Category Archives: Bitcoin (BTC)

How to Buy Your First Bitcoin on Coinbase (2024)

April 25, 2024 flippener Leave a comment

Before buying your first Bitcoin on Coinbase you need to open an account as described in How to Open a Coinbase Account to Buy Bitcoin (2024).

After that you will have an account page that looks like this – with 2 of 4 steps complete:

Coinbase Account page (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

Click on the Add payment method to get to the next screen:

Coinbase Add payment method (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

Here for simplicity we’ll add a debit card:

Coinbase Link card (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

Fill in the details and press Add Card. That will add the card as a payment method and you’ll be returned to the main account page, now showing 3 of 4 steps complete:

Coinbase Payment added (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

Next select Buy crypto then Continue and trade crypto:

Coinbase Trade crypto (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

At this point you will be required to pass a quiz on crypto to show you understand what you’re doing – rather ‘nanny state’ but that’s where we are. It’s best to select Read our crypto guide and then learn the basics about crypto:

Coinbase Crypto quiz (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

There are then a dozen screens like the following to read through:

Coinbase Crypto quiz 2 (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

On the last one select Take the test:

Coinbase Crypto quiz 3 (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

There are then half a dozen quiz questions like the following – in most cases you will be right if you choose the most pessimistic or negative response!

Coinbase Crypto quiz 4 (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

Once you’ve passed, select Continue and trade crypto:

Coinbase Crypto quiz 5 (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

You’ll finally get to the Buy screen – in future you can just select this from the main account page menu. Here the pound option has been selected (to spend so many pounds on Bitcoin) but you can instead select the Bitcoin (to buy so much Bitcoin, e.g. 0.1, and be told how many pounds this will cost). Enter the amount required. Note the card you entered will be shown at the bottom, with a credit limit:

Coinbase Crypto buy screen (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

Press Preview Buy, note here that the exchange rate changes live:

Coinbase Crypto buy screen 2 (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

Press Buy now:

Coinbase Crypto buy screen 3 (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

And you’ve bought your first Bitcoin! Note that the value of your Bitcoin will be shown at the bottom, and it will be less than asked for – there are always trading fees, buying and selling so you’ll get used to this. Coinbase fees are quite high (here £100 bought £95 of Bitcoin, so nearly 5%!). There are ways to reduce this – but that’s beyond the scope of this article (if you’re going to spend a lot of money, do investigate Coinbase One – but you will have to learn how to do trading). Click on View details to get taken to the Bitcoin Primary balance page (in future you can select this from your main account page):

Coinbase Primary balance (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

This shows your current holdings of Bitcoin and the pound sterling equivalent. For a more general overview, return to Home:

Coinbase Account home (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

Also note that if you buy multiple cryptocurrencies (e.g. Ethereum, USDC, etc.) you can see the balance of each coin, plus the total value of your portfolio, via the My assets menu and page:

Coinbase Assets page (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

Welcome to cryptocurrency and Bitcoin – you are no longer a Nocoiner!

Bitcoin (BTC), Blog, Coinbase

How to Open a Coinbase Account to Buy Bitcoin (2024)

April 23, 2024 flippener 1 Comment

Buying Crypto

This is an introduction to buying Bitcoin for those new to cryptocurrencies in general and to Bitcoin in particular. The first step is to create an account on a website where you can buy some crypto (elsewhere we’ll look at how to hold your cryptocurrency in your own ‘wallet’).

Here I’ll show you how to create an account at Coinbase.com. It claims to be “the most trusted platform in the UK for buying, selling and trading crypto” and is certainly very well known worldwide. As well as being popular it is also easy to use. It is not the cheapest nor the most fully featured platform and so we’ll look at other platforms later (like Nexo.com) for those more experienced with cryptocurrencies. Coinbase is, however, good for newcomers.

The process has got more onerous over the years, unfortunately, probably due to the UK government’s increasing requirements for financial institutions to follow Know Your Customer (KYC) rules. If you look through the process below in advance you’ll understand what you need to do before you get on the Coinbase website.

Opening a Coinbase Account

Go to the following website: https://www.coinbase.com/en-gb/

When you follow that link you’ll see a webpage like the following:

Coinbase UK Home Page (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

Then go through the following steps.

Click on the Sign up button, enter your email address and click Continue:

3. Enter your first and last name and a secure password.

A good place to get a password is PasswordsGenerator – choose a length of 16 characters and include symbols, numbers and upper and lowercase characters. Make sure at this point that you record the password somewhere, e.g. in a new document. You will need a lot of passwords when dealing with cryptocurrency and the general rule is that if you lose the password you can lose the money! Get into careful organisation now.

