Home

New to Cryptocurrency? Need Help?

Are you new to cryptocurrencies? You’ve heard about Bitcoin before, but thought it was all hype, especially after the mad rush to buy in 2017 and collapse of 2018. Bitcoin hasn’t died, it just suffered through a bear market. And now? Has the next bull run started? You might as well get prepared. Cryptocurrency is not going away this time, it is the future financial system! Need help?

What is ‘cryptocurrency’?

A new awareness of the nature of money is blossoming around the world. It has happened before. The new phenomenon in finance today is crytpocurrency: currency that is encrypted with mathematical algorithms to verify transactions and prevent double spending. Millions of GPU’s and CPU’s around the world are competing to solve these encryptions to be rewarded with value in the form of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ether etc.

What is a ‘blockchain’?

Cryptocurrency transactions are stored in blocks linked together. Blockchains can either be private or open and decentralized. Decentralized blockchains are accessible by anyone, meaning you could have every single bitcoin transaction stored on your personal computer. Not many people do that these days as blockchains can take up quite a bit of your storage space.

What is ‘decentralized’?

Most of our world is centralized: governments, banks, social media (on servers), informations systems. Centralization of assets and information creates vulnerabillity to cyber attacks and control concentrated in few hands. Hackers navigate to one central server to access critical information. Decentralized systems have information distributed throughout the network. To gain advantage one would have gain control over most of the network.

What is an ‘exchange’?

An exchange is where you can trade your fiat currency (Rands) for a cryptocurrency such as bitcoin, litecoin, ether, dash, etc. When joining an exchange you need to verify your ID document, residence and bank account where your rands originate. There are three accepting Rands (ZAR):

What is a ‘wallet’?

Yes, it might be obvious, but not with cryptocurrency. Most noobs do the equivalent of leaving their cash wallet open on a public park bench and watch from a distance. Wallets can be accessed through your smartphone or desktop, and can store multiple cryptocurrencies and tokens.

Security!!!

  1. Don’t store your cryptocurrency on an exchange, transfer to your personal wallet.
  2. Enable 2-Factor access on your exchange and wallets.
  3. Better still, store your ‘coins’ offline.
  4. Keep your private keys private.
  5. Don’t click social media links, type url’s.