Best place to buy as a Crypto Normie in Ireland

Waestrel wrote: »

Id like something that is Irish at the least, as I feel that gives it an air of legitimacy.

This doesn't make any sense. Maybe one or all of those services are okay but Coinbase or Kraken are the main gateways for us - both have good liquidity, known teams and easy on-ramps. Both require registration.

None of the services you've mentioned are anywhere on CoinMarketCap which means they are minnows with low liquidity and inherently less trustworthy (who are their teams?).

Coinbase I think would be the most suitable.

There’s lots of YouTube cideo’s on how to transfer from bank to CoinBase and buy there.

You can then go 1 step further and use GDax to avoid higher fee’s on purchasing Crypto.

Then send it to a hardware / software wallet and hodl

RoboRat wrote: »

Any advice for other currencies or just advice in general?

Use BTC or ETH as your base currencies for trading against, ignore dollar values.

Don't buy random coins based on hype without research and especially not when they're at all-time-highs - you might make money but you're much more likely to baghold, either forever or for a very long time. Only buy something if you really feel there's a great utility in it and it could be used by a large enough community in a few years. Having a team of geniuses helps.

If you make a huge taxable gain at any point keep an eye out for opportunities during a downturn to keep your crypto stack pretty much the same (or increase it) but evaporate that tax burden.

Keep your private keys as far away from the internet as you can for as long as you can. I'd imagine most people just use whatever Windows PC they're using, but all it takes is one instance of malware with a private key-scraper built in and you're screwed. I've repurposed an old laptop which never touches the internet for crypto and paper wallets for back-up.

RoboRat wrote: »

Thanks for the advice, really appreciate it. The private key, paper wallet and virtual wallet are what is really confusing me. At the moment, my money is on coinbase. I haven't anything else and don't have an old laptop. I have tons of memory sticks.. would that suffice and more importantly, how do i get a virtual/ paper wallet/ private key?

A lot of people keep their cryptos on Coinbase, you just have to be aware that should any airdrops or forks happen for whichever coin/s you have there you are entitled to zero, nothing, sweet FA and that's the way it should be (until Coinbase gets their banking license in which case I'd consider them at fault for not collecting your "dividends").
Plenty of new entrants/entitled plebs think think they're investing in shares or that exchanges are banks and that they deserve any forks or airdrops. This is false. If it's not your wallet, any gains shouldn't be yours.

Losing or handing over a private key is akin to giving all of your money away. Don't do this.

Spare USB sticks can be used to keep back-ups of keys if a password is set on them I suppose, but those still have to be kept very safe and should not be the only place you keep your keys. Hardware fails.

For BTC, Electrum is the main desktop wallet. You can create a paper wallet from that - preferably with a printer that isn't internet enabled or that saves image in cache.
MyEtherWallet.com is the main ETH & ERC token wallet, same applies. MetaMask is also great, but again, should only be used on a clean PC.

A hardware wallet is more than a USB key, it's one extra barrier to ensure the only person interacting with your wallets is you.

I completely understand the risks. By savings, I am talking about money I have left over at the end of the month. I have a pension and investment funds which go directly from my wages but I get the likes of travel expenses and bonus that I throw in to a jar and usually use it for Summer Holidays/ Christmas. Being honest, I have 2 young kids, a fairly well paid 9-5 job plus my own business so I have a bit of money to spare as I rarely go out!

I am not looking at going in heavy but I would be willing to throw about 2-3k over a few months and see what happens - I'm looking at Ethereum/ Bitcoin and Ripple. Might lose it, might end up with significant gains or might make nothing but I feel the opportunity is there to make some money so it's worth a punt.

I would be happy to sit on it for a few years and see if the crypto really takes off. I had looked at it years ago and wish I had, but being honest I didn't have much spare money and I couldn't afford to lose the bit that I had.

I have heard murmurings of Amazon and Walmart are integrating blockchain technology and this is why I have decided to dip my toes in now.