Where to buy Steem to power up and trade altcoins? Buying 15+ BTC of Steem on Bittrex.com was simple from making the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin deposits from USD on Coinbase to depositing altcoins from Poloniex and Bitfinex to executing the trades from BTC to Steem to making the withdrawals almost instantly to Steemit and powering up! For trading Bitcoin, Ethereum, Steem, Steem Dollars, and 179 cryptocurrencies, my choice is now Bittrex after using Poloniex for most of my previous cryptocurrency exchanges because Bitfinex has nearly instant verification and withdrawals. I have also used Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Shapeshift, and Blocktrades which is great for the very fastest exchange out from Steemit to Coinbase when selling SBD to pay my taxes! While I have been waiting for weeks on Poloniex to get my status verified to allow more than $7,000 in withdrawals daily, on Bittrex verification was finished for withdrawals up to 100 BTC daily within less than an hour from the time I created my account! Amazing technology and I love the interface! The greatest limitation is that there is no fiat currency trading currently outside of Tether for both USD and Chinese Yuan. Bittrex I believe is in the process of adding this and I think might become the top exchange once they do!
Would you read this post or watch the original video from YouTube to learn how to use Bittrex today?
Thank you very much to @gmichelbkk for converting the transcription of the YouTube video from GoTranscript into this beautiful post for Steemit, which is much faster to read than the video and has all of the highlights in screenshots!
I will show you how to do all the basic things in Bittrex.com, plus the most crucial getting started steps.
First, if you've never heard of Bittrex, what is it?
How does it fit into the larger picture of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and trading?
Bittrex.com is one of the top exchanges in the world, but you might not have heard of it even. I mostly traded on Poloniex.
A look at the different exchanges
I'm looking now at coinmarketcap.com where it shows the top cryptocurrency market capitalizations by volume in the last 24 hours.
Poloniex is consistently number one.
Kraken is consistently up towards the top. I've not used OKCoin.cn, Coinone or Huobi. Bittrex is currently the sixth of the cryptocurrency exchanges.
I really like Bittrex because there are so many different currencies you can trade in. It's very fast to upgrade your account to get the maximum trading volume. The downside of Bittrex though is that you have to trade in US dollar, Tether or the same one that's available for one for China. It doesn't have real Fiat currency trading, although I believe they're adding that to it.
I also use Bitstamp. I really like Bitstamp for straight from BTC to USD, or XRP to USD.
I also really like Bitfinex. That's where I sold the majority of my Dash when I sold my Dash masternode.
I like Bittrex and it's currently where I'm doing the majority of my trading, my buying and holding. I don't do much trading. Currently, I'm buying and doing my selling mostly on Bittrex because it has such an amazing selection. Look at these Bitcoin markets it has. I was consistently frustrated with the selection in Poloniex.
Bittrex.com is trading fast while Poloniex right now often goes really slow. That motivated me to switch and sign up for Bittrex.
What I like in Bittrex
If you look at Bittrex, it's got a lot bigger selection of currencies. You can do things like sort based on the order. I can sort this on the upper right by what order these were added. I can easily sort it this way to see the very newest currencies, which currently is Aragon, which is down 67%. Ouch!
You can even sort by things like spreads. You can see how wide the market is. You can see the difference between the buy and the sell price that's up. It also has this change in the volume, just like Poloniex. I find it works much faster and I'm very happy with the selection.
One of the most amazing things I've experienced on bittrex.com so far is the application for the enhanced account.
Bitstamp took 24 or 48 hours to verify my account, so that I could trade a huge amount of money, as much as $100,000 in Bitcoin back and forth in one day, which was well over $500 in fees, plus even more loss in the exchange.
Bitfinex took up several days to get my application approved.
Poloniex is still fooling around with my application to be able to trade larger amounts.
But bittrex.com literally gave me an enhanced account with the ability to trade up to 100 Bitcoin per day, that I can withdraw.
Bittrex literally did that in just a few minutes and I couldn't believe it. I went through and set-up two factor authentication with Google Authenticator, which I highly recommend. I submitted my identity verification, and it did it almost instantly. That is one of the best parts I've seen about Bittrex. They have a really good identity verification system that's fast.
