Look I'm sure you've heard about it. Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin Meantime, another 52 week high for Bitcoin What does it all mean You see? this isn't going to be the most entertaining video here on YouTube but I assure you this is going to be one of the most important videos that you'll ever watch because this here is going to be the one and only guide for you to get a complete full rundown to take you from being someone who might not know much about Crypto to even one day becoming a possible Crypto millionaire from the foundations of what you'll learn here today. Now look when I first invested my own money into Bitcoin I was just 20 years old living with my parents and at that time I was your typical broke student attending my local Community College working two part-time jobs. Now one of those jobs I was doing hardwood floors with my dad who was a contractor and the other job I was working with children who had autism as a health technician in between my hours at work.

I Still remember the days where I decided to invest the little money I was earning at that time into buying up some Bitcoin Since then, throughout my entire Journey I've been able to make millions but I've also lost near Millions too. And if there there's one thing that I regret and look back on now, it's wishing I had learned and knew all the things that I'm going to be sharing with you in this video here today. So ladies and gents, this year is going to be a much longer video because I'm essentially transferring my near decade worth of knowledge and experience into one jam-pack guide. Now, if you want to go ahead and get the most amount out of this video, I suggest that you find a way to take notes as we go along and follow along with an exchange of your choice.

With all that being said, here's what we're going to be going over for today: I'm also going to go ahead and put some chap timestamps Down Below in the description of this video. if you guys want to go ahead and Skip to any other parts of this video to give you an even further breakdown. Here's what we'll be covering though today. So first, we're going to have an introduction and in this, I'm going to be covering.

Why Now is more important than ever before for you to be paying attention to Crypto today. I'm also going to be explaining what the basics of crypto and all the key terms are such as blockchain, proof of stake versus proof of work, and the benefits of what crypto was created for. I'll then go over all the different ways that you can make money from crypto and what I believe is the best in today's day of age. We'll then be going over all the risks of crypto and how you can protect yourself from any type of scams or malicious activity.

Because Crypto Yes, it's the Wild Wild West And there's a lot of crazy stuff happening, but there are ways that you can go ahead and protect yourself so it doesn't happen to you from there. I'll be going over all the different types of crypto and all the most used terminologies. So if someone ever asks you about price, action, fundamentals, Dii products, you'll know exactly what they're talking about and how to respond. We're then going to be talking about how you can buy, trade, and store your crypto safely through the use of different cold and hot storage wallets.

I'll also show you step by step in what I believe is the best way for you to buy crypto securely and safely. After that, I'll also be going over how to research cryptocurrencies properly so that you can set yourself up for the best chances of success as an investor. Next, I'll go over how you can build your own balanced crypto portfolio depending on the risk level of your choice, and then I'll also go over everything you need to know about crypto taxes because this year is also another complicated topic. and if you're on your way to making millions one day, I Want to make sure that you don't ever overpay or underpay on the taxes due now towards the end, I'm going to give you five of my biggest lessons to help you get started in the safest and most efficient way possible.

Now last but not least, I'm going to go over all the different crypto plays and narratives for the upcoming Bull Run so that you have a direction of where you can now apply all this new knowledge you're going to learn so you don't miss out on what's to come. So to kick this off, why should you even learn or decide to invest your money into Crypto? Well, the first and most obvious reason is the potential for high returns. If you learn and understand how the crypto markets move, you have the opportunity to make lifechanging money if you're patient enough and put in the work now. I Truly believe that Crypto has the power to do that and it has the power to transfer wealth from the ultra wealthy to Everyday people like you and I and it just starts with taking some time to learn the basics.

Now on top of that, the overall crypto market cap is also down significantly, which means that cryptocurrencies are still at a discount. Look, it'd be a whole different story if I told you let's invest While Bitcoin was still at $69,000 in my right mind, I Would not know if I could say that this is going to be the best time to invest, but I at least know within the time of filming this video, we are down still a significant amount from where we were before and even right now Behind The Narrative of cryptocurrency continue to expand is still rising up. Crypto is still also in its infancy, and right now you have a chance of being at the Forefront of a potentially transformative wave between technology and finance. A lot of people tend to forget that Bitcoin was only created about 14 years back and there's so much room for improvement, adoption, and even more positive outlooks.

In the last 14 years, Bitcoin has grown tremendously. I'm also going to be going over a crypto calculator to just show you if you had invested even a hundred or $1,000 into Bitcoin when it first came out how much that would be worth. Last but not least, Crypto right now is still what I believe is the future. Governments are actively looking into crypto laws, regulations, and even things like Cbdcs.

Now, Cbdc is a central bank digital currency where one day in the future the government might decide to come out with their own cryptocurrency after they realize just how powerful this entire Market is. At this time, companies and institutions are still learning, investing, and implementing blockchain technology into their business. We've had other countries like El Salvador making them legal tender, and people right now are waking up to the limitations of Fiat currency and the bad that can come with it. Not only that, but I'd say crypto is now starting to go a bit more mainstream.

It's going to be more common for you to hear crypto on the news. If you're watching your favorite football team, you'll see like a crypto exchange popup or even just people at your work or people that you go to school with talking about different cryptocurrencies. Now I Want to show you something interesting here if you were to dollar cost average just $10 into the markets since 2020. Between gold Bitcoin, the S&P 500 treasury bonds and the NASDAQ.

According to this graph, your Bitcoin would be up over 100% while the NASDAQ is up only 28% the S&P 500 up only 18% Gold up 16% and the the US Treasury bonds, well, you'd actually be down 20% accounting for inflation as well. Now it's pretty clear judging from even the past few years, that Bitcoin has been a strong Contender as an investment. But let me actually show you what the exact numbers are. So as an example, say you had bought Bitcoin for $1,000 in 2010.

