Buying Your First Cryptocurrency

Austin Knight: Welcome to the Decrypting Crypto podcast. This is series one, episode two. We’re going to be talking about buying your first crypto. I’m Austin Knight. I’m here with my co-host Matthew Howells Barby.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Hey Austin. Hey everyone. By the end of this episode, we’re going to get you to the point, pretty exciting point where you’re going to be able to have Bitcoins inside your wallet. You’re going to own them. Now, we’re not going to be paying for them, just yet.

We’re not that generous, but we’re going to get you to the point where you are able to go in, buy a cryptocurrency, whether that’s Bitcoin or another and have pretty much everything you need to be able to go through, understand what you need to do, where you need to go, and how you can store those. So let’s jump in.

Austin Knight: This is so exciting because it’s … I will tell you, it’s daunting at first, but then once you get the hang of it, you’re good to go. It’s a very easy process after that, so how do you start? Where do you begin? First, you got to understand where and how to buy your Crypto, right?

Matthew Howells-Barby: Yes, for sure. I think it’s also worth caveating this whole thing with you … during your first time of doing this, you are going to go through every kind of possible emotion that you can ever face in your life. You’re going to be terrified. You’re going to be excited. You’re going to be happy. You’re going to be sad. You’re going to be frustrated.

You’re going to feel relieved. All of these things will happen on the first time. One thing I guarantee is, the second time it’s going to be 10 times easier. It’s just something new, right? And I think this all steps down to understanding like first of all, how and where you can buy your Crypto. There’s a few little things we want to go through. The first thing is, not all cryptocurrencies can actually be purchased with Fiat currency.

Fiat currency being a US dollar, Euro, British Sterling etcetera. Not all of them can be purchased directly with them. Also, the way that you actually go through and buy cryptocurrencies is through largely an exchange, which is a website like Coinbase, which we touched on very briefly in episode one, but not all cryptocurrencies are listed on the same exchange.

Kind of like going and buying some groceries from the store, but your favorite cereal is not at that store, you got to get on the road. It’s really annoying, but you got to go to different shops to get the things that you want. Similar thing with Crypto, right?

Austin Knight: That’s right. Sometimes you’re going to have to go and take one form of cryptocurrency and exchange that into another form of cryptocurrency just to buy the Crypto that you wanted in the first place. That can become a very convoluted process.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Yes, it can be the point where a lot of people get a bit stuck. Like right now what you can do with … if you want it to exchange us dollars, you could just go to any kind of currency exchange. Usually a store there’s always one in an airport, right. You could be like, “Hey, okay, I want to change these 1000 euros into US dollar.” and they’ll give you like what, I know like 1400 bucks in exchange for that 0100 and it’s sold down there and then.

Now, there are some crypto currencies that you can take a similar approach with. Where you can go in and be like, “Hey, I just have this US dollar, I want to buy Bitcoin.” Another two examples would be Ethereum and Litecoin, two completely different cryptocurrencies that you can go in and easily do that with. Sometimes you need to buy Bitcoin with US dollar and then let’s say you wanted a slightly different crypto currency.

One we’re going to talk about a little later in this episode Vertcoin. You then need to exchange your Bitcoin for Vertcoin. That’s the only way because there’s not a direct path of just buying things straight away with US dollar. Let’s just touch a little bit around some of the different exchanges. Maybe give everyone a few examples of some exchanges right now, Austin, that you can go on and buy cryptocurrencies from.

Austin Knight: Yes, so the most popular exchanges that you’re probably going to hear about from the start, Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, those are huge exchanges that have been around for years where you can go on and buy different forms of crypto currency.

Usually when a cryptocurrency gets listed by one of these exchanges, it becomes much more accessible and it blows up in value because it’s much easier to get your hands on. The problem with these exchanges is that you’re going to have to deal with verification because-

Matthew Howells-Barby: That’s actually only on the ones that take Fiat currency and that’s why, right?

Austin Knight: Exactly, yes, so when you’re trading Fiat currency for a cryptocurrency, you do have to go through an identity verification process. In the US in particular exchanges need to abide by something called know your customer, KYC rules. We touched on those a bit earlier in our first episode and a lot of the legislation around this is still developing.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Yes, and I think it also differs not only country to country, but when you’re an exchange, let’s take Coinbase. It’s a very well-known exchange. It’s definitely one of the most popular exchanges that most people will buy their first … probably like their first Bitcoin with his Coinbase. There’s a lot of risks for an exchange like Coinbase on any exchange that wants to do straight up Fiat currency to cryptocurrency transactions.

