 Hey, John Crestani here and in this video, I'm going to show you how to buy Bitcoin safely in this video. Bitcoin's all the rage. I'm also going to show you how to store it safely, which is the most important part, and how to make money, how to pay taxes, and a few other things. I've been involved in Bitcoin actually since 2011, and I'll show a screenshot right here. I bought Bitcoin back when it was $3. No joke. I bought it back when it was $3. I bought a couple hundred dollars of it. I have a very interesting story to also tell you in this video about that. Let's get right into it. Hey, John Crestani here and we're going to go over a few things in this video, okay? We're going to talk about how to buy Bitcoin safely. We're going to talk about how to store it safely so that the hackers and the scammers and all the nefarious folks in the world don't get your money from you. I'm going to show you also how to make Bitcoin, the two main ways of earning Bitcoin that you can apply and how to pay taxes, how to remember your passwords, and a few definitions for you. Now, before we go into anything else, the most important thing for us to start off with is a few definitions of this crazy space. And if you're excited about Bitcoin, you want me to do more videos about Bitcoin, just spank that like button, hit the subscribe, and let me know in the comments. Just type in crypto or type in Bitcoin if that's something you're interested in seeing talk about more. So, first off, Bitcoin. Bitcoin is digital gold. Just think of it as a replacement for gold. It's a holder of value. It's not similar to gold. It's not a good way of doing transactions of paying people, paying for products and services. Very few people use it for that. It's mainly an investment. So, just think of it like digital gold. Now, Ethereum is another very popular crypto currency. I don't know too much to say about it, but it's one of the big ones. Bitcoin and Ethereum are kind of way up there. They're in a category of their own and everything else is kind of like, is it a scam? Is it not a scam? Who knows, right? Now, crypto is everything. Crypto is any digital currency. Bitcoin is considered a crypto. Ethereum is considered a crypto, and all of the other thousands of people trying to create their own different sort of crypto coins. So, it's just kind of a catch-all word. Now, the next one is brokerage or your account or whatever. A brokerage is a place that you buy Bitcoin or you buy crypto assets. It's like going to the bank where you can exchange your dollars for other sorts of currencies. You know, you say, hey, here's 100 bucks. Can I get some yen or can I get some plan or can I get some pesos? Brokerage is just the online equivalent of that where you give them your dollars, you give them your pesos, and they give you back crypto, right? Now, the next definition is wallet. And when I'm talking about wallet, I'm not talking about one of these because this is for storing cash, right? We're talking about storing a digital currency. So, a wallet is going to look a little bit different. It's going to look a little bit more like this. And this is my crypto wallet. It's called Ledger, and it is connected by a USB drive. Now, sometimes the wallet, the place that you store your crypto is in the same place you buy it, like the bank, right? Or in this case, the brokerage. But you can also take it, you can take it with you, like a wallet, and keep it so that the bank can't mess around with it. Because some banks, you know, there have been runs on banks, banks can get money stolen from them. Sometimes banks just go bankrupt and give nobody their money. And this sadly and unfortunately happens very often in the crypto and Bitcoin world. This is the wild, wild, wild west of the financial industry right now. And there are so many nefarious characters out there looking to steal your money. It's good to be extremely, extremely safe about your crypto. And when we get to the part where I'm talking about storing your crypto safely, I'll go over my story of what happened to me. Very, very interesting and kind of cool, kind of embarrassing. Now, the next definitions are AML and KYC. Now, when you're buying Bitcoin or crypto through an exchange, they have to abide by what's called anti-money laundering rules and know your customer regulations. This is for any financial institution. They need to verify that you are a real person, that you are not a robot, that you're not some sort of hacker or scam or whatever. And that's why when you buy an online exchange, you'll need to give them your information. You'll have to have a government ID. You'll have to have a bank account. Let's go right into that. So how do you buy? Okay, so there's two main ways to buy Bitcoin or other cryptos. One is you can go offline. You can look at ATMs, okay? You can physically take your money out of your pocket, go to an ATM, which stands for Automated Teller Machine. You could throw your money into the ATM and get money and get crypto spit back into a USB device, okay? Now, there's ATMs all over the world and I'm going to have my editors kind of scroll through just a list of all of the locations that you can exchange real money, real hard money for digital money all over the world, okay? Next is online. You can buy it through a brokerage. The brokerage I use the most is SexyO, okay? So yes, it's because I'm sexy. No, SexyO is a Chexio. I don't know how