If I were to go ahead and calculate this, that would be worth over $215 million. Now 2010 was a long time ago. but say we did something else. Let's do January of 2020 and say IID invested $10,000 Now 2020 was not too long ago and if I had bought in at that time, Bitcoin's price would have been at $8600 with the current price of it being at over $43,000 at the time of filming this video, I would have made a profit of over 400% and have had brought up my Capital to 50,51 15 bucks just to show you some evidence.

Historically Bitcoin back before 2010 was sitting at under a dollar. It was a year later where Bitcoin hit $5 A year after that it went up to $100 and then the next year we saw it at $457 in 2014. Bitcoin Drew back down to $244 and since then we've seen Bitcoin grow at a pretty astronomical rate. What? I've realized within the last few years of seeing many investors come and go within the crypto space is that people want to make quick money fast.

I'm sure 90% of you out here have heard about things like Dogecoin Pepcoin and all these other memes. Now we'll go over exactly why that came about and why they performed the way they did later on. But the main focus I want to reiterate is just the importance of proper basic investing and having a long-term Vision on the horizon. Now look, I might be getting ahead of myself already talking about investing and how much money you can make.

Let's back up just a little bit to talk about what cryptocurrency is as a beginner. So what is cryptocurrency? Well, by definition, a cryptocurrency is a digital currency, which is an alternative form of payment created using encryption algorithms. The use of encryption Technologies mean that cryptocurrencies function both as a currency and as a virtual accounting system. Crypto is generally used in a wide variety of different applications such as buying goods and services, trading, and peer-to-peer transactions.

Now if that went over your head, that's completely okay because the literal definition of this can be rather daunting for anyone new to the market. But the way I like to explain it and what I think is the easiest to understand is just think of crypto as if it's PayPal VMO or Zel where there is no company in the middle between that exchange. So say you're going out to dinner with six of your friends and you get a Giant Food Bill Normally you would go ahead and split that bill with all these different credit cards, but sometimes there's a restaurant that could say sorry, we're only going to accept Just One credit card. If that's the case, then you would put it down on your card and you would tell all your friends to VMO you or Zel you and in this case, where someone is able to just input your username or your phone number or your email address and send you money in that capacity.

That right there is very similar to the basic understanding of crypto. More specifically, even with the creation of Bitcoin now when you're using VMO your money gets sent over over to VMO, then VMO actually has a sent over you. When it comes to crypto, you're taking out that middleman and the transaction goes straight over directly to you. Now to send someone money through crypto.

It's actually very simple. You can do this on any basic exchange or even if you have a hot wallet or a cold storage wallet and all you have to do is copy and paste a string of random letters and numbers. Unlike VMO or PayPal where you have people's usernames and email addresses that are tied to their identity. Crypto wallet addresses are generally Anonymous where it looks like if you had just like smashed your head on a keyboard, that's what the wallet address would look like.

So knowing all that, why is Crypto so important today? What are the problems that Crypto is mainly solving? well? Cryptocurrency has gained popularity in today's world because it has so much potential in solving complex and large issues in our financial economy and our government controlled. Society One of the narratives behind crypto is the fact that this is a strong hedge against inflation no matter where you live. right now, most countries have gone through extreme amounts of inflation because of the pandemic that we went through and the amount of money printing that we saw happen on the government level. Even in the US, we reached a 40-year high inflation rate last year when we peaked at 99.1% back in June.

Now this year happened because the government was simply able to print as much money as they wanted. You remember that. Meme With Jome, Powell and the printer, that's what it's about. when it comes to crypto.

No one has access to a money printing machine. The Federal government or any large entity can't come in and just be like okay, let's start printing trillions and trillions of dollars because crypto is also not considered to be Fiat and instead it's a different type of currency. Where it's self-regulated People often see that as an alternative use to modern-day currency like even the dollar. Now all the money printing led to a higher inflation rate which was combed by the higher interest rate that the government started pushing out.

The interest rate has now led to the borrowing of Money Getting much more expensive. So for me I was getting a mortgage on my house and back then when I was looking during the pandemic, the interest rate was like 3% So my mortgage at that time time was like $6,000 a month. By the time my house was finished getting built and I had looked at the interest rate again it was at over 5% So my monthly mortgage which was at $6,000 a month it had moved up to about $8 to $9,000 a month even auto loans right now. Back then you can get some cars with 0% interest on your auto loan, but now I'm seeing even rates of anywhere from 5 to 7% if you do decide that you want to go ahead and buy a vehicle and finance it.

So through the rise of interest rates, a lot of these Banks actually couldn't keep up because one of the ways that Banks can stay in business is through the amount of money that they get from you where you hold it in their checking account and from there they would be able to earn interest on that amount. Now, since interest rates were rising up for the amount of money that was getting loaned out, we actually saw a lot of banks starting to collapse. First Republic Bank Silvergate Bank. I Mean these were just a few and eventually the government had to go ahead and bail them out.

Last but not least, Crypto offers security and transparency. This is because everything is recorded on something called a public Ledger This is how blockchain technology works and and this year can lead to reduce fraud and Corruption especially in systems that are prone to human error or manipulation. Now that leads into what actually is. Bitcoin Because Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency is like the umbrella term for all the different cryptos that exist today now.

Bitcoin was actually the first crypto to ever be created and it was made in 2008 by an unknown person or group using the name. Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin was also initially created to be an electronic peer-to-peer Cash System but it turns out that it also attracted many investors as a store of value currency. Bitcoin at the moment is still the largest cryptocurrency and it makes up roughly 50% of the entire crypto market cap. The reason why people love Bitcoin too is that everything is open source.

This means the code and everything that makes what Bitcoin is today is fully available and open for the public to see. Now even going on Bitcoin.org you can pull up something called a white paper. Now all cryptocurrencies have this. Your white paper is going to give you a full rundown of what the crypto was created, for the details of it, it's going to introduce it.

