Smudge art by @ediah

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Who am I?

My name is Anidel Silvano I am a 19 year old crypto enthusiast and Steemit blogger from the Philippines. I ran away from home when I was about 16 years old and have supported myself doing different jobs. Being an undergraduate made my available choices very few and limited only to low paying jobs like being a domestic worker, a food cart attendant and a waitress. Since I live a simple-living I can support myself with the little income from those jobs. However, a traumatic incident while going home late night made me decide to stop those jobs all together. I was mugged! Fortunately I was able to run away, I can only imagine what would have happened to me if I was not able to do so. This made me decide to just stay at my rented apartment and find online work instead. I thought it was a perfect fit since I like being online 24/7. Working online has many advantages: I am my own boss, I follow my own time and schedule, less travel expense and most important of all a whole lot safer.

Photo by Josefa nDiaz on Unsplash

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What do I do?

I tried different types of online work affiliate marketing, participating on surveys, Pay-to-click sites and micro task website but I found these types of online work unappealing and does not suite me well. Most of the affiliate marketing work I found entails some sort of investment before the people can earn. Making it hard to convince people to join. Pay-to-click sites felt like I am just wasting my time and my talent I was not really creating anything and I was just doing mechanical work of no real value, they are utterly boring and worse of all they are paying next to nothing. Micro task are okay they pay a descent amount for the work you do but similar to pay-to-click sites it is boring and monotonous. I wanted something else that will incite my curiosity and learn something that might be of value now or in the near future.

Photo by Andre Francois on Unsplash

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Start of My Cryptocurrency Journey

Then one fateful day I ran across a facebook post that tells me about this new form of money called Bitcoins, a new revolutionary digital currency that seeks to emancipate money, to bring back the power of money to those who really owns it, the people and best of all you can earn them without making financial investment. Themes of decentralization, inclusive, and free money appealed to me immensely and thus, right there and then, I started my cryptocurrency journey learning as much as I could especially the underlying technology that makes it all possible. Luckily I have found several people and communities that share the same passion for learning and earning from this emerging financial mechanism that are willing to share their time and know-how so that newbies like me will be able to learn cryptocurrencies.

Photo by NESA by Makers on Unsplash

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With the help of the people I met online, reading freely available information found on the web and sheer determination to succeed in the crypto space I was able to learn a working knowledge how to earn from cryptocurrencies. I started with setting up cryptocurrency wallets, then learn different ways of getting free cryptocurrencies online like faucets, micro tasks, affiliate marketing and later doing bounties and airdrops. It was hard initially since I was learning as I go and the earnings was not that great as I have not found my niche and the big earning opportunity that was supposed to be replete.

Image source

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My fortunes drastically changed when I found Raiblocks (now called Nano) which lets you earn its native currency called MRAI (now called Nano) just by solving Recaptcha puzzles. This MRAI can be converted to through an exchange Bitcoins that I can receive using a local cryptocurrency payment processor called Coins.ph. With this relatively easy and high paying cryptocurrency I was able to amass some cryptocurrencies that I was able to use as seed money for my cryptocurrency learning and earning activities like trading, ICO participations, cloud mining and even investing in now defunct lending platforms. Some have been a success with a fair amount of failures also but overall my experience is generally positive. Too bad Raiblocks stopped their free MRAI faucet but not before helping a lot of people like me.

Screenshot taken from a now defunct Raiblocks faucet website Last October 2017.

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I started learning and doing cryptocurrencies as little over a year ago and I am practically living off them ever since. Now most of my earnings come from blogging, bounties, ICO investments and crypto trading. Among all of these the most important and essential platform I use is Steemit, a Steem-based blogging site where content creators are rewarded for blog-post they share in the platform. Most of the contents I share are cryptocurrency related articles such as faucets, mining, cryptocurrency wallet tutorials, and cryptocurrency earning opportunities. I also use Steemit to submit commissioned reviews, news summaries and contest submissions like this piece I am writing now.

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

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Living on Cryptocurrency

Living on cryptocurrency is hard. There is so much going on and you have to move fast to keep up. If you let your guard down you will see more half of you earnings vanish due to the volatility of the market. Take for example my earnings from Steemit. The market has not been good to STEEM lately losing much of its value against BTC and since BTC is also losing value against USD the impact to STEEM's fiat value is really devastating for Steemit blogger like me.

Screenshot taken from Huobi website. Having no stablecoin paired with STEEM exposes holders to more price volatility.

