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Several months ago a buddy told me how well he was doing with cryptocurrencies. It was later than I would have liked to find out but still in time for some profits. He recommended coinbase.com. Coinbase was super easy to sign up for and I was quickly making money.
After researching a little I learned that there are lots of these sites for buying and trading crypto and the early ones like gdax.com allow you to do so without spending a penny. This is nice because of the crazy gamble that it already is. The good news is that I had to have a coinbase account already to do it the way I did. If you know a less convoluted way please let me know. You can sign up for a coinbase account here and we will both get $10 in bitcoin if you use my link.
Once you have some bitcoin in your coinbase wallet you will need to send it to gdax.com. You will use your coinbase login to sign in. Both sites are owned by coinbase and use the same backend. You can just trade for free on gdax.com.
Once you are in your gdax home screen you will see a grey rectangle on the left side of the screen that says deposit, with a down arrow in a circle. Click that and deposit some of your bitcoin from your coinbase account to your gdax account. I have no idea why this isn’t automatic. Maybe it they’d make less money. That transfer is free at least.
Next you click the withdraw button next to the deposit button and send it to your binance.com wallet. To do this you will want to set up an account with binance at binance.com. I know, it’s a lot of passwords. As a hint, you can use a 2 part authentication password storage site like lastpass and then you can again use an authenticator like google authenticator for extra security to help.
Once you have your binance account set up now you can send money over. To do so go to your home screen on binance and then to funds on the top right menu. On the drop down menu click the Deposit Withdrawals. In the search icon, magnifying glass, search for BTC and click Deposit.
You will get a long address called your deposit address. Copy that by selecting it with your mouse and using control-c or right click and select copy. Next, go back to GDAX and if you didn’t before, click withdrawels and then select the menu item BTC Address on the top right. You will paste the address into the form field titled DESTINATION. Make sure you have selected the amount of bitcoin, or BTC, you want to deposit.
At this point you have to have installed some authenticator to proceed. I use Google Authenticator on my smartphone. Download it from the app store now if you haven’t already and set it up. Once you have the authentication code and hit enter it will withdraw and you can head back over to your binance account.
Back in your binance account on the top left where you see the word Exchange click it and select Advanced. To select Ripple or something else to buy with your bitcoin select it from the top right where the initials BTC are. I’m doing XRP/BTC because I think XRP or Ripple is so small that people will still feel comfortable gambling on it as of this writing.
On the bottom right you will see the Buy XRP, or whatever you selected area. Fill the amount and hit buy. If it didn’t work you may have to wait a bit for the withdrawal process to finish. Now you can play around and buy and sell without the fees. To review, Coinbase charges fees but you can do it on gdax.com and binance.com without the fees in the limit area.
This video also shows how to put money directly into gdax and using the limit area to trade for free using gdax. From gdax I sent my money to cryptopia.co.nz in order to buy xtrabytes.
Thanks to Gary Cruz for figuring this out and posting it in a video here.
Thanks for reading my post and please stay tuned for more news in the tech world. 🙂
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