Sometimes it mentions its team, how it works, the mechanics behind it, and if you're someone who really needs to understand exactly the logistics of how the technicalities may work, this is something that you may want to look into as well. Now, Bitcoin operates on a decentralized system called the Blockchain, which is just a fancy term for a public and digital Ledger that records all Bitcoin transactions. Now, the reason the blockchain is groundbreaking technology when it was first release is because the transactions are recorded in a secure and permanent manner that everyone has access to. This means that even with something like Bitcoin where a lot of TV shows portray Bitcoin to be like this Anonymous crypto thing where people are like oh, you want to go ahead and buy these drugs using Bitcoin it often doesn't make sense because everything is recorded onto the blockchain which is made public and then if you can find someone's wallet address you can see all of their different history in Spend.

Now the blockchain is truly fascinating stuff and it is real. If you go on even something like Blockchain.com you can go ahead and search up the latest transactions. As an example with here I can see the Bitcoin M Pool I can see details of different transactions the cost of it because the cost does go up and down throughout different times of when demand starts Rising for the use case of Bitcoin but all of these unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions that are still actively coming in are real people from all over the world that are sending transactions from one wallet to another. So if I click on a random transaction, I can go ahead and see who sent it, who received it, and all the details including the fee of how much money it costs right now to actually send that.

Bitcoin Now going back to the example we used earlier in Venmo and Zel where you send someone money. Usually that's free, but when you're using Bitcoin you do need to pay a small flat fee. This can range from a couple bucks all the way up to 20 or even 30 bucks depending on how much Bitcoin you're sending to someone. The reason you pay this amount is because that actually goes to the people that are mining the Bitcoin that allow for the transaction to get processed.

Now the transaction in the creation of Bitcoin is done through a process called Bitcoin mining which is almost like a digital version of Mining, for gold, where instead of physical mining, you actually have computers that solve complex math problems that validate and then secure those transactions that we saw on the blockchain. Now, when these problems are solved, a new block is added onto the blockchain and the miner is then issued with a new Bitcoin as a reward for adding a new transaction to Bitcoin's public. Ledger This method of validating transactions, securing the network, and creating new tokens through these math computations is what we call Proof of Work. If you've ever heard complaints about Crypto from the environmental Enthusiast crowd and people who are concerned about global warming, the Proof of Work method is essentially what they're protesting in order to mine.

Bitcoin You need computers, And not just that, you need computers that require a high amount of electricity and power. Obviously, electricity is not for free unless you're going completely solar, which is not the case for many people across the world. Now, the reason why Proof of Work is so energy intensive is because all these Bitcoin miners are also essentially competing with one another, trying to solve the computations first and validate the transactions before others. For example, at any given time, there isn't just one Bitcoin miner somewhere in the world that's working.

There may be hundreds if not thousands of different Bitcoin miners all working on the same math problem. Now, every minor here is going to be using a ton of power and energy, but only one of them will win and get rewarded a Bitcoin Which then means the other nine miners wasted all that energy for nothing in return. Now this process can seem like it's inefficient and to be honest, the more competition in the Bitcoin mining space, the more energ that will be used and as time goes on, it's going to get even more difficult in mining. Bitcoin So the Proof of Work system has always been seen to be as like the old school way of getting things done.

Now, it's not the only way for cryptocurrencies to be able to process transactions, but the new way and the more equo friendly alternative that we see a lot of these other all coins adopting is through the Proof of Stake method. Now, the Proof of Stake is another consensus mechanism used in crypto networks to validate transactions and add new blocks to the blockchain. This year functions more like a Lottery system where essentially, instead of using computing power to solve complex puzzles like in the Proof of Work system, users who own some of the network, cryptocurrencies can stake their coins which means locking them up as a form of security deposit and then the system then randomly chooses these stakers to check and add new transactions to the blockchain. Now, the most notable Proof of Stake example occurred between the second largest cryptocurrency in the world and that is Ethereum.

We're back in 2022. Ethereum used to be Proof of Work, then they decided to move over into Proof of Stake, and once that had gone into effect, Ethereum tokens were considered to be 99.9% more energy efficient, among several other positive benefits happening to the Ethereum project and ecosystem. Now the cool part here is anyone with a small amount of cryptocurrency can participate in staking and the rewards might be even higher for those with a bigger investment, but the roadblock to getting started are much lower than with proof OFW Cryptocurrencies We'll talk more about how you can make some additional passive income with staking I'll show you how much money I've made from staking my own crypto, but it is definitely an alternative way for you to earn what I considered to be additional interest on your investment that you have. So here on your screen you can go ahead and see the pros and the cons between proof of work and proof of Stake.

All right. So at this point you should have a better understanding of how cryptocurrencies like even Bitcoin and Ethereum work. With that said, let's go over a little bit more exciting stuff, which is four ways that you can actually make money from crypto. So the first and most obvious way to make money with crypto is by using it as an investment vehicle similar to how you would with a stock.

In this case, you would buy the crypto and overtime, the value appreciates and you can go ahead and lock in profits. So an example of this is putting $100 into Bitcoin when its price is at $110,000 By the way, you can always buy fractions of Bitcoin You do not have to buy a whole Bitcoin every single time. if you held that amount and Bitcoin had hit $69,000 like it did in the previous bull run. then whatever the amount was at that time where you sell sell your Bitcoin would be the amount of US Dollars you get back.

Now the second way you can make money from crypto is something we just talked about that's crypto staking. and I'll show you guys within my own portfolio using coinbase how much I've money even just in the last few years for this I Just want to mention that it depends on the crypto on how much you can earn. but generally I've seen people earn anywhere from 3 to even 15% back depending on the coin. Now the third way you can make money through crypto is through crypto mining.

This here is where you go ahead and buy computer gear. You turn on a crypto mining software and your computer is then going ahead and trying to capitalize on the proof of State consensus model that we just talked about. Fourth way you can make money from Crypto is through something called Defi So Defi otherwise known as decentralized Finance What it's short for allows you to do various amounts of things such as earning interest or allowing someone to borrow your crypto and paying you some money on that, You can go ahead and even lend out your crypto. and with a smart contract that's written up, if someone pays you back on time, they still have to pay you interest.