That’s one of the main reasons why you don’t get to actually just go and buy any cryptocurrency with your US dollar or Pound sterling because it just adds a whole extra layer of legislation. If an exchange wants to just do a Crypto to Crypto transaction, let’s take even just buying Bitcoin and swapping Bitcoin for Ethereum, you don’t need to have the same kind of like know your customer rules.

It means there’s a bunch of exchanges out there that actually just don’t even accept Fiat currency. It’s just Crypto to Crypto. It makes it a lot easier for the cryptocurrencies to be traded within those places and that’s why it creates this dynamic where only some cryptocurrencies can actually be purchased with either a Fiat currency or by being traded with another one.

Austin Knight: Usually you’re going to have your big staple crypto currencies on big staple exchanges that can go from Fiat to Crypto. Then if you want something else, you’ll go from that Crypto to the other Crypto that you actually wanted in the first place.

Matthew Howells-Barby: For sure, and like everyone has their own preference to the different exchange that they’ll often use. I think there’s certain trade-offs like a lot of people get a bit annoyed with Coinbase because it does have quite high fees that they charge. They are a company, they are not like a cryptocurrency. They’re an exchange, they’re a business that is for profit.

That said, I would argue they probably have like the nicest user interface. I mean they have a pretty sweet app. I literally bought Bitcoin on the toilet like the other week. That is when you know that cryptocurrency is getting for real when people are able to buy this on the toilet with an app.

Whereas some of the others not so user friendly. They looked like something out of like a Wall Street movie. Right, and that has become a bit less accessible. Yes, we both know what the verification process could be like as well.

Austin Knight: Yes, and because of these processes, including other processes like deposit limits, like when you get started on coin base, they ease you into being able to buy cryptocurrency. So, you start with $350 limit by debit card or $10,000 limit by bank per week.

What this really means is that pairing these sort of bureaucratic and not so user-friendly processes with the fact that cryptocurrencies are still fairly volatile right now. They’re stabilizing a little bit, but they are somewhat volatile. What that means is that you want to be set up in advance to purchase cryptocurrencies.

The reason that you were able to purchase Bitcoin on the toilet is because you had set yourself up ahead of time by going through the verification process, and by showing Coinbase that you could handle a limit larger than $350 or $10,000 or whatever it was.

Then when that currency got to the point where you’re ready to buy it, you were ready to go and you went for a. You don’t have to go through this crazy process.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Yes, it’s like I have a number of people that will say to me, “Oh Matt, how do I just like hop in and buy some Bitcoin right now?” I’m just like, “Well,” I mean I can kind of do that because I’ve been through all of the verification process, all of that, but you’re probably going to have to still wait at least two weeks and through like high volume periods, it’s even worse.

To give you an example of what the verification process is usually like first app, giving over like all of your personal details, you don’t have to necessarily link up bank accounts at this stage, but you have to like send in your passport. You even have to do like these weird photos where you take a picture of yourself holding your passport so that they know it’s actually you.

These are all manually reviewed and I mean I’ve been waiting now over a year for Kraken to verify me. It’s taking forever, so just bear that in mind. One thing when you’re even considering, a lot of this stuff is just get signed up to a couple of different exchanges, hedge your bets, get the verification process started and then you can start going into that.

Austin Knight: Yes, even if you’re not … you can look at the values today and maybe you’re like, “Ah, you know, I don’t think I really want to buy today” or “I’m not really ready.” I would still recommend get yourself set up, like build the infrastructure so that when you are ready to buy, you can actually buy

Matthew Howells-Barby: 100%. I mean you had a perfect example where was it IOTA? You were trying to try and buy a few months back and you couldn’t because you couldn’t get verified on. It’s an exchange that only listed IOTA and it’s pain in the ass, right?

Austin Knight: Yes, Matt was able to buy IOTA and I wasn’t partially because he’s a European citizen, and I am not but-

Matthew Howells-Barby: For now.

Austin Knight: That’s what you get into for now.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Not for long.

