SHOW ME THE DIGITAL MONEY!
THE BUILDING BLOCKS FOR BUYING BLOCKCHAIN CURRENCIES.
FIRST STEPS
To buy currencies, you’ll need to sign up to a marketplace that’ll take Australian dollars and the most straightforward of these is Coinbase. It’ll process credit card payments of up to $250 and has liquidity for four of the main cryptocurrencies so you can swap between them within the marketplace without additional transfer costs.
THE CRYPTO MAZE
One of the reasons Coinbase is so easy is because it’s not actually an exchange itself, it’s merely a front end for buying currencies with a credit card. While you can sell Bitcoin for fiat currencies (USD, EUR, GBP) in other regions, you can’t actually trade them for Australian dollars deposited into an account on Coinbase yet. This is a little daunting until you realise you’re buying cryptocurrencies that can be moved, exchanged, used to buy goods or stored in a wallet without much hassle or expense... Well, at least most of them can.
TRANSFERING FROM BITCOIN
One of the limitations of Bitcoin at the moment is that it’s expensive to move, as it could cost you as much as US$35 to move $100 of Bitcoin. Fortunately you can exchange BTC for three other less-heavy currencies by using your Coinbase login on the site
GDAX.com (the exchange Coinbase uses). Once you’ve logged into GDAX and converted your Bitcoin to Ethereum, BitcoinCash or Litecoin, you’ll be ready to move it anywhere you want for less than a dollar.
MOVING CRYPTOCURRENCIES TO A WALLET
Whether you’re using Coinomi, Jaxx or any other of the multitudes of wallets out there, moving your currency from one account into another is a similar process. You’ll need to set up the wallet first, create a password and then generate a payment request using your wallet. This is basically just a number, denoting that your wallet address is expecting to receive funds of a particular cryptocurrency. Then copy that code into the app or website you are sending from and the amount you would like to move, and hit send. Depending on the currency you are using, the exchange you are sending it from and the current volume of transactions, it can take some time for the miners to process the payment, it’s not uncommon for Coinbase to take an hour or so to complete a transaction to a wallet.