5 OSOM Tips For Buying Bitcoin
Mathieu Hardy
Chief Development Officer
Buying and trading Bitcoin can be intimidating at first, but everything changes once you have a helpful hand by your side. ✅ OSOM
Unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard about Bitcoin and other crypto assets. As of a decade ago, it was something that only a few people knew about but these days, just about everyone is buying and selling virtual assets. Crypto assets' popularity surged at the end of 2017 when Bitcoin reached its peak and was valued at 20,089 USD.
Lucky are those who got in on time to buy and sell Bitcoin, but there's no need to get upset if you weren't as successful. Bitcoin and other leading virtual assets are rising again and might be a great investment opportunity throughout 2019 – 2020. In 2018, the total value of crypto assets was 128.78 billion USD and with more industries and famous brands implementing them to power up a business, the capitalization is estimated to grow.
So, you might now be asking yourself “Can you buy Bitcoin online?” or saying “I want to buy Bitcoin online!” Whether you're considering experimenting and buying some crypto, or you already have some investments, it's helpful to know how to do it right. Such a dynamic market requires discipline and attention to make a profit, so to make it easier for you to start, we made a list of the top 5 tips on how to buy Bitcoin.
5 Key Insights for Buying Bitcoin
Want to buy BTC? What we've noticed over the years in the blockchain and crypto industry is that the complexity of buying and safekeeping the assets scares off potential buyers. You have to create a specific wallet, then find a suitable exchange, and follow up with erratic market changes. It's challenging to start and maintain the profit, but our team gathered some valuable tips and tricks to make buying Bitcoin painless and enjoyable. Without further ado, here's how you can start to feel like a virtual asset trading pro.
No.1 Never go all in
The general rule of thumb for any investment – whether it be currencies, stocks, or digital gold – is to never go 'waist-deep' in either of them. As stated by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, a world-renowned statistics and risk analysis mastermind, and the author of the bestselling book The Black Swan – "You can never be absolutely sure about anything." Keep this in mind for when you want to purchase Bitcoin.
Overconfidence is one of the biggest reasons why traders lose their money, as it blurs the perception of risk and leads to disasters. That's why you shouldn’t spend more than 10% of your savings on a single asset, whether it is Bitcoin or a US Government Bond. Diversification – a.k.a. splitting the capital across multiple cross-independent, and ideally, multinational types of assets – is the cornerstone of any legitimate investment portfolio. If you are just starting out and are not familiar with the risks crypto assets present, starting with no more than 1% of all your liquid assets should be your rule of thumb.
No.2 Don't keep all your eggs in one basket
As all crypto veterans know, you should never, under any circumstances, keep all your assets on a single exchange. Stories about MTGox or BTC-e are still haunting early Bitcoin adopters as well as newcomers, raising serious concerns about whether any exchange can really be trusted.
One option to distribute risk effectively is to use more than one exchange for trading purposes. If you use, say, five different exchanges to buy and store crypto assets, in any critical scenario you're not exposing more than 20% of your portfolio to counterparty risk (you might still lose all your money if the virtual assets all go to 0, but at least that won’t be the exchange’s fault). With apps like OSOM, you can easily manage funds on not just five, but up to twenty different exchanges at once. You can also store some of your funds that you aren’t planning on trading anytime soon in your own wallets.
The second best practice to feel confident about your funds' safety is to use a service which insures all deposits with a third-party company. This way, if all hell breaks loose, you'll always get your money back.
No.3 Trade only on credible exchanges
There are hundreds of exchanges that offer the trading of an array of crypto and virtual assets. If you are absolutely new to this market, you may get quickly carried away by blasting banners, vague promises, and fake volumes, which, in essence, are shaped and sharpened to make you swipe your credit card without thinking twice.
The most credible exchanges, like Coinbase, never use their position to help new projects raise capital, but instead offer an environment for already existing projects with a proven history. Other popular exchanges, like Binance, use their market position to invite developing companies to promote and sell their virtual assets on their platform.
These exchanges put their reputation at stake for the promise of solid due diligence, but projects still get negative feedback and quality concerns. An exchange that wants to squeeze profits out of their customers will exploit every possible means of doing so. An exchange that puts the customer first, will most likely have a smaller choice of products, but also much higher standards of customer protection.
No.4 Get yourself a crypto wallet
While exchanges allow the storing of crypto assets, they never actually give you a wallet or act as storage. What you usually get is just a 'balance' number in your user dashboard, and you can never be 100% sure if all the balances are supported by real money. At the end of the day, you will either have to:
(a) trust that the exchange can cover every single withdrawal at any given moment
(b) store your funds elsewhere after every purchase.
On top of that, having a separate wallet allows you to make much faster transactions. Often, exchanges take extra time to check outgoing transactions, add additional fees, and even avoid technical advancement (like implementing segwit). Sophisticated wallets, on the other hand, do their best to become a reliable instrument of remittance.
No.5 Explore!
There is so much more beyond Bitcoin in the crypto market. Hundreds of projects ranging from incredibly boring to amazingly awesome compete against each other for their place under the sun, with some of them, like Ethereum, are already ahead of the race with previously unseen concepts. It is worth writing a dedicated article about some of them that stand out, like Polkadot, Telegram Open Network, or Polybius, but you can always start with the Top 15 of Coinmarketcap.com – the world’s first tracker of crypto assets.
Give it a try: Buy Bitcoin with OSOM
We hope you found these tips useful for your next purchase, but before you head out into the crypto asset world, we want to give you a final bonus tip. Well, it's more of a suggestion.
You need to find an exchange to buy Bitcoin, but given the sheer number of options, it's hard to know which is the right one. We thought of this dilemma and came up with a solution.
Ever wondered how to buy BTC online? You can buy 1 BTC - or .001 BTC - the choice is yours with OSOM!
We allow our app users to link multiple exchange accounts to one OSOM platform. It's better to have everything in one app because trying to handle several different ones can cause you to lose track - and thereby, money. And you don't need that kind of struggle in your life.
Additionally, if you're still searching for that perfect exchange, OSOM has your back. We offer an exchange feature on the app. You can change Euros to Bitcoin and Ethereum and back to Euros with no deposit or withdrawal fees - just a 1.5% conversion. Try it today and buy Bitcoin with OSOM!
Buying and trading Bitcoin can be intimidating at first, but everything changes when you have something on the side to help guide you. We hope our five tips helped get you more familiar with the virtual asset market, and remember:
- Don’t put more than 1% of your total liquid assets into crypto when you are starting out
- Don’t spend more than 10% of your crypto allocation on a single asset
- Distribute your assets across exchanges and wallets
- Find one or more reliable exchanges
- Pick the right virtual asset wallet to safeguard your holdings
- And don’t forget to explore!
If you're still searching for a trusted exchange give OSOM a try. We offer an exchange feature on the app, converting Euros to Bitcoin and Ethereum back to Euros for no deposit or withdrawal fees - just a 1.5% conversion. It’s that simple - buy Bitcoin with OSOM today!
Mathieu Hardy
Chief Development Officer