Austin Knight: You also get cases where … I was in Brazil and I was at a barbecue and I was drunk and Ethereum dropped in value and I drunkenly purchased some of it and I’m really glad that I did that. I’m really glad that I had set myself up in a way that it was so easy for me to do. That I could blow my own cash on something-

Matthew Howells-Barby: Just a quick disclaimer. We do not advocate buying cryptocurrencies whilst drunk at barbecues in Brazil nor anywhere. Just to have a little quick text from the lawyer there. That’s fine. All right, let’s talk about example. We’ve talked about certain coins being able to be purchased.

Bitcoin, when you’re buying that, let’s talk about the process of going and buying a coin that you can’t just swap Fiat currencies like US dollar for … let’s take an example of a coin like Vertcoin, another cryptocurrency out there. It’s on a few exchanges on a huge amount but cannot be traded directly for Fiat currency.

First step, buying Bitcoin, right? Let’s walk through this process. When we’re going to buy Vertcoin and Bitcoin. First thing is you need to go and transfer your Fiat currency, US dollar to actually own some Bitcoin. That you can do through something like what we’ve talked about, Gemini, Kraken, Gatecoin, Coinbase. They’re all like Fiat currency exchanges.

Next step is, okay so I have my Bitcoin, now I’ve have purchased it and it’s sitting within Coinbase. So, like how it would sit in your PayPal account or even your bank account, right? You can see the balance there and it’s stored within their systems. Problem is to buy Vertcoin, you need to trade Bitcoin on an exchange like for example, Bittrex.

Bittrex is another huge exchange, but they only do Crypto to Crypto. To go and buy Vertcoin, you need to set up your Bittrex account and you need to set up a little wallet on Bittrex. That just gets done when you create an account. You need to transfer your Bitcoin from your Coinbase account over to your Bittrex account.

Those funds will then show up in your Bittrex account. You now have Bitcoin in there, and then you can go and trade your Bitcoin for Vertcoin within Bittrex. You now no longer own Bitcoin, but you now own Vertcoin, and that’s what’s sitting in your Bittrex wallet.

You can also another really cool tool, I think you might have used this in the past, ShapeShift, Austin.

Austin Knight: Yes, this makes things a little bit less complex. You could go to Coinbase, buy some Bitcoin. You’ve got that sitting in your wallet. You type your key into ShapeShift and say, I want to trade this Bitcoin for Vertcoin, and then you tell it where you want the Vertcoin to go.

So, you’ve probably set up a vert coin wallet, which is another thing that we’ll go into here later. Then shape shift will just immediately do that transfer for you. The issue is that it has higher fees.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Yes, that’s often the trade-off here is like, and in all honesty, for your first time buying Crypto, I really wouldn’t obsess over these fees. It’s going to nut out. It kind of like what you’d pay on something like PayPal maybe a little bit more, but just by a small amount when you’re doing this for the first time to just get to know the ropes a little bit and figure out where things could potentially go wrong, get used to the interface.

But at this stage, if you’ve followed the Vertcoin example, you’ve got that Vertcoin now in Bittrex exchange. A lot of people think, great, I have Vertcoin. Now. I just sit back and everything’s cool, that’s great and I’ll just leave it to Bittrex to look after my Crypto.

Austin Knight: But remember when we talked about centralized exchanges earlier and how dangerous that is.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Yes, that is pretty dangerous. I mean so there’s a couple of different schools of thought here. At the end of the day, Bittrex Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, they’re all companies, centralized systems. If someone hacks something like Bittrex or Coinbase, they could theoretically hack all of the accounts and get access to your private information that could maybe get access to your cryptocurrencies. That would not be good.

On the flip side, what you can do is you can transfer them out of exchanges and put them into a wallet that you own. We’re going to talk a little bit about what a wallet is, but that puts the owners of security on you. You lose your information, you misplace it, it gets stolen by someone physically.

There is no customer service number for the blockchain. That is one thing to remember and that can be really scary for people. Sometimes people say, “You know what, I’m okay with taking the risk of keeping things on exchange.” Personally, and I think both of us are in agreement.

Austin is like, I would advocate that you take things out of exchanges and store these yourself, but always try it with a small amount to begin with. Let’s walk through this. We’ve got our cryptocurrency, our Vertcoin and Bittrex, what now?

Austin Knight: Now, you’re gonna want to set up a wallet and that can be a little bit of a complicated thing to do. You got to pick the right wallet. Every cryptocurrency has its own wallet and more popular cryptos can be stored in multi Crypto wallets. Rather than needing a separate wallet for each cryptocurrency, like a wallet for a Bitcoin and a wallet for Vertcoin, a Wallet for Ether, you can have a single wallet that would store all three of those. That’s like the dream right now.