Or if they don't pay you back on time, you can be making a whole lot more out of all these things. I Think crypto. Defi is the one that we need to expand upon just because there's a lot of different ways you can go about this as you see on your screen here. If you were to ever get money from the bank as if I was getting a mortgage from my home, I had to go through a huge huge process where they were going through all my tax returns, my bank accounts they were going and asking for statements and verifying all this information, then going through my credit score which also measures how often I'm paying off the people that I owe my debts to.

Traditional lending can take a whole lot of time even after going through a long and tedious process. Banks can then say no to you and say we don't want to lend you the money. Now when it comes to Defi lending or borrowing money through cryptocurrency, you don't need to go through all the risk protocols that you would with traditional Finance so I could skip the credit score I could skip sending all my sensitive information like the tax returns, the bank statements, and instead I can hop on to a website, connect my wallet address, sign a smart contract where I can go ahead and access money using a variety of different Dii tools. So the top Defi lending platforms right now compound a Unis swap maker Dow is pretty good.

Let me show you a as a quick example. So A is a cryptocurrency itself. The more this token is used generally the higher the price begins to go in the bull run. A was doing pretty well and here on this website you can see some of the details where they even State just earn interest, borrow assets, and build applications where they now have $9 billion of liquidity locked in a across eight networks and over 15 markets.

Scrolling down with any cryptocurrency, you could generally see how they work to go ahead and actually use it. Go ahead and launch the app. From here you want to go ahead and connect a wallet. So from here I'm going to go ahead and load up something called a hot wallet.

We'll talk about the details of that later, but essentially this is just like a free profile wallet that you can go ahead and create I use metamask and here is where I can now begin to use different tools on A If I want to go ahead and stake a it'll tell me how much I can earn back. Now if I need to go ahead and borrow some money, there's going to be a a wide variety of different assets I can choose from. One of the requirements though, for you to be able to borrow money is to be able to put down an asset as collateral. So if you have no money, it's going to be hard to get free money coming in as a loan just because you'd be high risk.

and if you end up defaulting on that, there wouldn't be anything that you would pay back or reimburse the network for. Another example of a very popular Di5 protocol is something called Unis Swap This year is a decentralized crypto trading protocol. This year almost acts as if it's an exchange, except it's not. aliz what Unis swap is really good for is if you've ever heard of those certain allcoins where you're like, where in the world can I buy paypay version 2 Monkey token They're usually listed here on these decentralized exchanges first.

To do anything you generally need Ethereum and this is why I'm so bullish on Ethereum too, because any Di5 protocol that you use or even getting into the Nft space requires for you to use Ethereum rather than Bitcoin. So what you would do is get Ethereum, send it over to a metamask wallet that you have. You then go ahead and connect your metamask wallet and then from here you could swap that for any one of these tokens. Now if a random token here ends up popping off and it goes like up 3,000% this is where people would then be able to start making money.

It's from there where you choose that token and then you could resell it for the Ethereum and then move that back into your wallet and then offload it from a crypto exchange back into your bank account. So those are going to be some additional ways that you can make money through Defi. There are going to be two more ways and this is going to be through yield farming and air drops. now.

Yield farming allows for investors to earn yield by putting coins or tokens in a decentralized application. Yi Farming is going to be a lot more higher risk, but there is going to be a higher potential in return. I've seen some yield farming sites where they offer you 2,000% interest back on your crypto, but the downside is going to be the fact that that crypto is so volatile and there's really no value behind it where you end up losing your money anyways because the actual value of the currency drops so much now. air drops is another cool way for you to make money.

This here is completely free where usually if a crypto project is starting up a way for some of these newer projects to go ahead and reward their investors or people who are just supporters of the token is through air dropping into their wallet address a fixed amount now. I Have some people who love taking advantage of aird drops just because you do not have to put up any money and all it requires is for your time in communicating in, engaging and just spending some time within forums, communities. and Discord chats. Out of all of those ways though that we've mentioned, everything has its own risk.

The biggest risk when it comes to crypto trading is the fact that if you buy it at the all-time high price and you decide to sell when it goes down, you're going to be losing money. There's also going to be thousands of different coins, There's going to be thousands more popping up, and sometimes they are considered to be something called a rug. Pole Where literally, like the owner of that crypto, they code it up. uh, they copy and paste it from another credible project and they go ahead.

They get people to buy in and then they sell all their positions where people are then left holding the token. That is a term that you may hear where someone is holding the bag. Now, the term rug pull is just the fact that if someone buys in and you pretty much take the money out from underneath their feet, that's what rug Pole is. It sounds like what it is when it comes to even things like staking your crypto.

There are also additional Associated risks. Some cryptos if you go ahead and stake it, you cannot unstake it until a certain amount of time has passed. For the most part I've seen less and less cryptos that require a certain holding time, but what I have seen is if you want to earn even more interest, you do, then lock up for me personally. I Never like locking up my tokens in the case that I need to liquidate it very fast.

So anything I Stake I Make sure I read the conditions to see if I can unstake it in within at least a day. What I just talked about here is called Soft staking and essentially you're just allowed to unstake your crypto at any time. Now we talked about crypto mining earlier and if any of you guys have considered doing that I'd say it's pretty easy in getting started, but profit margins are going to be thin. Most people are not able to make money because equipment and cost of electricity is still rising and right now there is more competition so the payouts are getting much more difficult for you to win on on your screen.

Here is just a picture I Wanted to show you where this Bitcoin mining facility in Iceland is actually using more electricity than all the homes on its Island So this here just shows you how serious and well equipped the competition really is. Now we've just gone some of the general risks when it comes to making money with Crypto, but I wanted to go over the broader risks with the crypto market and also go over some of the most important practices to make sure that you stay safe and secure. Now according to chain analysis, 2022 was the biggest year ever for crypto hacking with 3.8 billion dollars gone now. I've heard from many different people other influencers companies that have constantly get scammed and what I need to say is that you need to make sure that you are protected to amp up your security.

