Yes, I buy, sell, trade, and stake crypto currencies and NFT. Ultimately, my goal is to hold bitcoin as a store of value.
In my mind bitcoin in the best place to build your wealth, better than the stock market, real estate, or any other traditional investment. Why? The video here will answer that question for you:
A Deep Intellectual Discussion on Why Bitcoin is the only place to invest your money
I’ve been really fired up about buying and holding bitcoin lately, and I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months figuring out the best way to do it. I discovered that most beginners and casual investors are missing out on higher returns because of a few expensive mistakes, and as we know, this mistakes can add up fast as bitcoin appreciates o in this article. I’m breaking down how I buy and hold bitcoin to get the highest return on my investment.
The name of the game here is going to be avoiding fees everywhere possible, and I´ll show you exactly how I do that with a step-by-step process.
We´ll start with transferring money onto a crypto exchange for free, purchasing bitcoin at the lower possible fees and at the lowest cost then transferring bitcoin off of the exchange at no cost whatsoever, finally we´ll look at the optional step of transferring that bitcoin to a crypto interest account to earn even greater returns on those holdings.
All of this is made possible and convenient with just two platforms: Gemini and Celsius Network. Keep in mind if you´re new to either of these platforms, they have both have pretty solid sign up bonuses that I will detail towards the end of the article. If you play it right you can get an easy 100 $ of bitcoin or more, just for continuing with your bitcoin investments. So, let´s get into it.
The very fist step to purchasing bitcoin is transferring US dollars onto a cryptocurrency exchange so that you can make the purchase. Most cryptocurrency exchanges will give you a couple of options for doing this, including ACH bank transfers, wire transfers, debit cards and potentially credit cards. Although there are often restrictions on buying crypto with credit, the first thing to be aware here is that there will be hefty fees on all of these options except an ACH Bank transfer. Typically, your bank will charge you for your wire transfer. Usually in the ballpark of 10 to 30 dollars, which is money that could be better spent on bitcoin.
On the other hand, debit card transfers and direct purchases with credit cards, will charge you a percentage of the transaction. On Gemini, for example, which is going to be our low-cost exchange, debit card transfers come with a 3.5% fee of the total. That’s three and a half percent of your investment that you are throwing away for the convenience of using your debit card. And again, it can be better spent on bitcoin by avoiding that fee int the first place. So, in the most cases, your best option is to do an ACH Bank Transfer, which is free of charge at least on Gemini.
The only downside to this option is that it may take a few business days for the fund transfer to complete. On many exchanges this means that you won’t be able to purchase bitcoin until the transfer completes. Fortunately, Gemini gives us instant access to these funds when we submit the deposit, so we can go ahead and look in a bitcoin purchase while the transfer processes. You won’t be able to withdraw the fund from your account until it does settle, but this instant tradability ensures that you won’t miss out on buying or making any other timely transactions during that settlement period.
Overall ACH Transfer onto the Gemini exchange are my preferred method for initiating cryptocurrency purchases because they are complete free and instantly available for trading.
You can do this conveniently on the Gemini mobile app or via web or mobile browser. Using the active trader tool, which I’ll cover more in a minute.
The next step of course is using that USD deposit to purchase bitcoin or another digital asset. When you are doing lump sum investing, dollar cost averaging or any other investing strategy, some of the biggest costs that can hurt you here are trading fees and spreads. Almost all exchanges will charge you a certain percentage of your transaction in trading fees, while the bulk of these fees will arise from purchasing crypto directly with debit and credit cards, there are still exchange fees to be aware of: For example, Coinbase charges exchange fees for all purchases, regardless of payment method, as you can see, a 10 dollars purchase comes with a 99 cent fee or 10% of your transaction and isn’t much better with larger transactions, a one thousand dollar purchase comes with about a fifteen dollars fee or 1.5 percent. Just like with direct debit and credit card purchases, these fees will instantly reduce your returns because you are paying more to get less bitcoin.
And if your dollar cost averaging over time, these fees can quickly add up particularly with smaller purchases on top of this, many crypto exchanges display prices that include the price spread, which means they are going to quote you a prices slightly higher than the market price to ensure that they are able to fill your order at the price they display.
There are a lot of exchanges out there that claim to have no fees o zero cost trading, but actually bump up this price spread to collect profits by filling your trade at a lower cost and then keeping the difference for themselves. Popular examples are Block Fi and Voyager. Both of which offer free trading but display prices is about 1% higher than market price. Even Coinbase does this with up to a 0.5% spread and they are already collecting trading fees from you.
So, the solution here is purchasing bitcoin without price spreads and minimized trading fees. To be fair, Coinbase nearly offers this with Coinbase pro, which eliminates the spread and reduces trading fees to a maximum on 0.5 %. However, you can still do better with Gemini.
The regular Gemini exchange has fees comparable to Coinbase. So, we want to use the Gemini Active trader exchange. This is pretty similar to Coinbase pro, as it´s just a more advance trading platform than the traditional Coinbase and Gemini Platforms. With Active Trader you can lower your fees to a maximum of 0.35% per transaction with no price spreads. So, after instantly transferring money into my Gemini account via ACH Bank Transfer, I just head right o my mobile browser and log into Active Trader.
Although you can also do this on your computer, this may look a little intimidating for new users, but you can ignore most of the features here. All you need to do is navigate to the USD bitcoin pairing or whichever other asset you want to purchase and submit a market order. If you want to get more strategy with your purchase price, you can use some of the other order types, but I generally stick with market orders just to get my order filled instantly. Furthermore, the bid ask spread is usually tight enough with bitcoin and I’m not going to pay signifyingly above market price with a market order.