I'm grateful that if for some reason I get a whole of 100 Bitcoin, I can withdraw all of it in one day on bittrex.com. If you are mining or if you're getting little transactions on a regular basis, Bittrex is also one of the only ones I'm aware of that has this auto-sell feature which is really cool. If you're mining, for example, you can send your mining rewards directly into Bittrex, and it will auto-sell it for you.
That's really cool if you've got something like a masternode or if you take orders, and if you just consistently want to dump an altcoin for Bitcoin every single day. This is a really cool feature that you can set up on Bittrex. It will automatically dump it in Bitcoin for you.
What is not ideal about Bittrex?
I already mentioned it a little bit, but if you want to trade Fiat currencies, they don't currently have that. They are working at it, but right now you have to use US Dollar Tether (USDT) or you have to use the Chinese version as well.
If you go to coincap.io it says that the Bitcoin price is $1,800, but If you want to use USDT, it's currently $1,866. The US Dollar Tether price may actually become significantly different from the US Dollar depending on what is actually going on.
Whereas on Bitstamp or on Bitfinex, if you decide you want to pull everything in the US Dollar, at the drop of a hat, you can do that. Not quite as easy on Bittrex, but it's still functional.
Tons of wallets and the fastest withdrawals
On Bittrex, you've got a ton of different wallets to choose from as well. There's wallet after wallet after wallet. It's very easy. Say I want to make a deposit in CloakCoin, I can just click "generate a new address" and do a deposit.
So far, I have made deposits and withdrawals. Bittrex is also one of the fastest withdrawals I've made. I withdrew two and a half Bitcoin on it, and it came through hours faster that Bitfinex. Poloniex took literally five or six hours longer than Bittrex. I was very happy with that. Unfortunately, when more and more people use it, this could change over time.
I've made six different deposits in the first week or two that I've used Bittrex.I had 200 Dash and then about 4 Bitcoin that I've deposited in. I trust Bittrex. I've done transactions totalling about 20 Bitcoin most of which went to power up my Steemit account which with the increase in the price of Steem is now about $80,000!
That's where I do the majority now of my buying because there are so many options on Bittrex.
Lots of times when I looked to trade currencies, I saw one that I wanted to buy on coincap.io, and then when I went over to Poloniex, it was not even there. I thought, "Well, this is depressing."
Two-factor authentication
If you're going to use Bittrex, it is the first of these exchanges that pretty much forced me to use two-factor authentication. Now, Coinbase did have me get text messages, but Bittrex pretty much demands that you use two-factor identification if you want to be able to withdraw.
Two-factor authentication is awesome.
That means if you steal my password, but you don't have my two-factor authentication device, then you can't log in to my account, even with my password. I'm grateful two-factor authentication helped make an account more secure.
It also makes it easier to lose access to your account.
As it says, "Please back-up your secret key."
If let's say, you have your phone as your Google Authenticator, and you go lose your phone and you don't have your secret key backed up, guess what?
Even with your password, you can't log into Bittrex or wherever you've got your two-factor authentication.
It's important you've got a back up of your secret key. That way, if you lose your phone or whatever you've got your two-factor on, whether it's your iPad or probably a Kindle or another computer, you can reset it for a new device.
Whatever you've got your two-factor on, you need the secret key backed up.
I didn't notice there was a secret key to back up, and I just blasted right on pass that. Then, I had to go through and disable two-factor authentication, copy in my new secret key and re-enabled it.
Make sure you get two-factor authentication up, and back-up your secret key.
It's good to use Google Authenticator because all the main exchanges that I've used: Bitstamp, Poloniex, Bitfinex and Coinbase, they all use Google Authenticator, and they all do two-factor authentication.
Then theoretically, you can back up all your two-factor keys in the same spot.
Then your friend, who knows where that is, can totally come in and sign in and clean you out that way. 😆
If you're trading in your dorm room, you might want to keep that in mind. 😅
Your clever roommate is looking over your shoulders, waiting to clean out your Bittrex exchange.
Trading cryptocurrencies can be risky
I'll make some actual trades now just for fun and we'll pick out a couple of currencies. I like to look at ones that have been flat or down over time. I don't like to by stuff that's up usually because that's the biggest risk.
I started buying Bitcoin and there are a few different bad things that can happen if you've never traded or you're just learning about cryptocurrency trading.
First, you can be all excited and put a bunch of time and energy in to buy and lose money.