What I'd recommend is using a VPN I've personally been using something like Surf Shark for many, many years, but you guys can use any VPN of your choice. I Also, go ahead and make sure I use a cold storage wallet now. we'll cover these in a future chapter. but essentially this is going to be a way for you to make your crypto portfolio close to impossible to hack to prevent getting scammed.

Also, make sure that you only click on links that you recognize only use reputable and well-known services and know that crypto influencers will not be reaching out to you and dming you. One issue I've seen in the past few years before I was able to get my accounts verified was a lot of people impersonating me saying oh, message me here on WhatsApp and then my viewers would go ahead and send them money and and say Brian we sent you money but it wasn't me, they sent it to a hacker who was impersonating me and it was just a whole big headache. If at any time you think I followed you back on Instagram or Twitter please verify that it's my actual account. This goes for any influencer.

if you see Michael sailor randomly followed your account or some crypto influence that you followed and then all of a sudden he followed you back. Chances are, they probably didn't go ahead and make sure that it's their real account because fraud accounts and impersonations are still on the rise now. One of the broad risks that I've seen developing within the last few years is also just the fact that crypto is still going through a ton of unclarity between rules and regulations. Government agencies like the SEC are constantly attacking crypto companies and issuing out new lawsuits claiming that many crypto projects are unregistered.

Securities Now this here can directly impact the value of your Holdings if you own that crypto. Even aside from that, the SEC going after projects and tokens affects the entire space because investors become less confident in wanting to invest into a space that is getting more and more regulated now. I'm personally someone who believes that regulation is actually very good for the space, but I also think there's a big difference between putting regulation versus fear and rules that are unjustified. Now, We've also witnessed some of the most prominent crypto projects, exchanges, and companies go bankrupt or insolvent.

This year resulted in many people losing their funds, and it really showed how little transparency was actually happening within companies. In a ironic space of crypto where transparency is supposed to be the biggest Factor behind what makes up this space. While there have been a few bad actors involved, these few actors have collectively caused so much damage that it made the entire crypto industry look bad in whole. To mitigate this risk I recommend that you do as much research as possible before trusting any project or service with your funds personally.

For me: I Use coinbase in any FDIC protected exchange. Now last but not least, while the Market within crypto can be volatile, there are also instances where there are some projects that are straight up scams. The one that caught most people off guard was Teral. Luna This year resulted in the founder of Teruna being on the run and it led to one of the craziest moments during the previous draw down of the Bull Market.

Now look, whenever the Crypto Bull Market comes about next. I Guarantee that we're going to be seeing even more scams rising up. This here seems to be inevitable, but you can go ahead and protect yourself by making sure that you at least do your due diligence from some of the research methods that we're going to be talking about soon. Moving forward as a reminder, go ahead and protect yourself.

So go ahead and use a trusted password manager. I Personally like using something called One Pass You can use things like Last Pass Two, where this will be a vault for new generated passwords on every account that you make. The second tip is to write your keys down and store them in an encrypted file offline. Anytime you keep something on your computer or digitally, you're at risk of if someone hacking you, still getting access to it.

One of the safest measure actually. turns out, if you write down your seed phrase on a piece of paper and you put that in a secure place, maybe you got a vault? Maybe you have one of those little Vault rigs at a bank account that you're paying $5 a month for, that could be a huge way for you to protect yourself. That right there is going to increase the amount of security that you have for yourself. The Following On this list are ones that I just covered, but if you want to take a chance to pause this video and look at it, you can go ahead and do that.

now. Moving on. we are now in chapter 3 where we are now going to cover the crypto types and terminologies. Now in the stock market.

Investors categorize different stocks with terms like dividend stocks Value Stock stocks Growth stocks, Tech stocks Finance Stocks and more. When it comes to crypto, we have our own categories in terms. This year is going to be your Altcoins, Your Stable Coins, Exchange Tokens, Meme coins, metaverse tokens, Nfts, and more. So to start out, allcoins are going to be the biggest term that you're going to hear.

Now, Altcoin is very simple. This is going to be any alternative cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. Some of the most prominent Altcoins that exist are going to be Ethereum, Xrp, Salana, Cardano, and more. Pretty much if you go on Coinmarketcap.com all the cryptocurrencies that you see aside from Bitcoin and stable coins are going to be all coins.

Now Stable Coins Here are cryptocurrencies that are pegged to the value of another asset. An example of this is going to be like Usdt or Usdc. A lot of newer investors assume that if you have cash and you load it up to an exchange, then you can buy Bitcoin directly. Nowadays, exchanges are making it easier.

So yes, that is indeed the case. But a few years back too, In order for you to go ahead and buy an Altcoin or even Bitcoin, you would need to go ahead and buy a stable coin first. Now, because these stable coins are pegged to the value of a dollar, it should always be one:1 Sometimes you're going to see that the stable coin is 96 cents or 94 cents. If things are getting a little bit more Rocky but generally it should always be very close to the value of $1 Now in the crypto crash of 2022, one of the largest stable coins at the time Tera USD had lost its Peg and then went in solvent.

This is why I'm also very particular about the stable coins that I use and the two I would recomend commend is going to be tether Usdt or also just Usdc. Now Next we have exchange tokens. These are cryptocurrencies issued by a cryptocurrency exchange and are primarily used to provide benefits to users for that exchange. Now the two main Exchange tokens that exist today are going to be BNB Binance coin and Kronos also known as Cro.

Next here we have meme coins. Now This was a brand new category that came about in the last Bull Run. Now, Mcoin is a type of crypto that that is primarily driven by internet memes and social media attention rather than any inherent value or technological innovation. This type of cryptocurrency often has a strong online following and can experience rapid and extreme price fluctuations based on what's trending now.

