I’ve been researching digital currency all day and think I would like to invest in maidsafe. My question is how? I understand that to buy stocks on the stock market I’d use something like etrade. But what’s an equivalent that you use for digital currency? Also can I buy it with my debit card or no? What’s the process there?
Thank you.
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Thank you. Another question, does this work like the stock market with buying and selling?
For example, let’s say I buy $500 of maide safe coins at 37 cents a coin as it was trading today. So now I have 1,351 coins.
Then one day we get lucky and the value of coins shoots up to $2,000 a coin. (like what happened with BitCoin) Can I then sell my 1,351 coins for $2.7million real dollars?
Or is this just not like stocks at all?
You can buy and sell on exchanges and make profits or losses like this, and exchange them like any other asset, including for fiat money. In those respects they are like shares, but not in the other senses such as regulation, ownership and rights in a company etc.
Coins are only worth what somebody else is willing to pay you for them.
So when I go to coinmarketcap.com or a site like that and it says Maidsafe coins are 37 cents that means that’s what they’re going for that day? 1 coin is 37 cents. And even though that’s what it’s worth, you may not be able to sell them all if there aren’t enough buyers?
I appreciate your patience. Thanks.
No worries, it’s good you ask what you are not clear about.
As with shares, the price on an exchange is only a guide - typically the last traded price. To trade you need somebody else willing to trade at the price you agree. The exchange automates that process, by matching bids and offers but doesn’t guarantee the price, so it is easier to deal in assets that are frequently traded in high volumes (liquidity).
So with BitCoin for example. When it began selling for 6 cents back in 2010. Had someone bought a few hundred dollars worth, would they now be real money multi millionaires? With how BitCoin is now going for around $2700.
Yes, well almost, strictly you will only be a dollar millionaire when you’ve exchanged those bitcoin for dollars.
This is why many of the crowdsale figures are potentially misleading when somebody writes “blah raised $10m”. In practice they have not raised $1 until they exchange the bitcoin, or Ether etc.
So it is worth remembering that whenever you hold assets they are only worth what you can get somebody else to pay you for them, and that can vary a great deal in a very short time, which is of course what has made this area so interesting to many.
Fiat is not ‘real’, there’s an unlimited supply and it isn’t backed by anything of tangible value (insurmountable debt?!). Bitcoin is far more real that state-issued digital cash in many respects. 
I know what you mean though.
The biggest difference between stocks and crypto is the volume and volatility. You can indeed make millions picking the right thing, in the stock market you look to make a few %, in crypto you look to make factoral gains. 100x-1000x’s are not that uncommon considering how ridiculous those gains sound.
I would be very wary of entering this space with a get-rich-quick dream though. There are a lot of predators out there looking to take advantage of that motivation. You’ve done well to find yourself here rather than in most of the hypey projects, but please be cautious and discerning, don’t rush into anything.
Maid is a good buy imo, but I am biased. Keep your expectations realistic. It was easy to make a lot of money at the start of this roller coaster, but there are a lot of ways to lose it quickly now. Even with MAID, you should only buy if you can withstand a lot of volatility. Whenever you buy you are likely to be in the red at various points. Don’t be pulled by the market or it will empty your wallet. Make a few careful bets that you can afford to lose and then just HOLD though all the madness. If you make the right bet then a few grand can indeed change your situation completely, but it will probably take years and have lots of up’s and down’s along the way.
So I bought some BitCoin on coinbase then sent that to poloniex and bought maidsafe with those BitCoins. Is it OK to leave my maidsafe coins on poloniex or should I move it to another kind of wallet.
Cool, welcome to investing in MaidSafecoin!
It should be fine to hold small amounts on an exchange for short periods, but not advisable for long periods or for large amounts because an exchange security or trust can fail, and this has happened numerous times. So it a matter of the risk you perceive and the impact of such a loss compared to other ways of looking after them. You have to investigate a bit to work out where works best for you.
Generally it’s best to move them off an exchange because then the risks are more under your control: losing a password, or a private key, or your computer being hacked for example.
Check out topics in this forum for storing in any of:
A minor drawback of using a bitcoin wallet is that it probably won’t understand the Omni protocol, and so won’t show you MAID balance. But you can check this any time by pasting the bitcoin address (not the private key) into omnichest.info.
Please use 2FA for storing them anywhere other than a paper/offline key pairing.
People get hacked on a daily basis who don’t have 2FA in their wallet or exchange account, I’ve seen it a fair few times. Don’t be one of them, always turn 2FA on as soon as you have real money involved.
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Thanks guys. I’m going to look into this paper/offline key pairing. It seems the most secure. I’ll just have to look up some instructions; I’m sure they’re in past threads. This is all a foreign language to me. I don’t have a tech background at all so I’m just kind of learning as I go here, hoping not to lose my maidesafe coins.
A few years ago a friend mentioned how we should all invest in BitCoin. Well no one did and I saw what it’s worth now and was really kicking myself. So I started investigating cryptocurrency/digital currency and came across this one a long with a few others and thought it sounded like a good idea (from what I could grasp lol).
I don’t want to wake up in a few years and see another currency that was trading for under a dollar be in the thousands unless I own a bunch.
Also, for future reference is buying BitCoin on Coinbase then sending that to Poloniex and buying currency with those BitCoins the easiest/cheapest way to do it or is there a better way?
Poloniex is the right way to go. I think buying and selling BTC on Uphold is cheaper than Coinbase, but it takes longer too. I get Coinbase withdrawals back in my bank on the same day, but Uphold takes about 2 weeks.
Also check out localbitcoins. I don’t know which service is cheapest or most efficient. Find one you are happy with. There are quite a few!
@MUsince96 What ever you do DO NOT send MAIDSAFE coins to Coinbase!!! you won’t get them back