Entering the new 'Wild West'

You’ve heard about it on the news. Your friends rave constantly about their profits, or are selling their shirt because they sold their Bitcoin at a large loss. Heck, you're here reading this on Steemit so you're probably curious too!!

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After seeing such collective international excitement about this new market I figured it was time to give it a shot. As many beginners do, I opened my first account with Coinbase due to simplicity’s sake. Considering how new this market is I knew I was better off just sticking to the service everyone else seemed to be using.

I had really wanted to access the “lesser known” market offering traders coins such as “Tron” or “Ripple” among MANY others. But I simply wasn’t comfortable meeting hefty deposit limits or having to worry about being hacked as this had happened plenty in the past to the “trusted” exchanges leaving their clients with empty wallets. It seemed as if I would be stuck with only Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin options until new exchanges that could compete with Coinbase emerged. While this exchange has the benefit of ease-of-use for beginners, it was so frustrating hearing about those new coins with all the potential they held being brought to the market yet not being able to access them.

It seemed impossible that better options weren’t available, so I did some research. While Coinbase may be popularized lately (At least here in the US) due to its simplicity, not only do the fees cut in to any profits I might have made- but users have to wait a whole 7 days to receive the coin they made an order for! A LOT can happen in 7 days in the cryptocurrency world. On my first bitcoin purchase, I only amounted it to a total of $10.00 to see how things went. Their fee was $0.99 which meant I had to generate about 10% minimal to simply break even. After feeling like I understood this market better, I reached out to established CryptoCurrency traders to see what their exchange of choice was. Binance being the main response; with a few other major options that I had decided either weren’t secure/reliable or had too high of a deposit/fee structure. It’s a new market after all, I sure wasn’t going to put my life savings in and hope for the best.

I spent some time exploring Binance as well as another called Kraken. The latter yet again wasn’t very welcoming of small traders such as myself. When examining Binance it seemed like I’d struck a gold mine considering the positive reputation and that it could accommodate “little” traders such as myself, without a miserable & complicated registration and funding process. After exploring the platform & previous user experiences my only thought was, “Now we’re in business!”. I transferred my holdings to Binance after creating an account immediately.

The first week of use I think I’d acquired at least 10+ different “Alt-Coins” which in a nutshell refers to the coins that can be used as an alternative to the big guys like Bitcoin. It was amazing how many different trading pairs were offered, how easy their app was to navigate, and especially that this brokerage seemed much more involved with it’s clients. I’m a traditional currency trader so the ability to day-trade, swing-trade, hold an asset for years or sell it at a moment’s notice is crucial to my performance. Binance allowed that freedom, as well as being able to sleep comfortably at night since they allow Limit orders & Stop-Limit orders as opposed to only a simple manual market order.

As of writing I’ve been using their platform for maybe close to 6 months. Not only am I happy with my exchange but I’ve learned a lot about this new market as well. They’re constantly adding new coins while removing coins deemed fraudulent (I’ve only seen this with one coin since joining, the exchange has a great reputation with regard to fund safety & customer support issues). Looking back, being stuck with only a handful of assets to trade while new ICO’s were hitting the markets heavily felt like being forced to stay home from the party and just watch everyone else have fun.

Rest assured this is not an ad on behalf of Binance I’m writing. This is a genuine review & explanation of my journey in exploring the wonderful new world of Crypto-currencies. I’m pleased with the information I’ve learned on my journey through crypto trading. At this point I’m just upset at myself for not joining them earlier (Gotta start somewhere though, right?).