HOW TO BUY: Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum (Step by Step)

What's up you guys! It's Gran here. So, this has been something that has been requested in the hundreds of times. People have been hitting me up on Snapchat, on Instagram, and many, many times in the comments, asking how to go about buying Bitcoin, Litecoin, any Ethereum.

So, I wanted to make a tutorial of exactly what I have done to do all of this—from how to set up an account, how to get your money in, all of that sort of stuff. I want to walk you through, step by step, exactly how I did it. Now, before I get into this, just a quick disclosure: I am just showing you guys exactly what I have done and the steps that I've had to go through, but by no means am I telling you guys to go and invest in cryptocurrency.

By no means am I endorsing you to go and spend money and speculate on cryptocurrencies or invest in cryptocurrencies with money you can't afford to lose. All the money that I'm putting in this, I'm basically just treating as my gambling and learning money. This is not money to me where if I lose all of it tomorrow, I'm going to be devastated. This isn't money to me where if it goes up ten times, it's going to be life-changing to me. I'm treating this as money that I can afford to risk in these markets.

Keep in mind that this market is extremely risky and extremely volatile, and right now I believe a lot of the market is just driven purely by speculation. If you're going to do this, do this with good intentions and don't do this as a means to get rich quick or anything like that. That's what I feel like a lot of people are doing. So if you're doing this, do this from the perspective that this is money you can afford to lose, and ideally, this is something you're going to be holding for the long term.

Also, by no means should this replace a historically proven retirement or investment strategy. This should be something that ideally it's something you believe in and really something that you can afford the volatility and afford the risk involved. However, if you're like me and just have money you can afford to risk, and want the first-hand experience of doing it, and want to see what it's all about, here you go! Let's get to it!

Let's go to this screen capture. So, I first started by making a Coinbase account. So, we go to obviously coinbase.com. So next, we're going to be signing up for a Coinbase account.

Now, here's the deal: Coinbase offers a referral link where you get $10 back on your first purchase of $100 or more, and I get $10. It's a referral link; I will get $10 if you want to use it. Feel free to use it! If you want to use someone else's referral link, feel free to use theirs. I recommend you use a referral link because it's ten bucks; you may as well just click the link and get the ten dollars. You don't want to do that? You know, by all means. But if you want to use my referral link and get the $10 back, and I get ten bucks, it's in the description. If you don't want to use it, that's totally cool too.

So anyway, now that you clicked on the referral link or not, or whatever, now you're going to go to the upper right and click sign up. So, I'm just going to make a totally fake account just to show you guys the process of how to do this. First name: let's do "Ty." Last name: "Lopes." Email: we'll do "lambos and books at gmail.com." And then for password, we'll just do "lambo."

I am NOT a robot—at least, that I know of. Select a storefront. I don't even know what that is. Okay, verify. So, you sort of verify that you're 18 years of age or older, and then create an account. So from here, you then have to verify your email address. Please verify your email address. There we go—verify email. There we go!

So, the next thing that you're going to have to do is link your phone number. Now you have a Coinbase account. My only issue with Coinbase is generally with the fees, so let's talk about how to get your money into Coinbase. You go down here to "add a payment method."

Now, you have three ways to make a payment: through your bank account, through a credit card, or through a wire transfer. Bank accounts are generally the easiest way to get your money in for the lowest price; however, it can often take up to seven business days for your money to hit Coinbase. So if you're okay waiting up to seven days, sometimes even longer, then it might be worth it.

Now, the issue with a credit card is that it will charge you a fee, and wire transfers are always pretty good. So let me show you some of the fees on my other account here. If I wanted to use my bank account and put in $7,500, you can see Coinbase fee is $50 just from one of my bank accounts. Not only that, it's going to take a little while. But let's say that we want to do a credit card.

So just to show you, to transfer $300 via a credit card is a $2.00 Coinbase fee plus a $7.26 payment method fee. I've also heard that with Coinbase, credit card transactions are coded as international, so in addition to that, you might be hit with some additional fees. I almost in no circumstance would ever recommend you to put money into Coinbase through a credit card.

