tl;dr: You're a beginner just starting to buy your first cryptocurrency. Here's some tips to save you from as many service fees as possible and basic strategy in the event that a coin you did buy starts to dip or you want to sell a coin that was profitable.
Starting Out
- The vast majority will start out with just signing up for some account and buy with USD (or whatever country currency) > Coin/Token. They'll look at their account and watch the few coins/tokens they have rise and drop in price. I know I did this, I've seen half my friends do this, and I still see this as their main strategy in 'making money' in the crypto space.
- When I started out I did buy orders and would just get 1 coin/token.
Experiences / Recommendations
- I started by signing up with Coinbase (https://www.coinbase.com) and linking my checking account and credit card. Of course things have been good, buying (using credit card) during the dips, selling (money to checking account) during the peaks, repeat. This was good for a while, but after doing this for a few weeks I realized I was losing a decent amount of money from the transaction fees cashing out through CoinBase. I have probably lost a few hundred in fees easily by not following a better process.
A workaround to this one: If you're buying ie. USD > BTC/ETH/LTC/BCH, you will want to at least sell going through an exchange (using this CoinBase example, you would want to use https://www.gdax.com since CoinBase owns/operates them). Login to GDAX and then from there you can follow the instructions with how to transfer your coins directly from your CoinBase account > GDAX and do either a limit or market sell order. Once you have USD you can just wire it free directly to your linked bank account. Doing it this way can easily save you ~4% off of every sell order instead of doing it through CoinBase.
- I started out originally buying just 1 coin/token. I regret doing this and not diversifying. This isn't always the case, but for beginners that don't know much about the cryptocurrency space I would highly recommend starting by splitting the initial amount you're willing to risk into at least 2 coins that you have researched into and believe will succeed. You can do anything from a 50/50 down to a 10/90 split in allocation.