Mem Coins is not something that I personally go hold in for a long period of time. This is straight up gambling where you enter and you exit. For all the people that you hear making millions of dollars off of any one of these meme coins, there are even more people who have lost a lot more money. Be careful with meme coins, they will be on the rise.

Once again, it is just the natural cycle of crypto because when people are making money, people want to make even more quick money and Founders and people who are able to code then start making up these projects because it doesn't take a long time. A lot of people can make their own crypto token in a very short period This year can result in a very dangerous, risky investment. Next, we have Metaverse tokens, and before we can answer what this crypto means, we need to go over the definition of metaverse itself. Now Actually made a Ted Talk on this a little while ago if you guys want to go ahead and never watch that it is on YouTube.

But in short, the Metaverse is a virtual reality space where you can step inside the internet and can connect with others. Now, the gaming industry is going to be the first step to the Metaverse, and we've also seen games like Minecraft Roblox and Fortnite. All currently offer the experience of living shopping, selling, connecting, and earning online. Now, whether you hate it or love it, we are right now living in a world where we're slowly moving away from physical reality and going more into the virtual space.

Now, if you're against that, you don't have to do anything with Metaverse tokens. But if you see the future and you know Apple's releasing their VR headset too and you want to play on this, there are something called Metaverse tokens that you can start buying. These here are generally tokens that are used within the virtual world. Now, since the concept of Metaverse is still relatively new and even speculative to others, these tokens are also considered to be high risk.

Now, the short existence of the Metaverse projects is also a reason why some of these games haven't boomed yet. But we'll talk, talk about the next crypto narrative and what this is setting itself up to be. towards the end of this video. For now, there were some Metaverse tokens that even in the last Bll run, they were heating up significantly.

and three of the largest ones by market cap are De Central Land Sandbox and Axi Infinity. Now Nfts oo I've made a lot of videos about Nfts I've been a first mover within the Nft space where we got into it many, many, many years ago, back when it was still just an idea of what it could be. Now, if you don't know, Nfts are a type of digital asset that represent ownership for a unique item or piece of content Using blockchain technology, think of these as a digital certificate. Each Nft is different and it cannot be replaced by anything else.

hence why they're called nonf fungible tokens now. I Need to mention that Nfts are not cryptocurrencies, but they do share some similarities and both utilize blockchain technology. The main difference here between Nfts and Crypto is the non-fungible principle and the purpose that they serve. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum are all fungible, meaning each unit is the same as every other unit, but with Nfts, they are all supposed to be unique in its own.

Now I was getting heavy into the Nft market in the last Bull Run I am still very bullish in the next Bull Run that Nfts are going to rise again. What we saw in the last rise of the Bull Run were Pfps also known as personal profile pictures. This is where You' buy an Nft of a board ape where people know Okay, wow, that's like the Louis Vuitton of Nfts and they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and for that person to use it as their profile picture, they are within the space, They know what they're doing, or they just simply have a lot of money. Now, in order to buy an Nft, you need to use Ethereum or one of the other newer currencies like Dow.

Just like how you can buy crypto using an exchange, you can also do something similar where you can buy it with the coinbase Nft platform or even going on open C.O Now as I mentioned earlier, I'm still personally bullish on Nfts even though these got rammed like completely wiped out in this past. bare Market The reason though why I think Nfts are going to make a comeback is simply because you're going to need Nfts in order to fit. The Narrative Of what we see coming up with a lot of these other projects in development: Now Ladies and gents, if you want to learn more about these cryptocurrencies including the top 20 largest projects, we have a full PDF guide. I'm going to give you guys free access to I'm also going to be giving you free access to the crypto key terms I'll have a link Down Below in the description if you want to go ahead and access that and I'll also be giving you access to this entire PowerPoint slide that I'm using for this video here.

If you want to pick it up, just drop me your email and we'll have it sent to you in an instant. All right. So in this section here we're going to go into more detail about everything you need to know regarding crypto wallets and how to use crypto exchanges. More specifically, I'm going to be talking about how you can buy crypto properly.

We'll then discuss the differences between a hot wallet versus a cold storage wallet and explain what they even are. I'll go over the different types of crypto exchanges that exist. we're going to be talking about the difference between a centralized exchange versus a decentralized exchange. And then and I'll also show you how I maximize my wallet and my crypto to have the most amount of protection possible after this entire section.

I'm then going to go over how much money I've been holding in one of my crypto exchanges. It's actually been doing pretty well in the last few weeks. We'll also go over how you can buy crypto properly, how you can transer your funds, how you can set up reoccurring buys, and do it where you're not spending additional cost in those transaction fees. So to begin, if you want to buy, store, trade, invest, or do any type of transaction regarding crypto, you need to utilize generally a crypto exchange first.

and this is going to be a centralized exchange. Now, Crypto exchange is a platform where buyers and sellers can trade crypto. These exchanges function similarly to a traditional Stock Exchange, but deals specifically with digital currencies instead of stocks. Anytime you are using a centralized exchange, you are trusting in their service and security measures to manage your funds.

From there, you can go ahead and transfer your crypto over to a crypto wallet, and this is where you're going to have more flexibility on being able to buy different things like Nfts, or putting your your money into Di protocols, or even being able to buy certain altcoins that may not be available on certain exchanges. Now, keep in mind, a lot of these centralized exchanges have to go through more heavy regulation versus those decentralized exchanges where they can pretty much hold any crypto currency in order to get your money from a centralized exchange over into a decentralized exchange. Usually you're placing it in a custodial wallet and the wallet is then transferring that over into wherever you want it to go. So what is a crypto wallet? Well, it is literally exactly what it sounds like.

Just imagine having a wallet. But this is going to give you a digital address and you can have your wallet stored on different browsers on your phone on certain devices. Now, crypto wallet is going to consist of a pair of keys. One is going to be your public Keys the second is going to be your private keys so similar to your bank account number.

you can go ahead and use your public key to receive and to send crypto. So if I were to venmo you right now I would say hey, I need to know your phone number or your email address in order for me to send that money. In this case, if you want to go ahead and send crypto to someone else, you need to ask them what their public Key address is going to be. Now the private Key address is something that should be kept in secret.