I also think that's just incredibly risky and stupid, especially if you're using a credit card just because you don't have money to otherwise pay for it. I would say, in almost every single situation, I would highly recommend you never pay with a credit card over Coinbase. So that leaves me to say that generally speaking, a wire is the best way to go about it.

But my recommendation isn't so much to use Coinbase; my recommendation is to use your Coinbase account on GDAX. So now, let's go over to GDAX. I'll explain exactly what this is. GDAX is primarily what I use; I like their interface a lot better, their fees are a lot lower, and this is a way to go around all the fees of Coinbase and all the hassles that go along with Coinbase.

Now, for me, Coinbase is a very easy to understand website. It's very user-friendly; it doesn't look very intimidating, but you make up for that in some of the fees. GDAX looks a lot more intimidating; it's really not. I'll walk you through exactly how to do this. Now, the good thing with GDAX is that it is linked with Coinbase. So when you make your account with Coinbase, you've also made your account with GDAX.

I like that the two are often connected. So we're going to go up here to create account. So, you're going to accept the GDAX User Terms next. So once you've agreed to the terms, it should already take you to this information here. This is something where a lot of people get sketched out.

When I first did this, I was like, "What is this? I don't feel comfortable with doing all of this. This is a little weird." All my friends were like, "Nah dude, we've all done it. Just do it too." You know? To be honest, I was a little sketched out, but you know, I just did it anyway. I figured this was part of the process. Everyone that's on GDAX has done this as well.

You know, I was a little weirded out by it, but at the same time, you know, I could see why security—especially within cryptocurrencies—is pretty important. They want to know exactly who is using this. So from that perspective, I figured, "You know what? It's part of the process. I'm just gonna do it anyway."

So I figured I would do it. So I realized I can't make a fully fake account here, so I'm going to tell you guys a little bit about it. You're going to fill out all of this, and then it's going to ask you after this to submit a picture of your driver's license. You can often do that through webcams. So what I did, I held up my driver's license through the webcam.

Then what it's going to ask you to do is take a picture through your webcam so they can verify that it is actually you with your driver's license, and it is actually you making this account to prevent people from faking accounts and pretending to be other people. So I kind of get that level of security.

Then after you've done all of this, there might be a bit of a wait time for you to actually get verified. For me, it didn't take long at all. I think it maybe took another ten minutes or so, if not almost instantaneously, for it to get verified. But once you've done that process, eventually you're gonna be verified.

Then from there, you're gonna get access to the GDAX trading system. Now, for me as well, just on the era of caution and security, I use a Google Authenticator app on a totally different cell phone, with a totally different number that I don't even remember myself, to log in to a lot of these accounts.

Now, when it comes to security, I know a lot of people just have a Google Authenticator app on their phone. But because I'm on YouTube and a lot of people watch me, I took the extra step of caution just to get a totally different phone number. It's not really needed; if you want to do it, by all means.

It's something I do. I don't want to go into too much detail on the security aspects of this, because a lot of it is totally up to you and personal. I feel like this is something that you need to do the research on your own, but this is what I've just done for me so far.

So now you've been verified on your GDAX account. You made that account, you also have your Coinbase account that's linked to GDAX. So the next step is to actually get money in your accounts to begin trading. Now, what you do is you're going to see this interface here. It looks a little bit confusing. Don't get intimidated by this; you're just going to go to the deposit button here.

So again, you have a few options here. You can use your bank account, you can use a bank wire, or you can move the funds from your Coinbase account. My recommendation that I used myself is just using a bank wire. You have your information here, and they charge you a $10 wire fee from all incoming wire deposits.

Now for me, from my bank account, it's free for me to send wires, so I can pretty much wire as much money for free to GDAX, and it just costs me $10. It's also pretty much instantaneous. If you send a wire early in the morning, it'll oftentimes hit the same day. Otherwise, it's often just gonna hit the next business day.

