Five things you can do with crypto

Jun

Five things you can do with crypto

#Bitcoin, #Blockchain, #Crypto, #Cryptocurrency

News

Critics say that cryptocurrency is a solution without a problem, but the reality speaks for itself. Here are five real-world use cases for crypto.

Payments

Many online and bricks-and-mortar retailers accept cryptocurrency payments. You pay using a mobile phone app, making it almost as fast and convenient as paying with a card or cash.

In order to acquire cryptocurrency to make your payment, you will need to sign up to an exchange, submit two forms of id and wait typically 7-10 days for verification, before making a bank transfer to the exchange and buying your crypto. You can then withdraw this to your wallet to spend anywhere you like (so long as the retailer accepts crypto)! Costs including bank transfer fees, exchange rates, trading fees and mining transaction fees will typically be no more than 5-10% of the total amount.

Trade to make money!

Cryptocurrency trading can be incredibly lucrative. There are huge sums of money to be made by calling the markets right, especially if you use leverage to magnify your gains.

Warnings on popular trading sites suggest that 85-90% of day traders lose money, so you will need to make sure you are one of the 10-15% who don’t get it wrong. (This may take some years of training and practice.)

Mix your funds to ensure your anonymity

You can send your bitcoins to a mixer to ensure that no one knows who owns them. Mixers combine your funds with many other people’s bitcoins, then pay them out to new addresses so that it is difficult or impossible to find out where they came from. Sometimes they pay them out to addresses owned by the mixer, rather than to their users, and occasionally Interpol raids them and shuts them down because their users are involved in money laundering. Assuming this doesn’t happen to you, you will be able to make completely anonymous transactions (until you cash out your crypto and need to give an exchange your personal details for KYC).

Send encrypted messages on the blockchain

Blockchains aren’t just for cryptocurrencies! Some have advanced functionality that allows you to send encrypted messages to other users, meaning you can communicate in private.

Although the user experience isn’t quite as polished as existing encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp or Telegram, it doesn’t take long to learn. The only real difference to the user is that you pay for sending a message using the blockchain.

HODL

The easiest thing to do with your crypto is HODL it – in other words, buy it and do nothing with it for many years. Ideally you will simply forget about it.

In fact, forgetting about your crypto is good because if you lose your private keys you will not be depressed in 5 years time when BTC is worth $1 million.