Week 1 Into the Crypto-verse: Watch the Transaction Fees

By Takimn22 | Takimn and Error | 18 May 2021

Greetings. Salutations. Hello. Fancy meeting you here. Seems I am late to the party. Very very late. I'm ashamed to admit I've just now taken the time to really get into crypto, but better late than never right? I thought it would be interesting to document my countless mistakes along the way. Let others get a laugh, maybe reminisce about when you first started, help someone else who is new to crypto avoid my pitfalls, or maybe you'll just question my intelligence. All are certainly possible.

Today I thought I'd hit on my first big hurdle. How the heck do I buy crypto? Where do I go to trade crypto? What wallet should I use? What is a virtual wallet? As a US citizen, there are quite a few restrictions that I had to figure out on the fly. I did what I feel like quite a few people do when they start. I went to Coinbase aka the top google search result for what I had typed in. Thorough research right? Well I had to start somewhere and I had at least heard the name before. I signed up, got a free $5 in BTC, and started looking into the different crypto options available to me as I was overly eager to make my first real purchase. After hours of research I found exactly what I wanted to do: ask someone else for help on what to buy.

I love the NBA and am a regular on RealGM.com. There happened to be a few guys on there talking about crypto and investing so I joined the conversation. They recommended looking into LINK which was my first real break in the crypto-verse. I tried to read the chart, desperately looking for patterns to tell me when to buy, and ultimately just tried to aim for a dip which I timed fairly poorly as it dipped a good bit more after my purchase. But hey, I was a bonafide owner of crypto! (The BTC hadn't been credited to my account yet) This however was my first real mistake. For anyone who doesn't know, Coinbase Pro is free to connect to your Coinbase wallet and has much cheaper fees. I paid the full Coinbase fees. Not a huge deal since it was a fairly small purchase but a lesson none the less. I then found out about the Coinbase Earn section and was able to bolster the portfolio with some free coins. No complaints on my end about that.

So. Additional Coinbase mistakes I made in pretty quick succession. You are able to convert one token into another. This was great as I was able to play around and pick what my free crypto was actually invested in. It also showed zero fees to convert between tokens with one exception that I realized too late. I had gotten click happen and accepted before I realized the fee wasn't zero. There is a fee to switch to USDT. So avoid that if you want to maximize your free money. Also, every time you convert it says no fees but it costs a portion of the assets anyway. Every swap I made left me with a bit less in total USD value so figure out what you want to have your crypto in and swap as few times as possible to make it happen. Overall coinbase was easy to use, but the fees are more than I care for so on to the next exchange. Ultimately I moved on to Kucoin while not verifying my identity on it. It works just fine for me and the fees are much more palatable though there are gas fees when sending crypto from Kucoin to your wallet. In order to put in the seed money for my Kucoin account I transferred a portion of my portfolio from Coinbase. OUCH! I got hit with a 10% fee to send crypto to Kucoin. Maybe having switched to Coinbase Pro prior to sending it would have helped (I hadn't discovered it at the time), but that was a hefty fee. All in all I had lost nearly 15% of my first purchase simply to fees.

My current setup now is just to buy BTC on CashAPP and send it to Kucoin (or more recently Gate.io for the few coins I couldn't get on Kucoin). There is a bit of a purchase fee but you can then send the BTC for free so overall I come out significantly ahead as opposed to doing the previous Coinbase route. I still have some fun money left on Coinbase and I plan on just leaving it there for now. The automatic staking rewards from some of the coins is nice and there are a few coins on there that I originally had trouble finding on Kucoin. All in all it was a week full of learning that left me in the red during a bull market. Happens. LINK would come to save me before long.

Week 1 Portfolio in rough order:

LINK, COMP, XLM, ALGO, XTZ, BAND, BTC

I'm about 2-3 weeks in so have a few posts to catch up on. I'm always open to advice and suggestions and will have a more updated portfolio in future posts. Some of the above was from the free education rewards.

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