So again, I highly recommend using a wire or using your bank accounts if you're okay with the wait times. Here it says three to five business days, but may take up to seven to ten calendar days, especially when a lot of people are putting money right now in GDAX and Coinbase. It may take on the longer end, so that's why I generally just recommend doing a wire.

Again, all the wire information is going to be here. Make sure you follow this to a tee to make sure your money doesn't end up somewhere else. So make sure you follow all of this, and then once you've wired your money in here, it's going to be showing up here under balance. It's gonna show USD right here.

So now that you got your money in here, I'll talk briefly about the GDAX interface and why I like it so much. You can go up here and you'll see Bitcoin/USD, Ethereum/USD, and Litecoin/USD. So you pretty much just click around at any of these and get whatever interface you want.

Now when you have your USD here, you can make either a market order, which is going to fill your order at market price, whatever the market price is at that time. So right now, it's pretty much trading at $710. You can see all the buy orders here and the sell orders here.

Now, the market orders do have a fee to them, so I don't recommend doing the market orders. Instead, what I recommend doing is doing a limit order. Now, what this means is that right now I can put in the price as $699.98, and I can click in and want to buy, you know, five Ethereum or you just press in this amount here, and it will pre-fill it here. Then, you click place buy order. That buy order is going to show up down here, and as soon as the price hits $699.98, your order will be filled.

There's a small chance when it comes to a market order that it might not hit that level. When I was trying to buy Litecoin, I was trying to buy Litecoin at $124; it never hit $124—it hit $125, and then I missed out on a run-up. So it's really important when you place a market order to somewhat monitor it. If you want to try to buy as soon as possible and you don't want to wait for it to drop down and hit your number, you may just want to click "Cancel."

There's a little cancel over here, so you can click the cancel button and then we try it again at a higher price or whatever price you want to buy in at. I highly recommend doing this. This is free, and this is what I've been doing all the time—just placing your limit orders right here, and this goes without any fees as well, which is what I really like.

Then once your order is filled, you'll be able to see it right here. So let's say I'm buying five Ethereum. It will show right here that I have five Ethereum in my account, and then from here, you can pretty much just withdraw it to whatever account you want to withdraw it to.

Now a quick description of this GDAX interface, because at first, to me it was a little bit confusing, but you learn it in about five minutes. What you have here are the prices every 15 minutes, you have what's called a candlestick chart. I highly recommend, if you're interested in stocks or cryptocurrencies in general, read up about candlestick charts.

It's extremely interesting. I read a book in high school; it was like a 400-page book about trading candlestick charts—super interesting stuff. I won't go into too much detail, but you can see here the red means a price drop and the green means a price increase.

So the way a candlestick chart works is that the top price is the price that started out with, the bottom price is the price it closed at. Now we are at 15-minute intervals, which means that within 15 minutes, the price went from $714 and dropped to $703. This candlestick here is known as a hammer, which means that the price started up here at about $703, dropped as low as $696.86, but within that 15-minute time frame ended up right here at $702.72.

So we'll take this green candlestick for example. This means that it started right here at $701.18. Within 15 minutes, it went as low as $697.28 and as high as $708.85, but within that 15-minute timeframe, closed out at $700.81.

So that's just a brief introduction to candlestick charts. I highly recommend you guys look this up, and you can also change the duration of the candlestick charts. This means that every minute you can see what it's trading at. We can also go to every hour and see what it's trading at.

The good thing about candlestick charts—and reading some of these graphs—is that you can often see a lot of support and resistance. So you can pretty much see here it's always had a support of about $680 in the last 24 hours or so, because you can see in this line here it's always hit about right here. You can see even these two candlestick charts have always had a bit of support at this level.

Then one can make the call that says, "Okay, under about $680, this might be undervalued. It might be a good time to buy." Now you also have line charts that show you the volume and the price. I like the candlestick charts, and I like doing a one-hour to maybe six-hour view. So you can see this is all the way back from December 2nd to December 16th.

This is something I recommend you have a bit of knowledge about, but I don't recommend you guys start getting into day trading cryptocurrencies. It's something that's extremely risky; I don't recommend it. Instead, I recommend a very long-term approach to this where you believe in this currency for a very long time. You invest money that you can afford to lose, and you just keep it.