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The problem stems from the fact that STEEM in most cryptocurrency exchange is not paired to any kind of stablecoin which serves as a safe haven when the Steem market is on the bearish ran. Some Korean exchanges give some sort of solace by paring them with Korean Won but this option is only available for Korean residence and thus, does not really help my case and all other Steemit bloggers who are not Koreans. There are ways to mitigate this volatility but, I have always wanted an accessible market for STEEM that will help me deal with the volatility of fiat value of STEEM, a stablecoin like Tether would have been great but no exchange offer it then when I checked coinsmarketcap.com, and well that’s what I thought, that was before Huobi came to the rescue.

Screenshot taken from official Twitter Account.

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My first encounter with Huobi exchange

Last April 25, 2018 my prayers was answered as one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, Huobi have announced that it is launching STEEM and best of all it is pairing STEEM with Tether which is a stablecoin. By letting STEEM holder customers the ability to trade with a stablecoin like Tether, it effectively gave Steem traders like me a lot more flexibility on how to manage my STEEM holdings. STEEM holders like me now have a safety net of sorts as we can move now STEEM to a non-volatile crypto asset to protect it from sudden price drops like that one that has been happening for the past few days.

image source

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Honestly I have not much information about Huobi at the time I don’t even know how to pronounce its name properly LOL but upon further investigation of Huobi I was impressed by its credentials. It all turned out that Huobi has been around for quite some time now, founded in 2013, and is headquartered in one of the most cryptocurrency friendly country state in the world Singapore. They have offices around the world including Hong Kong, Japan, United States and more recently London which will serve as a gateway for the European market. Looking back in on its history it was once considered to be the largest cryptocurrency exchange in China before the government declared cryptocurrency trading illegal last September 2017.

Screenshot taken from Coinsmarketcap.com

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Huobi Tokens

Huobi also released their own utility token called Huobi Token that will be used as a Blockchain-powered loyalty point system and will be utilized to interact with the several business units of Huobi located all over the world. It is an ERC20 token that can be traded with several popular cryptocurrency within the Huobi exchanges. It is paired with Tether, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple, Litecoin, Dash and IOST.

I was so excited about this exchange that I immediately registered in the platform. Registration was easy just click or tap on the invite link below to join the Huobi exchange or you can just scan the QR shown below also.

https://www.huobi.br.com/en-us/topic/invited/?invite_code=i2qg3

Personalized Promotional Poster Downloaded from Huobi.

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There is a referral program that lets you earn Fee cash backs for every successful referral you make. You will have your referral link once you have completed your registration and login to your account. To access your referral link you just have to click on the drop down menu in the main dashboard of the site located at the upper right portion of the screen and select the “My invitation code” in the sub menu to go to the web page where your referral link is located. Look at the screenshots shown below for an example on how to find it.

Screenshot taken from Huobi web site.

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Upon clicking the “My invitation code” sub menu the web browser will bring you to the web referral page where your referral information is displayed and some additional information about top referrals. Just scroll down a little bit to view your invite code and invite link. For easier access I suggest that you keep your referral code in a notepad or word documents so that you can easily access it even if you are not online. You can also print out our personalize QR code if you like. You can find the download link button to the left of your invitation code.

Screenshot taken from Huobi web site.

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How to register in Huobi

Of course you can only do that once you have already registered in the exchange. Let me show you how easy it is you join. Once you followed the invitation link you will see a form like this in the site. Just fill up the necessary information on all the required fields.

Screenshot taken from Huobi web site.

1. First you have to select your Country. Don’t mind if it is asking for nationality as all the selection there are countries not nationality therefore just choose your country.

2. Then enter a valid email that you can access in the second field. Verification emails will be sent to the email you will be inputting therefore it is of utmost importance that it is valid and you have access to this.

3. The next two fields are used to input and confirm your password. I recommend that you first save the intended password you want to use to a notepad or word document and cut and paste it into the password fields. Make sure the password you have used is unique and has not been used before.

4. Lastly please input the invitation code: i2qg3 this is my invite code and I would really appreciate it if you use my invitation code.

Before you send make sure that you have ticked the tick box and then click on the “Sign Up” button. This will initiate verification process by sending you a verification email which you need to confirm to activate your account. You may also use your phone number register and verify your account which basically follows the same procedure except that you need to give your mobile number (using the international format) and verification codes will be sent via SMS instead of email.

Secure your account by enabling 2FA

Once you are registered the first thing you might want to do is to secure your account immediately. You can do this by clicking the drop down menu of you account name that is shown in the main dashboard located on the top right as shown below.

Screenshot taken from Huobi web site.