Matthew Howells-Barby: It’s worth pointing out there as well. A lot of people say, “Oh God, you’ve got to have all these different wallets, so it’s something…” it’s not much different to bank accounts where like, you can’t just go and have like your Bank of America account where you have your us dollar and then what, your pound sterling account.

No, they’re going to convert that for you. You need to open up a UK Bank for your sterling accounts. It sounds like, it’s kind of the same but the advantage with Crypto is actually you also get these wallets, which you’re talking about where you can have multiples, almost like being able to, in one bank account, store US dollar pound sterling, euro, etcetera, yen, won, like all of these different currencies all in one place. This is just to bring that to life a little bit more.

Austin Knight: It can sound convoluted and complex, but ultimately there are a lot of simplified innovations and things that can make this easier, especially when you get used to it. It’s just that it’s different.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Yes, the trade-off primarily is like user experience and ease of use to the level of security. This is why we want to break down maybe four different core types of wallets that you can use starting with and I don’t want to use the least secure because it’s not. All of these are very secure.

That’s one thing I do want to point out here, but there are options in amongst this list as we go on that are incredibly secure or at least the vulnerability changes. Let’s bring this to life. We’ve got to start off online and mobile wallets. Do you use a mobile wallet like Jacks?

Austin Knight: Yes, I think that this is the easiest wallet to get set up with once you want to get off of an exchange. This is just a wallet that you download as an application on your computer or on your phone and you can think of it almost like a physical wallet or a bank account, like you’re transferring the currency from the exchange to this wallet on your computer, on your phone or wherever you want it to live. As Matt said, it’s not that it’s not secure it’s just not absurdly secure.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Yes, I almost feel like sometimes I have the Jaxx app on my phone and I almost feel like it’s like Apple Pay in a way. That’s what they want it to be when you can just go and make because you can go and just make payments via your phone by just scanning a QR code like an old just hook straight up to your Jaxx wallet, similar things.

The same time someone steals your phone, and they know your password. You can do some stuff on like iPhone fingerprint, makes it more secure. I’m super paranoid. I would never hold your entire wealth of cryptocurrency in a Jaxx wallet personally, but I would way rather hold of in there than an exchange.

Austin Knight: Yes, the benefit of these online or mobile wallets is that they’re really easy to get set up with and they do increase your security by an order of magnitude over being in an exchange. It’s like low effort to benefit ratio, but as you’ll see as a general pattern, as we dig into these wallets, the more secure they get from a technical perspective, the more vulnerable they get from a personal perspective.

The more secure that you make your wallet, the harder it is for somebody else to break into it, but unfortunately the easier it is for you to somehow make a human error and lose your currency. For example, in the case of an online or mobile wallet, maybe you lose your phone, maybe somebody steals your phone. You can’t steal an entire coin based exchange on a single device, there’s trade-offs there.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Yes, and that’s what brings onto the next piece, which is the desktop wallets, which I would say a more secure and mobile wallets because it’s basically a desktop application that you run and you’ll have all of your code stored within that digitally and you can have extra layers of passwords and security measures set up, but what you will always have is for all of these wallets is a public address and that’s what we talked about in episode one.

What we used to send bitcoin is just like your bank account number, but that’s not all you need. You need your private key as well and with these two together, that’s how you actually access the–think of your private key like a password but it is the password.

That’s the thing that unlocks your wallet. That’s the thing that you can send with. If someone has your private key, it’s kind of game over, but at the same thing is like if you lose your private key that’s gone forever and any of the coins within that is gone forever.

Austin Knight: This has happened to lots of people.

Matthew Howells-Barby: So many people. We were talking earlier about that there was a guy who had all of his bitcoin stored on a laptop like a number of years ago before bitcoin really took off. He threw away his laptop because it’s broken and all of the coins that he had on there were stored on it.

Those bitcoins became worth, I think it was over 100,000,000 dollars now in current valuation as of early 2018 and he is now trying to dig up a landfill site to recover this laptop, but has all of this net worth and good luck. I really hope he finds it, but you don’t want to be that person. Right?