Think about that.
You've paid your time and your money to trade. Is this something you'd like to do for fun?
That's a valid question.
The first year I traded Bitcoin, I lost over $5,000 and spent hundreds of hours doing it.
Is that something I would have thought of as a leisure activity?
Absolutely not!
It was stressful and I was trying to make money, which really made losing $5,000 plus dollars frustrating.
The other thing that can happen to you and that's really bad is you can get lucky and win.
That's even worst and that happened to me playing poker. I thought I was just the next World Series of Poker champion because I bought into a $10 poker tournament and I won $1,000 out of it, all while I was getting drunk the whole time as well.
I thought, "My God. I have some amazing poker skill."
Then guess what?
I proceeded.
I won another $10 buy-in for a $1,000, but I proceeded to lose thousands of dollars after that playing poker as I bought in to higher and higher stakes game like, "Well, I'm the man now. I can buy in to a $100 game. Hell, I can buy in to a $500 game now that I'm so good at poker."
The people who play small stakes tend to be easier in poker to win against and the people who play higher stakes tend to be a bit better in skill. The same goes with cryptocurrency trading. If you buy into something and get lucky, it can be easy to think, "Well, I'm just a man."
I'm grateful that this year I've made about $75,000 in profit in cryptocurrency trading. Now, that's before taxes because after the IRS gets their fingers on it, it's $50,000. I've re-invested, as you can see about $20,000. Really, that's a net difference of $30,000 and anyway, what was I saying? 😀
I could easily get a big head and think, "Well, I know what I'm doing with crypto trading. Now that I made all this money, I'm going to dump $50,000 in here. I'm going to start trading. I'm going to turn this $50,000 into $100,000, and then this 100 into 200."
I'm grateful I've made mistakes so many times that I can see that I got lucky. I promoted my own currency, I made my own opportunity. It's still just as easy for me to lose money as it's ever been in the market.
I'm not smarter than anyone because I happen to invest in one currency, which I then promoted a whole bunch, which went up a bunch, and then I dumped it as it started going down.
I'm not smarter than anyone because I did that.
That is a pretty typical investing strategy that was mentioned in "Money: Master The Game." I didn't even come up with that either. 😄
The point is cryptocurrency trading from an ego standpoint is very risky. If you start losing a little bit of money in it, there'll be a temptation if you are like me to try and put more in and get that money back, and make it all about how much money you've made. If you want to do this long term, it might cost you several thousand dollars to learn the basics.
I've given you this upfront because I've made all these mistakes, all these things have happened to me already.
You can learn from my experience instead of having to do it yourself. But if you want to do all the same things I've done and be aggravated as hell when the Bitcoin price plummets, you can go do that if you want to.
How to trade on Bittrex
I'll show you how to trade on Bittrex now buying two new cryptocurrencies: Aragon (ANT) and Humaniq (HMQ).
One of the attractive things about Bittrex is that it makes it easy when these new currencies are put on. Some of these new currencies might be a really good opportunity to trade, and some of them might be a complete sink hole.
You might buy a new currency and it just might be way overvalued, and the value of it may drop 99.9% on you.
My jaw just cracked saying that: 99.9%!
It is possible for a massive drop like that to happen with these online currencies. It may go up way more than that too.
I like how easy it is.
I went over to markets here, and you can sort then by the date the currency was added.
Buying Aragon, a new cryptocurrency
Let's take a look at this Aragon one, which I guess has plummeted 60 something percent.
It's the biggest down one right now.
If you look at the top left menu, you can then switch on each of these options. You can switch it to a day.
It's so new, it doesn't have that much data. You can switch it to 15 minutes here if you want. The more you play around and switch these things, the more it'll take the table. I'm using the mouse wheel to scroll right now to move this back and forth.
Let's say I want to just buy a little bit of this currency. I've got the charts at the left and I can see that the price was way higher when it got listed. I don't know how that works, but maybe someone lost a bunch or just came in down here. This is where the price is at now. At the right, I can see the volume of it, which is 690 Bitcoin in volume that is done.
You can see the 24-hour high here. You can see the exact price in US dollars, which is $3.64.
I really liked that.
Poloniex is frustrating. If you want to equate stuff to US dollars, then you don't just want to be stuck in Bitcoin. Maybe there's a switch or a setting input; I haven't found it yet.
