some crypto. Bitcoin was way too expensive so I started out with Litecoin. My first exchange was Coinbase. Coinbase is extremely easy to use and I have always felt safe with them. I now have it set up with a Yubikey so you can't access my account without having a physical device. I set that up recently when Bitcoin hit 40K.
The second exchange I used was Coinbase Pro. I wanted to try buying some alt coins and the fees were much lower on Coinbase Pro than on Coinbase. I trade a bit and when I learned about XRP (Ripple) and I wanted to buy that. I bought it at 40 cents right before it went up to $3.00 and then back below 40 cents. In order to buy it I needed to get an account with Kraken. Kraken is currently my go-to account for trading. I like the way it is organized and I currently trade daily. I also like that you can stake coins like Polka Dot and earn a 12% staking reward; you get to hold an asset which may appreciate and earn interest at the same time. You can also stake a handful of other coins including Ether. I don't recommend staking Ether 2.0 yet. I am using Kraken right now a lot to get all of my various hardware and software wallets reset and organized. The only negative is that I need to sell some of my BNB and Raven Coin to move it over. I typically move with Tether but I am open to other ideas.
I also joined Poloniex and Binance International. I barely used Poloniex but it had a lot of great pairs. I liked Binance a lot. It allowed access to new coins and you can participate in air drops. The only problem is that I am an American and apparently the created a lower quality site for Americans to use. It doesn't have all the coins you need and it doesn't have all the staking you need. I have considered using a VPN and starting a new Binance account but I am going to check out Huobi before I do that.
After Binance International said I need to pull my account I setup accounts with Robinhood, Kucoin, and Etoro. Robinhood may be free but they suck at executing trades. You need to use limit orders and hope. Etoro also has free trading and they have one awesome feature that no one else has yet. They have copy trading. You can look up current Etoro customers who are paid to have people copy their trades. You just select how much money. It was a little difficult getting money into Etoro.
Kucoin was way too complext for it to be a side exchange. If it was to be my main exchange I am sure could have learned how it operated but it was pretty confusing. You have lots of different accounts and you can trade with the coins you have or you can use the coins as collateral and invest with a loan. My money got stuck in a trading bot for about 2 weeks. I just about broke even. I have given up on Kucoin for now but it seems like really nice platform