The inspiration for this particular article was both the fact that I got reminded of my own experience starting off in crypto and the possibility of others not having to go through the same if they stumble upon this article. My main aim is to advise and hopefully educate anyone that might just be starting off with the very basics of crypto, but I won't be explaining what the complex projects of particular coins/tokens nor will I be explaining crypto itself, there are a million articles talking about those.
What I want to focus on is all the things that stop people from getting to the right information when they are researching the basics before they know what sites to use and who they should maybe listen to. I'm no crypto expert or financial adviser but I am a writer trying my best to help others, so it's the next best, free, thing.
1. Google with caution
So to start off I recommend not asking Google which cryptos to invest into, or which project has potential or anything of the sort, at least not directly. Cause chances are, you'll get one of these ->
And in that list you will get... either no actual info about why the crypto in question is good, or profitable or cheap for that matter, and in 99% of cases they will just say the Top 20 coins/tokens by Market Cap... by default. I will never understand why they do this, cause it's both stupidly obvious that these are the top projects for a reason and it makes it obvious that they have no clue what they are writing about.
You may ask why that is? If all an article does is tell you something you could have looked up yourself on a tracker site like CoinMarketCap, it likely just copy pasted most of it from there. And in fact, out of those top 20 projects, half aren't even good. In this particular article, they mention 2 extremely stupid investments.
1. The minor offence (if I can even call it that) - Dogecoin... which is just a pumped meme-coin with no actual use case or reason to have value besides it being funny I guess? So it's not a good investment and in essence isn't an investment at all.
2. The humongous offence - Tether... they wrote that people should invest in Tether, a stablecoin, also the worst stablecoin out there. For anyone not understanding, they want you to use 20USD to buy 20 Tether(USDT)... which will over the course of all eternity, give you a return of...0% aka 20USD, the same amount you bought it for. Except, it won't in this particular case, because Tether is on the brink of death and could implode at any point in time. Fun!
I won't go further into detail about this one, but in general, try to find sites that focus on crypto in particular cause they are a lot more likely to give you actually useful info and not try to fuck you over. Of course, not all of these are legit either but it's not that hard finding the good ones. Here's a few to get you started - CoinDesk, CoinTelegraph
Those are some news sites but there are also sites that explain particular projects and/or crypto in general, rather easily found too.
2. Youtubers/Celebrities will sell you anything
If you got into crypto cause a celebrity you like told you to buy something... please sell it immediately and either leave crypto or try and learn something about it. Celebrities are paid by projects to hype up their projects so people will buy them, afterwards the team will sell all of said asset and the celebrities will have already been paid and the one that's left with a loss... is you. That's what's called a rug pull or a carpet pull if it's big enough of a scam.
This isn't always the case, but don't expect celebrities to know any better than you do about crypto. Same goes for youtubers, and I don't mean celebrity youtubers per se. I mean the "crypto expert" youtubers that say a certain coin is going to MOON! or 100000X in a day. These videos often share one of the following traits:
- Thumbnails with explosions, way too many colors/icons and !!!!!'s as well as numbers that seem insane, cause they are.
- Clickbait titles and thumbnails
- A bunch of referrals or products the person is selling in the video itself
- Erradic, fast and random movements
- Some bullshit technical analysis to make you think they know what they are doing
- a bunch of other very fishy red flags
There are some channels on YouTube that are good, that focus more on explaining projects or general crypto news that even I watch a lot of so keep an eye out for those. My favorite among them is Coin Bureau - and they even made a video about the best crypto YouTube channels so check that out to find more.
3. Never YOLO or FOMO
These ones should be rather easy to explain. There are often projects that might seem like a surefire win and that you should put all your money into them, and they might even pan out, but it's never a good idea to put all your money into a single project. Cause if that one project fails or goes down, all your money is gone.
You only live once (YOLO) can easily seem good if you experience loses often because it's basically an all or nothing, get rich or go broke... but it leads to going broke more often than getting rich. No matter how many success stories you hear there are a thousand more failure stories you don't hear.
Fear of missing out (FOMO) is similar. Wanting to get in on a trend to get some fast money, except you'll instead get dumped on and lose money cause you'll be the person people are cashing out on. If something is mooning, let it moon, and wait for it to fall if you're really into the project. Don't try and ride the wave or it'll end up drowning you instead.
Reddit is a place that can easily pull you into doing both of these. You don't have to not go onto Reddit but don't let it pull you in, it's never worth it.
4. Learn just a little bit
Besides learning about what crypto is in general, do a bit of research on every project you plan on investing into. Even if it's just something you wanna trade for a bit cause you can see a trend or you heard a rumor. Read up on it, even just the simplest article talking about the projects goals. It can save you both a lot of money, a lot of nerves and a hell of a lot of future knowledge on what to do and not do.
If you wanna go my route, get a bit deeper into projects if you plan on holding long term and look into lending/staking and such for even more profits.
Conclusion
There's a lot of other stuff I'd recommend doing, but my brain stopped working right about now so I'll just stop it here and maybe do a Pt.2 when I remember more problems I ran into to share with all of you. In any case, I hope it ends up being helpful to you all and enjoy the crypto world!