We had a fee of just 0.35% for this order, which is the only fee we’ve paid so far, and the only few we will pay. At this point, we successfully transferred money onto crypto exchange and instantly purchased bitcoin with nothing more than the .35% fee.
Next step is transferring bitcoin off of an exchange which you will be able to do as soon as your ACH Bank transfer settles. As the saying goes: not your keys, not your coins. The keys in this case, are a piece of digital code that secures your ownership of a digital asset.
Crypto exchanges technically own the keys of assets held on their exchanges because they are the custodians of those assets while they sit on your exchange account. the risk here is that your assets are only as secure as the exchange. If the exchange is compromise, you may lose your assets. Although I believe this become a less likely threat as the crypto ecosystem advances, it´s still important to consider. Therefore, it´s generally recommended to transfer your cryptocurrency holdings off of an exchange and onto a digital wallet. You can ensure the highest security for your bitcoin holdings.
The two options here are software wallets and hardware wallets. Software wallets will use web-based, desktop or mobile applications to store the keys that allow you to access your bitcoin. This provides more security that in exchange because you have access to these keys, but you are still trusting those applications and their underline security features.
The second option is hardware wallets, which store your keys in a physical device that isn’t connected to the internet. This is arguably one of the most secure ways to store your bitcoin because it can’t be compromised unless someone manages to take possession of your hardware wallet and the security information needed to access it. Whichever option you choose, Gemini gives us another big advantage of free withdrawals from the app.
Although most popular exchange are trending in this direction, there are still many that will charge you network fees for sending your assets out of the exchange. Sometimes even requiring minimum withdrawal amounts. With Gemini you can make 10 withdraws per month at no cost, regardless of the size of the transaction.
So now you have instantly transferred money, without cost, purchased bitcoin at a low 0.35% fee ad securely moved it to a digital wallet for free. But if you want to earn even greater returns from your bitcoin, you may want to consider holding it in a crypto interest account. When you store your bitcoin on one of these crypto interest platforms, your balance will be used to provide loans to other customers.
When the platform collects interest from ins borrowers, they´ll pass some of those earnings back to you in the form of regular interest payments. Be aware that there are some risks with this, because just like holding your crypto on an exchange, you don’t have full ownership of your keys, however most reputable crypto interest platforms are fully transparent about their security features and have systems in place to make sure that their platforms are even more secure than your average cryptocurrency exchange.
I did a long research into the top interest platforms, which you can check out for a full picture of your options. But I ultimately decided that Celsius Network is the strongest option for earning bitcoin interest. In addition to some solid security features that protect both users and the greater Celsius ecosystem, Celsius offers some of the best interest rates in the industry at 6.2% on bitcoin. This interest is paid out weekly and compounds over time which can be a great source of additional returns on your bitcoin holdings, and again is one of the most competitive options out there.
Unlike other platforms, Celsius has no minimum balance requirements, no lock up periods and gives you unlimited free withdrawals. So, if at anytime you no longer want to continue with the app, you can withdraw your assets a no cost whatsoever.
Once you´ve created an account, all you to do is deposit bitcoin into the app by sending it to your unique address. As soon as the transfer is complete, you’ll start earning interest on your balance while it continues to appreciate.
In summary, here is my step by step process for buying and holding bitcoin for maximum returns: I start with an ACH Bank Transfer onto Gemini which costs me nothing and its available for trading instantly. Then I use the Gemini active Trading tool for purchasing bitcoin at just a 0.35% fee, afterwards I withdraw my bitcoin for free to my Celsius Network account where I earn compounding weekly interest at 6.2% APY, that’s a little over 0.5% per moth so you can actually make up for the Gemini trading fees just by holding your bitcoin there for a few weeks.
Ultimately, this strategy maximizes my returns by minimizing my costs and generating compound interest that will snowball with bitcoin´s price growth, and, as I said, if you are new to any of these platforms there are some solid promotions that you can take advantage of. Gemini offers $10 to new users if you sign up and trade $100 worth of crypto. There’s a link for that in the description. Admittedly this 10$ bonus isn’t that great, but if you are going to use the platform anyway, its still free money. If you are not in a hurry, I think they occasionally up the signing up bonus to $25, so you may want to hold out for that opportunity.
But the best promotion opportunities are with Celsius, which offers $50 in bitcoin when you sign up and make 400$ deposit. You do need a referral code for that, so that will be in the description below, but be sure to take advantage of the other deposit bonuses on Celsius that are also available on top of that sign-up bonus. Currently Celsius 10 to 25 % deposit bonuses on BNB UNI, CARDANO, PAX G and even STABLE coins, and almost all of them are available to current users too.
This means you can get the$50 bitcoin sign up bonus and all of the other bonuses, earning potentially hundreds of dollars in free crypto and then earning interest on top of all of that. Check out Celsius. Network/promotion-rules for all the available promotions.
All you have to do is enter the desired promo code into your app and make a deposit. For example, I was able to use the code STABLE10 and STABLE50 earning a total of $60 in bitcoin for a single $200 deposit. Which is the easiest money I’ve ever made. If you are not quite sold on Celsius yet and you want to learn more or explore other options, be sure to check out the video I did comparing all of the biggest crypto interest platforms. And if there’s anything you want more detail on, just drop a comment below.
Thanks for reading. Do you own research!