Austin Knight: Yes, It can be deceptive because you think, oh well this is a digital currency so surely there’s a backup. It’s like, “It’s probably on my google drive,” whatever but no, it’s not on your google drive, there is no backup wherever you store this. That’s it. That’s the end of the line. Don’t be misled by the fact that this is digital and thinking that there are a bunch of fail safes because there aren’t unless you build those fail-safes yourself.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Yes, you can’t call up Mr. Bitcoin, or well Mrs. Bitcoin and suddenly he or she is going to send you that backup and everything’s going to be fine don’t worry about it. It’s over. You need to be super diligent with this. I also don’t want to scare people.

I really want to over emphasize the importance of security here becauseoveremphasize certainly in my lifetime and you’ll lifetime Austin, have we had to think about security on such a personal level. It’s always been like, well, the bank like looks after my money and I’m okay with that and I trust them. Maybe I don’t quite trust them, but well I’m not going to put all of my money under my pillow. Yes, I have to have the necessary evil.

Austin Knight: It’s just what you do and you leave it to them.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Yes, and this brings us onto the next ones, which are … there’s also new wallets that are coming out, which are my personal favorite hot wallets. We have things like the legend Nano, the trestle, these look like USB flash drives and you plugged them into your computer and you can basically … they have their own address, you have the private keys, you also have like a 12-word backup phrase in case you do lose your private key, which is quite useful and these are probably one of the most secure ways that you can store things and it’s all offline.

It never hooks up to the Internet so there’s no risk of like malware hacking into these things, but you do have this little flash drive type thing that you’re going to probably want to put in a safe, in a safe location. Maybe if you own a lot of Cryptos, split these into a couple of different ledgers or hardware wallets.

I was actually listening to another podcast recently where people were talking actually about security. It’s interesting, my wife said something to me the other day was like, well, you know Matt, let’s say someone owns  millions of dollars of crypto and it’s husband and a wife and the wife she owns all of the crypto.

She knows all the tech, understands it all, she stored it and the husband has no idea what the hell crypto is. He just knows that there’s this nice amount of money that keeps growing that his wife is providing. One day, the house gets burgled and the husband is home and he is targeted because the individual knows that this family owned a lot of cryptocurrency and this is like overdramatized.

Don’t worry about this, but like this is an interesting situation is like, Okay, that person is demanding the cryptocurrency. That husband doesn’t know how to give that cryptocurrency or really even what it is. It’s an interesting point and a really interesting piece of advice that I had someone give is basically, storing the large amount of your net worth of cryptocurrency outside of your personal residency. One thing mentioned was a bank safety, deposit box. The irony in that is almost unbearable.

Austin Knight: That is hilarious. I know, but it is like the natural conclusion that you come to.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Right, then having maybe 10% of your wealth stored on location. Worst case scenario, Hey, this is everything we have. It’s all on this place that is actually cryptocurrency on it and you’re not giving away your entire life savings. Please tell me that your entire life savings are not in cryptocurrency at this stage, but just-

Austin Knight: There is one family that did that.

Matthew Howells-Barby: That’s going to be hundreds of thousands of cases just popping up. This is actually a very good point to really emphasize like that. Not only do you need to really think about your investments properly, but is taking caution here. This is a new and evolving space in its infancy.

Do not invest money that you cannot afford to lose and really don’t succumb to the fear of missing out of like all these gains that people keep talking about. Every single news article is either someone made a million or someone lost a million. They don’t talk about the median level stuff in between, so try not to get kind of swept up in amongst it all. We’re going to dig too much into that, but I think it’s an important thing to touch upon here as the security side of things.

Austin Knight: Only invest what you’re willing to lose, and also I think it’s worth noting that probably the best way to think about this is that if you’re only concerned with investment returns with this technology, you’re missing the bigger picture. Even though it’s always being talked about in the context of investment. This is much bigger than that. This is a technological innovation and we’ll dig into that more later in the series.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Yes, The best advice I’ve heard is if you’re ever thinking about investing in a cryptocurrency, first of all, don’t just take someone’s word. Do not listen to me and Austin, in terms of investment advice. We’re not investment advisors, we do not know exactly what’s going to happen with all of these different cryptocurrencies. What we do certainly my approach, and I’m sure Austin, you’re the same as whenever I’m thinking about this is an interesting crypto currency, maybe I’ll invest in this I will actually try and use the technology first.

I’ll go buy some bitcoins and I will spend it and see how it works, get to know it a little bit more before I start investing my actual hard-earned cash into it. That’s just a nice little disclaimer. The final thing we just want to touch on the wallets is the last one, which is the paper wallets.

