Hi and Welcome,
I knew nothing about Crypto currencies three months ago, but having spent a great deal of time in the past ten weeks I am now the proud owner of a small investment “wallet” holding six different crypto currencies. My intent is investment, not trading, though I will add trading as an accelerator in about two months time when I have sufficient knowledge and have done some experimentation.
First, there are two types of brokers - those who accept Fiat currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, etc) and hold your funds in their Exchange on your behalf (with you at risk if they fold or get hacked), and those who do not accept Fiat currencies. The latter would insist that you transfer Crypto currencies into your account with them on their exchange of a type they deal in. All deal in Bitcoin (BTC) most deal with at least BTC, Ethereum - ETH and recently Tether - USDT - a coin whose value is supposed to represent 1.0000 USD but whose actual value fluctuates about a tenth of a percent or so. Depending on broker type, you use your base currency that you transferred INTO the Exchange Account to buy other tokens (crypto-currency) such as BTC, ETH or any of nearly 2,000 other variants. Crypto is growing very quickly.
1 I have not purchased Bitcoin (yet) but I used an exchange provider named Bittrex who accept USD fiat input currency (for a 3% deposit fee), and who accept withdrawals in USD to a Fiat bank account. There are hundreds of Exchanges like Bittrex. I subsequently opened an account with FTX before I decided to create a “cryptocurrency wallet” independent of these exchanges and now have most of the crypto funds under my direct control and not on any external exchange. That is either in a warm wallet or a cold wallet. Do some reading on those search terms.
2 Transaction fees are very low for crypto. They are between 0.1 and 0.3%, but there are some minima - you may pay the equivalent of USD 1 to deposit or withdraw, but annoyingly, each exchange charges in different ways. To move from Bittrex to my warm wallet, I needed to purchase a small amount of ETH to be able to pay the “GAS” for moving the tokens from the Bittrex account on their Exchange to my warm wallet account off exchange. Then some small fees to move USDT (Tether) from my warm wallet to new FTX account. Bottom line - don’t transfer very small amounts of funds - or if you do, understand that there are some minimum fees.
3 I have not yet transferred any money from any Crypto account to a Fiat bank account, nor do I intend to for a few years yet, but will do that as a test in the next 2 months just to make sure I know how to do it.
4 I don’t really understand the reason for this question. You need to decide what it is you intend to do with Bitcoin, or any other crypto currency. For me, this is a five to ten year dollar cost average based medium term investment where I expect that the future may be a little representative of the past, though not expecting Bitcoin to repeat its 10 million times value gain (yes, from $0.001 to $10,000) over nearly twelve years. But I am expecting SOME of the tokens to make 10X their value over the next five years, and my investment plan reflects this expectation. So I am in no hurry to take anything OUT for the foreseeable.
5. Yes, I have spent probably 300+ hours reading, studying, watching crypto videos, and reading white papers to understand what each of these crypto companies does for a living, and where their future impact is likely to be in our world of commerce, contracts, IOT and about 30 other sectors, and make my decisions accordingly. If that is not your bag, you could just pay for a crypto advisor to tell you what to buy and when. There are thousands of them on the web, just like the guys who sell Forex courses so you can trade like a gazillionaire.
I hope this has been useful. A word of caution. If you think there is a high risk of losing your money trading Forex, don’t even go there with leveraged crypto speculation (long or specifically short). You’ll lose your ass in about ten milliseconds.