If your password is suitably secure you will see the green lines below the password box as shown below. Make sure the check box is ticked, and press Create free account. You may need to pass a Captcha at this point.

Coinbase Create Account Page (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

4. You’ll come to the Verify email screen:

Coinbase Verify Email Page (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

Go to your email interface (Outlook, Gmail or whatever) to find the email and click on the Verify Email Address button:

Coinbase Verification Email (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

5. You should now be able to login to Coinbase with the email and password you provided:

Coinbase Sign In (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

At which point you may be emailed a code to enter:

Coinbase Sign In Code (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

7. Once logged in you will have a bunch more questions to answer:

Coinbase Sign In email option (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

Coinbase Sign In phone (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

Coinbase Sign In citizenship (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

8. Enter your date of birth and home address and answer some questions:

Coinbase Sign In personal information (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

9. Next we have to get through all the KYC and ‘be careful crypto is dangerous’ warnings and questions. Most people reading this will be Restricted Investors:

Coinbase Sign In KYC (Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

10. Finally, if you have had the patience, you will have got through all the KYC requirements:

11. Next, you have to do identity verification, again most likely due to government requirements for Anti-Money Laundering (AML). For most people the simplest option is likely to be uploading a scan or photo of the back and front of their driving licence:

12. After you press the Upload button you will get an acknowledgement:

It’s worth keeping this window open until it completes; if you try to sign out you may have to start again. At some point it will complete (in the example shown it took less than 5 minutes) and you will be signed into your new account on Coinbase:

At this point let’s take a break, and we’ll continue setting up inside your account in another article. By all means now take a look around the Coinbase platform and see what features are available to you.

Bitcoin (BTC)

Five reasons Bitcoin is invincible

March 25, 2024 flippener

Is Bitcoin back from the dead? A year ago, Bitcoin — and “crypto” in general — was in a parlous state. A series of major scandals, including the FTX collapse, had investors running scared and regulators on a warpath. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched numerous full-bore attacks on crypto companies, and even blamed crypto for a short-lived banking crisis last summer. The public perception of digital assets was also in the toilet, and politicians, fearing reputational contagion, wanted nothing to do with them (this was in stark contrast to early 2022, when a third of the US Congress took money from a certain Sam Bankman-Fried).

Critics, not unreasonably, said crypto had failed to offer compelling use-cases, beyond speculation. They said it was a cesspit of money laundering and terrorism (its involvement in the latter tends to be vastly overstated). They said it was dangerous for the environment. They said it could never become part of the financial system, because key financial players on Wall Street would never accept it. Some even dared to bid a valedictory “Sayonara”, as they have hundreds of times before now.

Yet today, Bitcoin is trading at around $70,000, above its previous all-time-high of about $69,000. The world’s premier cryptocurrency now has a market cap greater than silver, and many expect it to reach parity with gold within a few months. Meanwhile, the rest of the crypto market, which slumped along lifelessly for much of 2023, isn’t far behind.

So, what’s going on here? What sparked Bitcoin’s resurrection? The truth is there are five principal reasons behind its revival, the first of which may seem rather obvious…

1. You can’t kill Bitcoin

It’s awfully difficult to eradicate something like Bitcoin. Its network is peer-to-peer and decentralised, with roughly 18,000 public nodes working to validate and maintain the network daily, and they work independently. There isn’t a central point of failure or vulnerability for someone or something to stop. It’s a self-perpetuating system. And, more importantly, Bitcoin has tremendous latent support in the world: there are more than 100 million Bitcoin holders globally and, characteristically, they do not respond to political pressure. Since its emergence 13 years ago, Bitcoin has purred along efficiently, steadily growing, even in the face of massive competition and numerous hacks (particularly to exchanges and individual wallets).

This resilience isn’t directly connected to price; Bitcoin can be resistant without the price going up. But the price is based on this sense of permanence. It’s a function of everyone knowing with certainty that the Bitcoin code can’t be changed and that the issuance of new Bitcoin isn’t a political matter. Unlike fiat currencies, which are subject to central bank issuing more or less of a currency depending on the economic circumstances, the issuance of Bitcoin is predictable. That’s a unique selling point in a world where everything, even money, is increasingly politicised.

2. The arrival of ETFs

Though the Bitcoin industry takes pride in its outsider status, it has long sought mainstream support, whether from regulators or blue-blood institutions. This January, after 10 years of trying, it hit the mother lode, winning SEC approval for Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, or ETFs. These vehicles, which helped to popularise gold in the 2000s, allow everyday investors to buy into Bitcoin as if they were purchasing a conventional stock. There’s no need to own the underlying asset or to store it oneself.