A really great service is MyEtherWallet. A people wallet is you don’t have any physical hardware, USB flash drive. You don’t have an APP, you don’t have anything. What you have is a public address on your private key, basically printed on a piece of paper that you can use to interface via MyEtherWallet website or any other wallet application using these details, but it’s just stored on a piece of paper.

Now if that piece of paper gets wet, that piece of paper gets lost. It’s over. Just really think about how good are you personally with storing this kind of information. If security is not your forte, start with something easy unless you get more comfortable, try some different methods, but work within the bounds of what you can actually feel comfortable with.

Austin Knight: Let’s summarize all those together then because we had a lot of side conversations. They’re least secure easiest would be storing your currency on the exchange itself. Some people like to do this, generally,  this would be recommended against. Once you’re done exchanging the money, take it out of the exchange, then you’re going to be putting it into a wallet.

You’ve got four different categories of wallet options. The first and the easiest to obtain and it is much more secure, but not the most secure is an online or a mobile wallet like bread or Jacks. The second and a very common form of wallet is a desktop wallet. This is a little bit more secure. Most cryptos are going to have their own desktop wallet, you can just search vert coin, wallet, and it’s going to pop up.

The third and way more secure than any of the prior type of wallet that you can obtain is a hardware wallet, like a USB drive. It’s a physical thing that you’re holding. You’re physically holding your crypto on that device. You can look for a ledger or a tresor, those are very secure.

Again, the more, the deeper we go into this, the more you’re opening yourself up to human error, but the more you’re also securing your crypto technologically.  Your final option, this one is free as well. All of these are free really except for the hardware wallet is the paper Wallet.

MyEtherWallet, that’s going to be the most secure, but like Matt side, if you spill some water on it, you could be in a world of hurt.

Matthew Howells-Barby: For sure. You’ve got your wallet, you’ve chosen one, you’ve set it up. Whenever you get a new wallet, you’ve got a public address with it, and from there you can send your money from say bit tricks or say bitcoin when the exchanges to that public address. You’ve now stored it within your wallet, so at this point you’re good. You own crypto-currency, congratulations. You have it stored in a wallet.

The next thing people often want to do, and this is the final piece, and this is 100%. The most addictive piece is tracking the price of your investments and tracking the gains and losses.  I personally love the Blockfolio App. I probably now refresh this more than Facebook, which is alarming and you can just input how much what type of cryptocurrency.

Let’s say you want bitcoin to keep things easy and maybe you also bought vert coin and iota, right? You can add in how much you purchase them for and how many of them you purchased and it creates a little portfolio for you and it’ll update the APP showing basically the prices,  the net gain, the total value your portfolio at any point in time.That’s really useful.

The other thing is you can go actually on the website that myself and Austin run the coin offering. We have like a bunch of like life price data on there. You can also check out coin market cap. The final thing I would probably say is whenever you do invest in a cryptocurrency or even start thinking about investing in cryptic currency, a lot of them will have sub reddits, so that’s like if you haven’t used reddit before, kind of like a reddit channel.

They’ll have a slack channel, a telegram channel. These are all like kind of like WhatsApp or Facebook messenger type groups, discord, et cetera. You’ll be able to find this on the cryptocurrencies website, they usually have one. You can start up today with news, events and anything else that’s going on.

Austin Knight: This is one of the cool things about the state of this technology right now is that it is really early and what that means is that you can get onto a slack channel and you can talk with the people that are building this technology and investing their time and their effort into it to learn more about how it works. Something that I want to call out there with tracking your investments.

A lot of people expect that when you purchase the currency and you put it into a wallet, you can track it from there. Sometimes that’s true, like in the case of Jaxx or a mobile wallet, but a lot of the time it’s not true.  You’ll want to set up a separate app where you track the value and that’s basically what we were talking through there.

Matthew Howells-Barby: Yes, and then once you’ve done that you should be all good to go. One of the last questions that people are probably thinking at this stage, just like, all right, this is great. I’m all set up a patch of stuff. What actually gives the cryptos value, unfortunately, that is going to be the subject of episode three.

What we’re going to go through in the next episode is all of those questions around how the different cryptocurrencies actually have value, Make sure you tune into that. For now enjoy the crypto that you now own. Thanks for listening. If you loved this episode and want to show both myself and Austin your appreciation, we love it that if you could spend some time adding a quick review on the iTunes store or your favorite podcasting platform.