It should never be shared. And this here is what you're going to use in order to be able to log into different devices. So say as an example: I Have my metamask and it's only here on this browser on this computer. If I wanted to go ahead and log into my metamask from a different location, I would need to know the private keys and I would need to know the password to it.

So the security of your crypto wallet is crucial. and if anyone gains access to your private key, they can control your funds. And conversely, if you lose your private key, you pretty much lose access to your crypto. So there are essentially three different types of wallets.

You have a hot wallet, which is like the metamask, or any type of wallet that exists digitally. So if I go ahead and set up an account, say as an example with Coinbase and they give me access to the Coinbase wallet. This here is classified as a custodial wallet. Next, we have hot wallets.

This is pretty much what I just went over with the example of metamask. These are going to be wallets that you can sign up for very easily on online. Add it to your browser, or if you go on the App Store Sometimes you're going to be able to see hot wallets listed there. So Custodial Wallet is where a thirdparty service provider, such as a cryptocurrency exchange or online wallet platform manages and controls the private keys on your behalf.

So when you create an account with a certain exchange, you're able to send that crypto over into those different accounts where it's being held on is going to be the custodial wallet. Now, these custodial wallets, you pretty much don't have to do anything in setting it up. You get it as a byproduct for when you create an account with that particular exchange. Now, on the other hand, you have a hot wallet.

You're going to have a bit more ownership over this just because a company isn't managing it. And with a hot wallet, it's pretty much like the metamask wallet that I just went over with an app. Like Metamask, you can go ahead and download it off the Internet and then add it to your browser of choice. Now, hot wallets are connected to the Internet and they're actively used for managing and transacting with other cryptocurrencies.

These here are convenient. It's userfriendly. It's easy to set up. It is completely free to get one as well.

Now, the one disadvantage of a hot wallet is the fact that they do tend to get hacked pretty often. After this, we have cold storage wallets now. Cold Storage Wallet is considered to be one of the most secure ways for you to hold your asset. Now these here are going to be physical devices that look similar to USB drives.

I Got a variety of different Cold Storage wallets and usually these companies have different tiers so if you want to have the one with the brightest LED screen and the most capability, usually it's going to be a couple hundred bucks versus the most basic one. It's not going to feel as good. Sometimes it's a little plastic and flimsy, but they still get the job done. Now the advantage of a cold storage wallet is that like I said, it's the most secure option for your crypto and you are in full control of your private crypto.

Keys The disadvantage with this is the fact that if you're making everyday transactions, you have to go ahead and punch in your own personal code every single time and you need to have your device on hand. If you're someone who's day trading, you obviously do not want to do that from a cold storage wallet, because even every time you send and transact crypto from that exchange, you're paying that additional fee. The main times you want to use a cold storage wallet is if you have a large sum of crypto that you know you're not moving and you're holding on to Deer life for and you just want to tuck it away. Just like with a cold storage wallet, anytime you purchase one of these devices, they're going to have a full tutorial and pamphlet on what you need to do in order to get started.

Generally, they are very easy. You just connect it, you get a wallet address, and wherever you're currently holding your crypto, say it's on an exchange like coinbase. You then go ahead, you copy the wallet address you get on the cold storage device and all you simply do is just send it over from your exchange over into the device. and it's going to be chilling in there.

Now that here leads into the definition of what a crypto exchange is. and this is just straight up guys. A crypto exchange is used to buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies, But more particularly, there are going to be two main exchanges. We mentioned this earlier, it's going to be a centralized exchange or a decentralized exchange.

Now, centralized exchanges are going to operate under the authority of being a real company. So examples of this coinbase binance. There's going to be a few more that I'm not going to mention here because they ended up going under in the last bare Market But you guys are going to have the idea here. Anytime you use a centralized exchange, you do have to go through a mandatory Kyc process.

You also have to do this when you are working with the stock exchange. and this here is just a law that's been around for as long as I. Remember where you're inputting your own personal information so that there's going to be less instances of money laundering happening in the world Now, Decentralized exchange is going to operate without a central Authority and they allow users to trade directly from their crypto wallets. Decentralized exchanges rely solely on Smart contracts on the blockchain to facilitate the peer-to-peer trading between users.

Now, decentralized exchange is usually meant for people who are, you know, a few years into crypto, they already have an idea of what altcoins are. They've been here within the space. Often times, you don't see many new users who just hear about crypto automatically start trading into Dexes. But that's also because most people don't know about them and they don't know how easy it actually is.

Now, centralized exchanges are going to be the easiest and the most user friendly out of everything. This is going to be a a bit of a tear down just because of the connection aspect, but once you're on there I'd say it'd be hard for you to get lost and to navigate through some of these decks if you guys want to check any of them out. the most popular ones are Unis swap something that we covered earlier. you also have sushi Swap and pancake swap.

So knowing all that, how do I maximize my wallet and my crypto exchange? Because I have crypto in many different wallets across different exchanges. And what I've learned though is just having a balance seems to be the best. So long-term Holdings put on a cold storage wallet, tuck it away, keep it safe, and if I have any Altcoin positions or Nfts that I know I'm not going to be moving and trading often I'd consider actually moving that over to the cold storage wallet. Now there are some exchanges that allow you to earn additional interest when you go ahead and stake that crypto.

So those are the occasions where I would not move it onto my cold storage wallet for any remaining crypto. I Usually do keep it on a centralized exchange, but I make sure that I Implement maximum security possible. So what this is going to look like is making sure you set up two- Factor authentication. but don't do things like even adding your cell phone where you get the text message because quite frequently people do get SIM swapped.

