 You are watching the Daily Decrypt. May the currency competition be with you. I am your host Amanda B. Johnson and today's episode is brought to you by the Merkel. So you want to be a player. So you want to exchange one cryptocurrency for another. Well luckily for you in this new land of opportunity, that's pretty easy to do. So there are two ways to do it. First, with an exchange with which you make an account. And second, exchange with which you don't make an account. I'm gonna show you both. So saddle up partner. So the first type, the one where you make an account. This is the kind you would want to go with if you want to do fancy things like set by limit sell orders or I don't even know what the terms mean. Basically if you want a bunch of fancy tools with which you can say hey if something ever reaches this price buy it or if it falls to this price sell it you'll want to use one of these types of exchanges. Now personally I have used two exchanges that require me to create an account. First one is Polonix and the second one is bter.com. Bter.com is scammy a shit so stay away from them and I'll tell you how to use Polonix. First visit Polonix.com where you can yes create an account using your email address and creating a password. They'll send you a verification email which you will click on and you are ready to log in and begin. Click balances and from the drop-down menu select transfer balances. You'll be taken to terms and conditions which you can peruse at your leisure and agree or disagree to although you probably can't trade if you don't agree to them and once you've gone through them click submit. Here you'll see all the cryptos that you can deposit to trade with. Now naturally you have a zero balance in all of them right now. Personally I'm interested in trading Bitcoin for bit shares so I will click on deposit and withdraw in the BTC row. Here I'll click generate to get a deposit address of my very own and I can send any amount up to the equivalent of $2,000 US dollars in Polonix limits. The $2,000 daily cap of deposits and withdrawals can be increased if you want but we are not going to do that in this video today. Now pro tip if you're sending from a mobile wallet and you need a QR code to make this easier head on over to WolframAlpha.com and copy and paste your deposit address into the field type space QR space code and click enter and through the magic of Wolfram Alpha there will be your QR code and send that transaction. I'm sending about $50 worth of Bitcoin today. Once you've sent your transaction return to the top of the page click balances and select deposit history from the drop-down menu. Here we can watch for our pending confirmations on our deposit and getting confirmations will be a prerequisite to begin trading. Now in my case it took a few minutes for my deposit to even show up in this section so give it some time before you freak. Once the necessary number of confirmations comes in in the case of Bitcoin it's just one. The status will change from pending to complete and you're ready to trade. Head back to the top of the page click the left most tab called exchange. Find your desired market on the right. It's Bitcoin in my case so I'll click the crypto underneath Bitcoin that I'd like to trade for it which is BitShares in my case. I scroll down a bit to see the buy BitShares box and I'm shown how much Bitcoin I have to trade with and the current best price on the market for the trading pair. If you'd like to trade your whole balance and the current best price listed is acceptable to you yes and yes in my case. Simply click your full balance and the fields below will be auto populated. Polonix takes a point two percent commission on every trade which will automatically be calculated in and then click buy. Now in my case there was enough BitShares available at that price that the entire trade went through immediately but in the case that there's not you'll find that some or all of your order goes into the open order area waiting for someone with your desired price to come and make the trade. To see if that's the case click the orders tab at the top of the page and select my open orders. You'll see that I have none because my entire trade finished immediately but if it hadn't I could cancel an open order at any time and either keep the Bitcoin or change the price for which I was attempting to sell it. And I'm finished trading for today. I head back to the balances menu see my transfer balances and click that I would like to deposit or withdraw the BitShares. If you'd like to withdraw the full balance as I do just click right on the number. The BitShares network transaction fee is automatically deducted that's another nice feature and I put the name of my account here in the withdraw to field. Click of the button done. After I've clicked withdraw Polonix will send me a confirmation email basically a two factor authentication which I just need to click on from within my email for the withdrawal to be executed and I can see here in my pretty little BitShares wallet that it worked and that's it. Relatively painless but if you're thinking hmm Amanda that seems like more effort than I want to go to well there exist account less exchanges for you too namely shapeshift.io, meta exchange.info and blocktrades.us. So I'll show you how to use one of them too. Navigate on over to shapeshift.io and if you watch this video anytime in the near future it's probably going to still say click here to try the beta version. Let's do that. First choose the coin you'd like to make a deposit in in my case Bitcoin again and choose the coin that you would like to take back out. In my case I'm going to say Dash. I'll now choose the precise trading method which just means that I'm going to tell shapeshift exactly how much Bitcoin I want to deposit and I can get a slightly better exchange rate in return. I'd like to deposit 0.07 of a Bitcoin and shapeshift tells me that that will kick back to me 5.32 and change in Dash. I enter my Dash address Zim Zam and I enter a Bitcoin refund address in case for some reason this doesn't go well and they need to send my money back. I agree to the terms and click start transaction. Shapeshift now tells me that I have just under 10 minutes to send that 0.07 of a Bitcoin to the address listed here. I'm going to send from my ultra secure hardware wallet today if you'd like to know what a hardware wallet is and how it works click the words you see popping up on your screen now and after sending my deposit shows up as received within a few moments. Now depending on shapeshifts liquidity at the moment the exchange itself in my personal experience has taken anywhere from 15 seconds to 15 even 30 minutes. There's no way to really know in this case so relax step away from the computer and make yourself a Bloody Mary. In due time you'll see that green check mark appear with the words all done and it is done. In the case of this particular trade that I did for this video the total trade time was about five minutes and that's all you need to know to use either of these types of exchanges. Now bear in mind that as centralized exchanges there is a degree of trust involved when using these sites so only use the ones with the best reputations naturally. It's possible even probable nay inevitable that we will be exchanging peer-to-peer directly one with another via trustless protocols that will eliminate the profitability of committing fraudulent acts in the first place. Today's episode has been brought to you by the Merkle a cryptocurrency and blockchain news source with something for everybody. The Merkle provides market analyses, technical tutorials and hard hitting news pieces about a broad range of important happenings in the crypto sphere. You can fall down the rabbit hole yourself at themerkle.com And now I have a question for you dear viewer if you would oblige me. It's been suggested that I do an AMA and ask me anything on the Daily Decrypt subreddit where anybody could come and ask me any sort of question that they want so I'd like to gauge market demand. Would you be interested in visiting Reddit and asking me a question on an AMA in a week or two I guess. Let me know just post in the comment section below or tweet me at the Daily Decrypt. Thank you. Have a good day. Today we've spoken with Alejandro Colorado, Alex for short, a Daily Decrypt viewer we met at a Bitcoin conference in Mexico City. There he told us that information he had found via the Daily Decrypt had helped him develop a trading strategy using fiat pegged cryptocurrencies to hedge volatility. Here's how he does it.