What is crypto currency? How do I buy it?

Ever since I was a teenager, I wanted to save money and invest for the future. However it seemed like a far off dream, an unattainable reality, at the time my options were big banks and brokerage firms with minimum 5k investments. Can you imagine that now? Putting 5k into a blue chip stock and getting a a few percent gains… ehhh slow and painful. Back then banks were still offering as much as 10% interest, so investing was really for people that already had wealth.

Flash forward to 2014, I started working for a large mining and resources company that offered an employee share program, this was to be my first investment. I’d invest around $100 a month and it slowly accumulated for a few years and I only made about a 10% gain, eventually I left the company and sold out my position in the shares.

Around 2019 I still didn’t know much about crypto currency (unfortunately…) but I started researching Fintech (Financial Technology) and came across a company called spaceship capital finance, they offered an app with an easy and fee free way to invest in an index fund. This was a great way to get started but I'll talk more about spaceship another time.

In late 2020 I was researching crypto currency and decided I need to buy some, my goal was to learn how it worked and use it to build wealth, as by now the stories of tremendous gains were everywhere. So I decided to use an exchange called Independent Reserve. My first purchase was Litecoin (LTC) and then I thought well … what now? I watched it go up and down until I came across another company called BlockFi, so I transferred my LTC to there and started earning interest, which is now much higher than any bank can offer. I used the platform to trade into other crypto currency’s such as Bitcoin (BTC), Tether (USDT), Pax Gold (PAXG) and Chainlink (LINK) all earning good interest paid monthly. Since then I have found many great ways to earn passive income, which I will talk about in future posts.

My next crypto investment was in a company called crypto.com, I staked their native token (CRO) for 6 months and in return they gave me a Ruby Red Metal Visa card which earns me 2% crypto back on most purchases and payments. This has proved to be my most profitable investment to date and I'll cover it more another time.

2021 was a massive year in crypto, so much learned and so much gained, I now have over 20 investments on multiple platforms, with a sound knowledge of investing and crypto currencies. Yet I am still to learn a lot more, so it's great I've come across the Hive network (Sorry I'm late...) and all of it's wonders. Please reach out to me if there is something you think I should be apart of on HIVE. We are all like little worker bee's working hard to make a better HIVE.

So looking back over the last 20 years, we have gone from literally having "out of reach" investment products, that had to be transacted by a broker. To now having access to hundreds if not thousands of investments that anyone with a phone and a few dollars can start investing. This makes me think, if such a decentralized culture is emerging, what roles will banks play in the next 20 years? Will there be traditional banks and brokers? or will they go the way of video stores, and slowly drop off one by one until there are none left...