This is where someone is able to get access to your phone number, they get all the text, and they have access to all your information. So one of the best alternative ways to protect yourself through two-factor authentication is either through the authenticator app that only you have access to on a separate device or using something like a physical security key. Now the physical security key that I use is a UB key. This here's a camera memory card.

It's not actually the device, but that U key actually requires for me to plug it into a computer anytime I'm trying to log in on a separate device. Now if I am actively trading, I will move my funds over into a hot wallet like my metamask or even my coinbase wallet. But I don't like to put a lot of money on there just because they do end up tending to get hacked the easiest and most frequently out of all the different methods that I've talked about. Now remember my story of when I invested into Bitcoin at 20 years old? Well, that was about 7 years ago and the platform I had used back then was Coinbase and it's still what I would recommend.

Now Now at this point you probably know, but a video like this takes almost a whole month to put together with my team to be able to publish something of this much value. It requires us to pull back on our ordinary uploading schedule And to make up for that loss, we've gone ahead, reached out to Coinbase, who agreed to happily sponsor this portion of the video. So if you are looking for an exchange to use and you haven't signed up for one, check out Coinbase listed down below. Currently they have a sick welcome bonus offer promotion for new applicants where if you use my link down below, they'll hook you up with up to $200 in free crypto in just getting started and up to $400 cash and free rewards.

Now out of all the exchanges that I've used and trust me, I've used almost every single one of them to exist, Coinbase is by far the easiest one. They support a wide variety of cryptocurrencies that they're continuing to add on a regular basis. They're also considered to be one of the largest and most reputable exchanges in the world. They're also FDIC insured and they are a publicly traded company.

This happened back in April of 2021, and while being a publicly trade a company doesn't inherently make them more secure or safer. But because they are publicly traded, usually these companies are subject to more stringent regulatory requirements and oversight by other regulatory bodies such as the US, Securities and Exchange Commission And more. On top of that, when you're a public company, a lot of your finances need to be posted regularly and publicly, and everything needs to be disclosed. So if you ever worry about a company not having the funds or if you're worried about what they might be doing with your money, Coinbase's transparency far exceeds many other companies that I've encountered in the past.

Now on top of that, Coinbase has a ton of different passive earning opportunities on over 100 different assets. They make crypto taxes easy I'll show you guys a bit more about that soon. Coinbase also has some of the most competitive fees I Know that this was an issue before, but we'll go over some of the different tools that you can take advantage of now to cut down on those fees as well. Even within this past year, coin bases continue to add different softwares and programs, including Nfts, and even recently, they have their own hot wallet.

So in this section here, let's go over then all that I've talked about I Want to make sure you have the full details on how when you sign up, you get that $200 and getting started. We're going to go over how you can make your first crypto trade. We're going to talk about how you can earn passive rewards through staking and then we're also going to be going over Coinbase's Advanced trading feature. All right.

So the first step here. make sure that you go ahead and open our link Down Below In the description of this video, I'll also have it down below pinned as the top comment on that first page. Depending on mobile or on a website, this is what should look like. you'll notice.

It says get up to $200 for getting started. If we go ahead and click on this, we can see the additional terms to get started. It's actually very simple. You go ahead and put your first name, your last name, your email address, and your password.

Once you go ahead and you do that, go ahead and create that free account. Once you have done that, you're going to get a verification email sent over to the email that you've inputed onto Coinbase. All right. So once you've completed those steps, you're then going to want to complete the Kyc and after that, you should have now full access to your Coinbase account.

Now I'm currently logged into my own account and I want to just walk you through some of the basic features. First of all, in the home screen. if you click on your balance, you're going to be able to see the full history of your crypto portfolio. And like I mentioned, I had about 776 bucks back in 2018 on this account.

We had the rise of the Bull Market my crypto Came Crashing Down But slowly we have rebuilt up, almost closing in on some of the previous levels with my portfolio here. Even in the last week, we're still up a pretty decent amount of about $20,000 Now to go ahead and buy crypto, it's super simple. On the top right hand of your screen, you're going to see the word transfer. You click on that and you have four different options to send crypto to receive crypto, or to deposit cash and withdraw cash.

The first step you want to take here is depositing some cash. Coinbase has a wide variety of different payment methods you could use. PayPal You could wire transfer, direct deposit it in, or even just connect your bank account. I Think connecting a bank account is the best and smoothest ways to go? Uh, this is where they're going to use Pled to effortlessly connect you.

You just log into your bank account using this and then they're automatically going to be synced up. After completing that process, you're then going to be able to see your bank account pop up here for the purpose of this video. I'm going to just toss in $11,000 from my checking account and then I'm just going to click add cash Now Coinbase is also going to tell me there, uh, when it's available and from here once. I've completed that.

I'm going to go ahead and refresh my page and see an updated balance of that $1,000 getting added in. Now the next step in buying crypto is actually very simple. but I want to show you a few different ways just to make sure that you guys are not overspending in these fees. So obviously you have your buy and sell here.

I can buy up to $3,500 worth of bitcoin. so if I put $1,000 it's going to buy $1,000 worth of bitcoin at its current price. If I preview by here, you'll notice that my fee would normally be $468 but I actually get it completely for free. The way I did that was signing up for a program called Coinbase 1.

Now Coinbase 1 is going to offer you a ton of benefits. One of those is z zero traded fees on up to $110,000 a month. Now Coinbase 1 allows you to pay them $30 a month, but if you are going to pay more in fees I believe the ROI is there, but you just need to do the math for yourself. On top of that, this is also going to give you access to over a million doll in eligible reimbursement off the chance that the funds in your account get stolen.

All right. So I've been using Coinbase 1 for a pretty good amount of time, but if you didn't want to do this, you also actually have one more option going into Coinbase. Clicking on more, Go on Advanced Trade from here. click on Advanced So open up Advanced trade and you're going to go ahead and see the Coinbase order form and a whole different look.

Now, this is not meant for beginners. This is a little bit more on the advanced level side. if you trade Futures options. If you want to do leverage, this is where you'll have acc