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Just click the account name drop down menu and select the “Account & Security.” On a side note you can find your userID (UID) here, you will be needing this when participating in contest and other incentivized activities in Huobi. This web page also shows you the security settings of your account. If it is the first time using the exchange I highly recommend you to enable your “Two-factor authentication” or 2FA to add another layer of security. It is a bit tedious to enable and use them but it is better to be safe than sorry. There are three types of 2FA you have email, phone or Google authenticator. It is my recommendation to use them all but if I were to choose among the three I will use Google authenticator. I will not be discussing how use it here but you can find many awesome tutorials online.

Screenshot taken from Huobi web site.

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Enabling the 2FA is easy if you registered by email you can use your SMS as your secondary authentication by linking it to your account. Just input your mobile number following the international format. If done properly a code will be sent via text message and you just have to enter the code in the web page. Conversely if you registered via SMS you can use your Email as your 2FA just input your email and wait for the code to be sent in your email. Sometimes the message gets filtered as SPAM I suggest looking in the SPAM folder. If you are as security conscious like me you might want to enable Google 2FA trust me it is all worth it.

Depositing Cryptocurrency in to Huobi

Once you are done securing your account we are now ready to put some cryptocurrency in your account to start trading crypto. You can deposit from the dashboard following the screenshots shown below:

Screenshot taken from Huobi web site.

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Once you are in the “Deposit and withdrawal” page you may start searching for the Cryptocurrency you like to deposit. Make sure you know the proper ticker symbol of the crypto as it does not accept full names. For example you wanted to search for Bitcoins you have to input BTC not the full name. When you have located the cryptocurrency you have three options “Deposit,” “Withdraw” and “Exchange.”

Screenshot taken from Huobi web site.

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Clicking the Deposit link will show you the deposit address of the selected crypto. Once you have this you can start depositing cryptocurrencies in the address. Make sure you know the proper format of the address. There are some addresses that need transaction ID, memo or other additional information. Deposits made to wrong cryptos addresses will not be recoverable. So please practice due diligence.

Screenshot taken from Huobi web site.

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Clicking the withdrawal link will show you the withdrawal interface. You will need to input the address of the Crypto you want to withdraw to, then input the amount you want to send out and then click on the “Withdraw” botton. Make sure that you have the correct crypto address. If you withdraw to a wrong account that funds will not be recoverable so be careful. Once you withdraw there will be fees. Make sure the amount you are withdrawing is worth the withdrawal fees.

Screenshot taken from Huobi web site.

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The exchange link brings you to the exchange web page where you can do your trading. This is where the action is. The charting tool used in the site comes from TradingView you can expect all the tools that we all come to love from the charting tools will be there. Beginners might find the trading page intimidating as there as so much information on the screen so let me just call your attention to the most important part of the screen to the buy and sell order fields. It is here where you buy cryptocurrency if you want to take up positions in trade. There is a simple rule when you buy and sell “you buy low” and “you sell high” simple enough right? But easier said than done so be very careful when trading and if you are still a beginner do not try to trade something that you are not willing to lose.

Screenshot taken from Huobi web site.

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There are so many other features that is going on the exchange to fit in this article so I am just letting you explore for yourself its other features like the OTC, HADAX and Margin Trading. Don’t fret though there are lots of videos being shared by the Huobi team to educate its users and I will be exploring them as well and you can expect a similar article like this in the future from me. There are so much nice projects in the works in Huobi. Huobi does not only give Steemians the ability to trade with a stablecoin but gives an opportunity to earn by joining contest and bounties that requires writing skills to help disseminate information and educate users.

Since I have just recently started being an active member in the Huobi community there is nothing much to tell about the exchange besides what I have already stated above. I have not yet found my first pot of Gold here. However I am sure that there are will be a lot of opportunities to find our first pot of Gold in this platform, from trading, airdrops, bounties or some short of contest or even affiliate marketing. The Huobi community is still growing and expanding to new locations all over the world. We users (new and old) can contribute in its success by participating in all of its initiative while trying to learn how to earn in this great Huobi platform. I am proud to say that with this entry I am officially committing myself in helping the Huobi on its ultimate goal of being the no. 1 cryptocurrency exchange in the world. No. 1 not only because of transaction volumes but no. 1 in terms quality of service, security, best user experience and best community that helps each other to attain success.

With that I must bid my farewell for now my friends but rest assured that this is not the ending but rather a beginning of my Journey as part of this resilient and awesome Huobi community who all believes that the pot of Gold we have been all looking for might be found here Huobi.

Disclamier

I am in no way a professional and this should not be considered financial advice. Do your own proper research and training before participating in trading activities as they are generally risky investments. This blog-post is my official entry in the contest shown below as a honest and true to life story of my cryptocurrency and Huobi experiences.