How To Make Money in Cryptocurrency

April 19, 2023 flippener

The Bear is dead, long live the Bull!

It is increasingly clear that the most recent Bitcoin bear market (‘crash’) is finally over and we are starting the next bull market (‘to the moon’).

Bitcoin Bull Market (Image: Bitcoin-Investors.co.uk)

It has seemed to me that we were at or close to the bottom of the market for some time. In November I was able to add to my Bitcoin portfolio with additional loans from Ledn, at a price around $17-18k per Bitcoin.

Around the New Year, appropriately enough, it looked more certain that we had turned a corner. I increased my holding of Bitcoin, via dollar loans against Bitcoin (at around $22k), while being cautious and open to the possibility of further significant falls in the market.

However, it is obvious now that the worst is behind us and we should – mostly – be seeing increases in value from here on in. I say mostly because, of course, Bitcoin never goes up in a straight line, and we can expect spikes and troughs as its value on average goes up.

As I write this Bitcoin is at $29160 and Ether at $1969 on Coinbase. It looks like a great time to buy in as the market shakes off its ‘crypto winter’ and starts to build momentum towards a new all-time high.

It is important to be patient, however. Bitcoin’s value rises and falls in 4 year cycles because of its halving, and the rest of the market follows along in its wake. Therefore we can expect good gains leading up to the forthcoming halving, but the real breakout is likely to take place in the 6 months afterward.

The next halving is due in April 2024. In advance of it we can hope for a steady increase in the value of Bitcoin, plus a faster spike in its value in the 6 months from the halving to October 2024. That should produce the next Bitcoin All Time High (when I’ll be looking to sell) – and then, realistically, the usual fall again afterwards towards 2026 until the next halving approaches in 2028.

In terms of Bitcoin as an investment then, I see the current moment as a great time to buy in. That could be via a lump sum purchase (especially while Bitcoin is below $30k and Ether is below $2k) but Dollar Cost Averaging over the next 12 months would also be a very good strategy.

A suggested diversified portfolio would be something like 50% Bitcoin, 25% Ethereum and 25% of either a range of alternative coins or blue chip NFTs such as the Mutant Ape Yacht Club (which currently has a floor of just 11.9 Eth).

Bitcoin (BTC), Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin Rally Continues, Gaining More Than 80% This Year

April 18, 2023 flippener

The cryptocurrency extended its gains after another big jump on Tuesday, topping $30,000 for the first time since June.

Bitcoin is still the market’s runaway success story of the year. The cryptocurrency topped $30,000 on Tuesday for the first time since June.

Bitcoin has gained more than 80 percent in price this year, far outperforming many other assets. The Nasdaq 100, an index of the biggest tech stocks, has gained roughly 20 percent in that period — a strong showing but a far cry from Bitcoin’s resurgence.

The latest Bitcoin rally appears to be partly tied to the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, which has included nine interest rate increases over the past year. Crypto asset prices sank a year ago as the central bank began to raise rates, but investors are now betting that the Fed will soon pause its rate increases, even though Fed officials have been suggesting the opposite, setting off a big rebound.

Bitcoin’s biggest gains also coincide with the turmoil in the banking sector. The cryptocurrency is up more than 45 percent since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last month. Industry advocates point to the recent rally as a sign that investors are converting some of their cash into digital currencies, though there is little evidence of that happening.

2022 was a hard year for crypto — but it may have been just what the industry needed

April 17, 2023 flippener

2022’s crypto collapse wiped out roughly $2 trillion worth of crypto assets.
As the sector enters a period of stability, good actors must come together to deliver a digital assets industry that promotes the safe, sound and compliant development of blockchain-powered tech.

Consumers, businesses and investors around the world lost nearly $2 trillion in the digital assets market last year. By any measure, the systemic failures in the digital assets market in 2022 were eye-watering — some argue they are still reverberating in 2023, with correlations in the evolving banking crisis.

Many of 2022’s crypto losses were triggered by a daisy chain of events that began with the collapse of the stable-in-name-only Terra-Luna token, and were punctuated by the collapse of FTX.

The remaining viable players in the crypto industry must take a hard look in the mirror to regain market trust, particularly among regulators and policymakers. Regulators and policymakers, meanwhile, should take heed in not overreacting to crypto risks but responsibly harness the technology.