Then, to actually trade, there are two basic windows down here.
You've got the "Buy Aragon" and you've got the "Sell Aragon."
You need to have some Bitcoin available to buy Aragon.
Sometimes on Bittrex, you have to refresh to see the data showing up because it screws up and it doesn't load correctly.
Now, it shows that I've got my two and a half Bitcoin available.
In the Order Book I have the Bids at the left and the Asks at the right.
To help this make sense, the Bids are other people who want to buy Aragon or ANT. If I'm putting in a buy order, depending on the price, it's essentially going at the left in the Bids.
Then on the right side, the Asks, that's people who want to sell Aragon.
This means that if I want to buy and I want my order to instantly be fulfilled, then what I need to do is look at the right and pick out a price.
Let's say I want to buy just a tenth of a Bitcoin over here.
What I've done first is I clicked on the Ask for this particular order. Whoever has put this order up, they have agreed that if I pay the price they want for a certain amount of Aragon, then they will give it to me at that price.
What you have to do is put the total Bitcoin you want to spend, which is 0.1 BTC for this example. Then, if you have clicked on the Ask order, it populates the price automatically in the Bid field. I can see now that I will get 154 ANT if I spend 0.1 BTC with this order.
When I click the "Buy Aragon" button, a confirmation window shows up.
Now, I can see the commission in Bitcoin, which is the commission that Bittrex is taking out of it. I can also see the subtotal in Bitcoin I'm putting in and the price. I just have to hit "Confirm" now.
Then, you will see what's happening in real time at the top right, which is really cool. It shows you when the order has been placed and when it has been processed.
Now, you can see that I have less Bitcoin at the left, and I have more Aragon at the right.
That's how you execute an order.
Do I want to keep some Aragon? Maybe it will go up after it has been down 67%, I don't know. I can look at the charts and see that it has been up and down. You can see the 24-hour high and low too. I just bought it at 64, and it has been as low as 52, so there's no telling.
I prefer to buy on more of a flat market though. For now, if I hold the Aragon this potentially gets more complicated for my taxes because if it goes up, then I have capital gains whenever I sell it. The more of these currencies you transact, the more you're potentially building your accounting work up and up.
The worst thing you can do is trade a bunch of different currencies in really small amounts, hold them for a little while like a week or a few weeks, and then sell them because then you're theoretically making a whole bunch of accounting work for yourself. In which case, depending on where you live, then you might need to simplify it a bunch.
It's nicer, if possible, to either buy things and hold on them for a while because let's say, I hold on to this Aragon for a year. I don't have to worry about it. I just buy it. I don't have to put anything on my taxes because I've just bought it. Now, when I sell it, then I have to pay tax on that. But if I just am holding on to it, then nothing has to happen.
For now, maybe I'll just hold on to my tenth of a Bitcoin of Aragon, which was newly launched and see how much that's worth, I'll give it a few weeks or months to see how much that's worth then.
If you want to get into some new currency, I'd say that they're quite risky. The price will come out just right for some of them, but for some others it will come way too high or way too low.
Buying Humaniq, another new cryptocurrency
Let's say that I want to also buy into this new cryptocurrency called Humaniq because it just came out a week ago. I will show you how to look at the charts a little bit more on this one.
It has got the 24-hour high and low and it seems stable relative to cryptos. I can zoom back out in the chart to see better and it has pretty much trended down since it came out. You can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out on the chart. Right when Humaniq came out, the days or so after that, it has pretty much trended straight down.
Buying one of these currencies can be really risky because some of them will just keep going down for another six months or a year. At the same time though, buying a brand new currency like this could be a great investment. There are lots of currencies where if you bought a little bit right when they came out, you might have a whole lot of money now.
What I can do is buy a little bit on this if I want to. This doesn't look that attractive in terms of it has pretty much come straight down. I don't know anything about this particular currency either, which is a big problem.
If you don't have any idea about the currency itself, what you can do essentially is just bet the market and buy a whole bunch of different currencies.
I don't have enough money in this account to just buy a whole bunch now. Sure, if I sold all my Bitcoin, I could put a tenth of a Bitcoin into a hundred different currencies. I think Bittrex has almost 200 currencies, so I can't afford to just be putting a tenth of a Bitcoin into all these different currencies.
