I’m covering Bitcoin in more depth soon, but maybe you’ve already made up on your mind that you want to go ahead and buy some so you can see what all this is about.

You may also be interested in buying other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Litecoin, or Ripple. The process I outline today will actually be the same if you want to purchase Ethereum or Litecoin.

For Ripple and other altcoins (alternative coins), I’ll cover how to purchase these in a future post.

Hello CoinBase

I highly recommend using CoinBase to purchase your first Bitcoin.

CoinBase is a digital currency exchange based in the U.S. that allows you to exchange fiat currency (such as USD) for cryptocurrency. They currently support Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin.

CoinBase has done an amazing job of making it super easy to dip your toes into cryptocurrency. They’ve made a website and mobile app that’s very user-friendly. This is why I recommend starting here.

Once you’ve purchased some cryptocurrency in CoinBase, you can later move it to another exchange that supports other coins if you are interested in purchasing other types of cryptocurrency. More on that later.

Simply go to CoinBase.com to sign up. Or, you can use my special signup link and we’ll both get $10 worth of Bitcoin for free when you sign up and buy or sell at least $100 of Bitcoin.

But what if I don’t have enough money to buy 1 BitCoin (BTC)?

No worries! You don’t have to actually purchase a full coin. With cryptocurrency, you can actually purchase fractions of coins. So you can put as much or as little as you want into BTC.

Currently, BTC is divisible to the eighth decimal place, although this could change in the future. This smallest unit of BTC is referred to as a Satoshi, named after Bitcoin’s mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto (more on that later, too!).

A note about CoinBase limits

CoinBase, along with all other exchanges as far as I know, has limits on how much crypto you can buy with fiat currency each week. So if you were planning on jumping in and buying $100k worth of BTC, you may need to go a different route (I’ll cover this in a future post).

You can increase these weekly limits by:

1. Buying more over time
2. Verifying more aspects of your identity

Is CoinBase secure?

You may have heard of the infamous Mt. Gox hack (no worries if you haven’t!) and you’re wondering if CoinBase is going to cause you to lose all the money you spend on crypto.

While there’s no such thing as hack-proof, I think CoinBase is pretty secure. Plus, they keep 97% of their crypto reserves in cold storage, meaning 97% of the exchanges crypto is not connected to the Internet in anyway, which makes it pretty much unhackable.

Questions?

If you run into any issues at all while signing up for CoinBase, contact their Support team or feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (@HODLDaily)

Disclaimer

I am not responsible for your money. Please do your own due diligence when considering investing in anything I mention on this site, even if I'm really excited about it myself.