With jurisdictions adopting policies across the spectrum, de-banking and de-risking are emerging as major threats to the industry. These trends have unintended consequences and, over time, may produce more harm to the countries (and markets) that adopt these policies than the knee-jerk corrections to last year’s financial misdeeds.

Countries that lead in the development of the third generation of the internet (what some are calling Web3), and the novel industries and business models it will produce (including in the core of finance and banking), will prevail in the digital currency race.

Bitcoin (BTC) Most Undervalued in 10 Years According to Stock-to-Flow Model

June 25, 2021 flippener

According to the stock-to-flow deflection chart, today, bitcoin is the most undervalued with respect to the last 10 years of its history.

A similar situation occurred in the middle of the 2017 bull market. After which, the BTC price continued its exponential growth.

Additionally, bitcoin is deviating from its 11-year uptrend line. The deviation reaches 36% negative. This gives an additional signal that the value of BTC is undervalued and also shows room for upside. The peaks of previous bull markets led the major cryptocurrency high above this trendline.

Record deflection from stock-to-flow
In a recent tweet, cryptocurrency trader @CryptoMichNL pointed out that bitcoin’s price deflection chart from the popular stock-to-flow model is at its lowest level in over 10 years.

Today’s BTC price is oscillating around $40,000, while according to the model, it should already be slightly above $100,000.

Bitcoin Cryptocurrency (Image: MaxPixel)

The last time such a significant negative deviation occurred was in the early days of the network development. Back then BTC cost less than $0.1 in October 2010 (yellow circle).

Moreover, the chart shows another moment in the history of the major cryptocurrency when the deflection almost touched current levels (blue circle).

This was in July 2017, in the middle of the previous bull market, when bitcoin cost around $2,000. A few months later, its price continued an exponential rise. This took it to the historical all-time high of $20,000 in December 2017.

The stock-to-flow deflection chart, therefore, not only gives a general indication of the relative value of BTC. It also provides an additional argument that the cryptocurrency market is in the middle of a long-term bull market.

This remains in line with a number of on-chain analysis indicators that are currently providing similar readings.

The stock-to-flow model popularised by @100trillionUSD reaches back to the now-classic book “The Bitcoin Standard” by Saifedean Ammous.

It expresses the relationship of stock, circulating supply, flow, or new production, of any asset whose quantity increases over time. For bitcoin, it is the circulating supply of coins in relation to newly mined coins.

4 Reasons to Be Bullish as Bitcoin Breaks Back Above $40K

June 23, 2021 flippener

With BTC’s price regaining traction and heading towards $40,000, it’s worth reviewing four (ok, five) reasons why you should be more bullish.

Although bitcoin has already added $10,000 of value in a week to $40,000, some on-chain features suggest even more bullish developments awaiting right around the corner. From the Stablecoin Ratio to increasing active addresses to corporations buying and holders still holding.

Reason 1: Bitcoin to Stablecoin Ratio
According to data from CryptoQuant, the Bitcoin to stablecoin ratio oscillator has gone into bullish territory. This metric highlights the ratio of the number of bitcoins to stablecoins stored on all exchanges.

The analytics company said this metric has a “perfect BTFD hit rate since 2019.” CryptoQuant encouraged BTC bulls by adding, “it just printed another buy signal,” as the stablecoins sitting on exchanges have far superseded the bitcoins, suggesting more potential purchases.

Bitcoin Electronic Money (Image: MaxPixel)

It’s worth noting that the Bitcoin Stablecoin Supply Ratio, which works similarly, has also been declining in the past few months.

Reason 2: The Bottom Is In?
Jurrien Timmer, the Director of Global Macro at Fidelity Investments, also opined about BTC’s recent price developments. In fact, he believes the massive price slump towards $30,000 was actually the bottom.

He came to this conclusion by comparing the BTC/USD chart with the GS Retail Favorites Basket. History shows that the correlation between the two has been relatively high, suggesting that bitcoin could indeed mimic the basket’s performance.

Reason 3: Corporations Keep Buying, Institutional Praise
While some reports suggested that short-term investors had sold off their BTC holdings during the recent crash, others have only doubled down. Such is the case with MicroStrategy.

Michael Saylor’s NASDAQ-listed business intelligence giant plans to allocate another $1 billion in the primary cryptocurrency after a new stock offering.

The executive, who became among the most prominent BTC bulls in the past year, took it to Twitter to advise those who plan to have 5% of their portfolios in the asset that the remaining 95% will be “demonetized by bitcoin.”

Please, Stop Saying Bitcoin Is Dead

June 21, 2021 flippener

My Bitcoin is down by more than $100,000 and I’m grinning. 13 years on, we’ve heard it all before. Here’s what is missed.