Let's say that I want to put in a bit less this time. I could buy a hundredth of a Bitcoin. Right now, that's $18 I think.
Now, it doesn't seem to be a too serious of an investment. If it goes up ten times, then I've got $180, which is pretty good.
But then the temptation comes in like, "Well, if it's going to go up ten times, I might as well put in $180, then I've have $1,800."
But what if it goes down 99%?
If it goes down 99%, and I put in $18, what I lost is $17.
If I put in $180 and it goes down 99%, then I've lost $178 or so. That does not sound like so much fun.
One strategy you can do if you don't know anything about any of the coins, you can just go in and buy a little bit of a bunch of them. I spent $600 on Poloniex to buy a hundredth of a Bitcoin on 50 different coins, and it made $1,000 in a month doing that.
If the market is going crazy on a bubble like it is now, that's a great strategy. If you just buy a little bit of every new currency that comes out, occasionally you'll be a huge winner, and one of them will go up 100, 200 or 500 times from wherever it was at coming out.
Still, you could do the research and balance it out and put more into a smaller number. I encourage what I do, which is a combination. I buy the market because I don't have time to research 190 different coins and be a part of each community. I do some basic research, find a few that I like, promote them, and then also buy into some of the others for just a little bit.
Now, I can easily just grab a little bit of Humaniq at this price. I'm on the Buy side to make my order, but if I want an instant order fulfillment, I need to work over on the Asks side.
If you want instant sell, you pretty much need to work over on the Bids side and pull your prices from there.
To pull my price, I simply clicked on the price I want in the Asks section and it populated automatically in the Bid area of the Buy section. Then, I put in my 0.01 Bitcoin.
I hit "Buy Humaniq" and I can see that the commission is really small, which looks right. I can also see the total for my order, so then I hit confirm.
Now the order goes in over here and it was instantly fulfilled because it was sitting right there in the Asks section.
As soon as I fulfilled it, someone put in an even lower price order.
Now, if I immediately try to sell it, I would only lose a little tiny bit. If I sold this right back right now, I'd get almost the exact same amount that I originally sold it for.
Why not just buy and hold this for a while. I put in like $20 and it might do really well, so I'm investing in it.
Selling Aragon
Let's say that I have some buyer's remorse about Aragon. I think, "My God, I can't believe I put in $180 into this currency I've never even heard of before. My God, it's going to go down."
If I want to sell it back down to what I just did on the last one what I need to do is go over to the Bids side and find an order that covers the 154 Aragon I have at the price I've put it in.
I can click on this order because it will cover it and the price is populated in the Sell section now. Finally I enter my amount in Bitcoin.
Now, if I hit "Sell Aragon," you'll see that they're taking another small commission from me, but if you trade a bunch, these add up.
My ANT sell order was placed and was instantly filled.
I started with about 2.55 or so Bitcoin, and I have about 2.53, now that the ANT sell order was just filled.
If I scroll down to go over to my order history, I can see both of these orders in detail. You can see that I just lost a little bit doing it that way.
I bought 154 Aragon for essentially 64499, and then I sold 143 Aragon for 63001.
Now, this is the basic problem with trading. There's a difference between the up and the down. Just by buying and selling repeatedly, you're in the middle of that difference between the market. Theoretically, if you traded enough times and the market stayed exactly the same, you would essentially lose all of your money eventually between just the difference in the market.
Volatility is good for being able to make some money, but the problem with volatility is that it can make it even worse. Imagine if I'd bought that and it went down 15% or 20% between the time I bought it and the time I sold it.
Cryptocurrency trading is extremely risky. Sure, there are some upsides to it, and there are some huge downsides as well. Note that while I filmed this tutorial a few weeks ago and bought a few cryptocurrencies to use as an example here, I have sold everything to Steem since!
I'm grateful I've taken the time here to show you exactly how to make trades on Bittrex.com. If you'd like more tutorials and videos like this, would you please like this video or upvote the post. That way more people like you will find this tutorial and that's what motivates me to keep making them.
Thank you very much for reading this.
I love you.
You're awesome.
I appreciate the time you've spent with me today and I hope you have a wonderful day today.
If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed? If you would like me to follow you, would you please read this post next?
Love,
Jerry Banfield