I don't recommend following all of these graphs all the time, every day, because otherwise, you're gonna be up until 4 a.m. every morning like me, trying to watch this—trying to trade this. You might win some, you might lose some; it's not worth it from my perspective. Instead, I recommend just holding it long-term and expect this to be something that you're gonna keep for many, many, many years, despite the price that, you know, is up or down.

So next, we're going to be going from this price chart to a depth chart. Now for the depth chart, I want to show Bitcoin because Bitcoin is a lot more interesting when it comes to a depth chart. So this is what's called a depth chart, and this shows you all the buy orders in green and all the sell orders in red.

What I like to do is see where a lot of resistance is and where a lot of sells are going to be, just to try to predict what price is going to hit and how much difficulty it's gonna have to try to hit that price. So what we call this here is a sell wall. The reason we call it a sell wall is that it looks a lot like a wall.

So you can see here that a lot of people are pretty much trying to sell just about $19,600 because there's a huge amount of volume of sells here. This means that we pretty much have to buy up all of these orders in order to get to the next highest price, which we can see a lot more resistance at $19,750.

So when it comes to sell walls, a lot of this is just purely psychological. You're gonna see a lot of resistance at even numbers. Let's say $19,000, $19,500, $19,750, and then again at $20,000. All along the way, we'll see a lot of support and resistance.

So I like to use this chart just to see how many people are taking profit and at what price. But again, I don't recommend you guys follow this too closely, and then trade this 24/7. It gets exhausting; it's extremely risky, in my opinion, it's not totally worth it.

Instead, I highly recommend you guys to buy and hold if you guys are gonna be doing this, especially with money you can afford to lose. So once you've done this, and you've bought whatever cryptocurrency you want, I want to talk briefly about security. I don't recommend you hold your money in Coinbase or GDAX.

Instead, I highly recommend you get your own secure wallet to hold your cryptocurrency. I don't want to get too involved in this; I would ideally like you to do your own research on this, but what's really popular right now are hardware wallets like the Ledger Nano or Trezor. Look into moving your money into one of those, and it's going to be a lot more secure than holding your money in Coinbase and GDAX.

There have been hacks in the past where if you've held your money in here, cryptocurrencies have been stolen. Unfortunately, if this happens, there's really not much you can do about that. So I highly recommend not keeping your money in one of these sites. Instead, I highly recommend moving it to some sort of hardware wallet and taking your account security extremely seriously.

A lot of people are moving their money from Coinbase to GDAX, and then from GDAX, you can withdraw it to pretty much any hardware wallet from there without the fee. So that's what a lot of people are doing. Again, the purpose of this video isn't to give too much information about that; it's more of just a tutorial about how to make an account and then buy from there, and what I've done along the way.

This is exactly what I have done, so please just take this with a grain of salt from what I have done, but I highly recommend you guys just do your own research in addition to what I'm saying. Now, before I end this video, another really annoying disclosure about all this—hate disclosures—but I just wanted to say, please do this at your own risk.

This is money I can afford to lose. I'm not betting my entire life on cryptocurrency. I'm not putting in any sort of amount I can't afford to lose, and I highly recommend that you do the same. If you decide to do this, don't invest in an amount you can't afford to lose. You don't put in your rent money, or your mortgage money, or child support money, or money that you need to eat.

I highly recommend you literally just invest whatever you can afford to lose and whatever you're okay putting in this system, because even though I'm doing this, I still believe that this market is heavily driven purely just by speculation. Because of this enormous rise up, I have no idea how high this could go; it could go fifty or a hundred thousand, or it could dip to ten thousand.

Look, I have no idea—my guess is as good as yours. If you're interested in doing this, these are the steps that I use to get started, but please do this at your own risk.

So with that said, thank you so much for watching this! If you enjoy this type of content and want other content that I make about real estate and passive income and all that other great stuff, make sure to click subscribe. Also, smash that notification bell so YouTube notifies you any time I upload a video.

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