Saying Bitcoin is dead is nothing new.

It’s become so common that a website that tracks this bizarre phenomenon has recorded 416 times Bitcoin has been declared dead … and survived. Bitcoin rising from the dead is programmed into its code. Bitcoin will be declared dead many more times because it’s a silent protest that challenges the status quo. 13 years on, Bitcoin is still alive and breathing and roaring back to life.

My own Bitcoin portfolio is down more than $100,000. I am grinning at all the losses.

Here’s what is overwhelmingly misunderstood:
Bitcoin is a religion.

One of the greatest investors of all time, Paul Tudor Jones, snuck a comment into a conversation with another legendary investor, Stan Druckenmiller. This comment changed my understanding of what Bitcoin is.

Image by 3D Animation Production Company from Pixabay

“Do you know that when Bitcoin went from $17,000 to $3000 that 86% of the people that owned it at $17,000, never sold it?”
John Street Capital on Twitter summed it up beautifully: “86% of the [Bitcoin] owners are religious zealots.” That’s why hedge funds and Wall Street are loving the huge crash in the Bitcoin price and buying more, not selling like retail investors.

The network effects of a technology are huge and explain a lot of the enormous growth we’ve seen in stocks such as Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook. Bitcoin has even greater network effects than Web 2.0 tech companies. But Bitcoin also has a fiercely loyal user base that won’t disappear, even when 50% of the value of their investment drops. Bitcoin isn’t dead.
The power of religious user loyalty is misunderstood.

Bitcoin doesn’t need influencers to market itself.

The adult babies saying Bitcoin is dead are influencers looking for clicks. You can’t be angry at adults trying to buy food and pay their bills. I get it.
But Bitcoin is an unconventional technology. It has no payroll, no office, and no marketing team. Bitcoin relies solely on word of mouth to survive and grow. There’s another thing that is missed.

Bitcoin is now a brand.

The Bitcoin car in the Indy 500 shows quietly what Bitcoin is becoming. Bitcoin is more than a brand, though. Bitcoin is a movement. The movement has one message to share… Stop creating money out of thin air and giving it to the elites and institutions.

Bitcoin users are saying nicely, “Give us free markets again.” When the stock market needs to dip because of high unemployment or a global health crisis, let it. As long as markets are propped up with money created out of thin air, inequality will rise.

3 Tips To Win at the Bitcoin Accumulation Game

June 16, 2021 flippener

Since its inception, Bitcoin has seen its price rise from a few cents to nearly $60k as of this writing. This phenomenal increase in the price of Bitcoin in just twelve years might lead you to believe that the best is behind us. The reality is quite different.

Bitcoin is not like a stock in a company that is listed on the stock market.

Bitcoin is a monetary revolution that will change the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the future. The digital currency invented by Satoshi Nakamoto has far greater reach than any of the GAFAM for example.

Bitcoin is all about power
At most 1% of the world’s population currently owns Bitcoin. Of that 100 million people, half (at best) really understand the liberating potential of Bitcoin. Many still think of Bitcoin as just another financial investment.
In reality, Bitcoin is about power, not money.
As more and more people realize this in the coming years, the demand for Bitcoin will explode. Everyone will want to own Bitcoin. On the other hand, the supply will remain frozen at 21 million units. This is the strength of the Bitcoin system, which has a programmatic monetary policy that highlights the virtues of quantitative hardening.

With demand increasing exponentially and supply hard-capped, the price of Bitcoin can only increase phenomenally in the future if we stick to the principles that govern the law of supply and demand.
Your best bet is to accumulate as much BTC as you can while you can. The “Stack Sats” movement that was born in the heart of summer 2019 is here to remind you of this essential truth.

Bitcoin is an accumulation game, and you must adapt to take full advantage of it
Bitcoin is indeed an accumulation game for years to come.
In this accumulation game that has been brewing for many months now, we can see two categories of people emerging: weak hands and strong hands. The weak hands are people who have a lot of questions. These people have a hard time accumulating Bitcoin.
During a bear market, weak hands are reluctant to take action by asking themselves this question:
“What if Bitcoin price keeps going down?”
During a bull market, the weak hands refuse to take action with a new question that paralyzes them:
“What if Bitcoin price has reached its top?”

Those who focus solely on the short-term price of Bitcoin cannot be among the winners
By always trying to buy the lowest and sell the highest, these weak hands are making mistakes. First, when they start buying Bitcoin, it is often after a trend reversal. Second, they sell it at the slightest drop in price for fear of losing money.

Bitcoin Investors UK