to pronounce it, but I buy my crypto through there. Now, when you buy online, you need a government ID, okay? You have, and depending on how much information you give them, you'll start off with a 3,000 daily exchange limit, meaning you can buy 3,000 or you can sell $3,000 worth of crypto. And for most of you, that will be plenty, okay? Now, if you link your bank account or if you verify your bank account, if you link your social media accounts or your email or all these other forms of verifying that you are a real person, you will be able to increase that limit to $10,000 or even more, okay? Thumbs up if you're getting some information about things right now. Just spank that like button if you are learning a little bit about crypto and Bitcoin and make sure to leave in the comments what is the most interesting aspect of learning about Bitcoin or crypto for you because I have a lot of stories about this stuff. I can go to a lot of depth about how this whole stuff works. There's a few main ways to store your Bitcoin or your crypto assets. One is you can do it online, on an exchange, the same place you bought it from exactly like a bank, right? You buy it, you leave it in the bank. I don't recommend this. I don't recommend this at all. As I said before, the Bitcoin space is the wild west. It's a cowboy space. There are people that have just gotten completely obliterated out of millions of dollars because exchanges went down or their equivalent, which is marketplaces, which is just another place you buy stuff online, and I'm one of them. I actually lost millions of dollars. You saw, I'll show a screenshot here that I actually bought a couple hundred dollars with Bitcoin back in 2011 when the price was three dollars of Bitcoin. No joke, seriously. I bought some Bitcoin and I thought I had it and I remember checking to see years later after the price had gone up to, I think it was like over, it was a thousand or over a thousand dollars. I said, hey, I bought some Bitcoin back way, back when I, ah, maybe I should go look around for it. It was gone, poof, or scammed or whatever it was the Mount Go scam. MTGOX or Mount Gox, however you want to pronounce it, all these X's, I don't understand how to pronounce them sometimes, but the point being, everything got stolen. It would be worth, I think, a trillion dollars now. And there's news articles about it talking about how, and nobody knows what happened. The Bitcoin just went disappeared because again, the problem with cryptocurrency is that it's sort of, it's anonymous, like cash, which is also anonymous. An interesting statistic for you is that the most dangerous activity is the transportation of large amounts of money. This is the most dangerous activity throughout history. And just to give you an example here, back when the United States was being formed around the 17, 1800s, and gold was discovered in California, they would move large amounts of gold from the west coast, from California over to the east coast, where most of the rich people live. And vice versa, rich people would move their entire family households and everything they owned out west to try to take part in the capitalistic revolution that was happening in California. And the transportation of so much raw amount of money left a great opportunity for thieves and train robbers and all sorts of, you know, cowboys and criminals and whatnot. And it's part of our country lords, all of these criminals that just had a feeding frenzy on the gold moving east and the people moving west. It's the same thing that's happening right now. So if you are not safe, if you're not smart about how you're buying and storing your Bitcoin, you're likely going to lose it because the hackers that are out there all over the world, the social engineers, the people everywhere, the criminals are out to get your digital currency. If it's accessible on the internet, they're going to keep trying to get it. So you have to be safe about how you store your Bitcoin. Now, the way I prefer to store it is I store it in an offline device. This is not a device that has Bluetooth. This is not a device that has Wi-Fi. This is a device that only can only be accessed once I plug it into my computer. The Bitcoin is not on an exchange. There are many other devices where you can access and trade your Bitcoin. It's an online exchange, but they've got a device just to make you feel good because they're marketers. They're marketers and they're trying to make it easy for you to move money. But if it's easier for you to move around your money, it's easier for criminals to get to it. Keep your money offline. That's what I do. And I recommend this device, which is a ledger. It's affordable. It's not too expensive. It's very good. It's reliable. And it keeps me safe at night. The other places I've gotten scammed out of what would be worth now hundreds and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, has been online marketplaces. So I used to buy things through online marketplaces such as the Silk Road and Empire Market and Dream Market. There's a number of different markets where I'd buy things on. But basically, all of these markets had something called an exit scam. And what is an exit scam? Well, an exit scam is when the person that runs the marketplace says, I got all this money, let me just take it and disappear. And that is sadly common in the space. Because folks who started a little geeks that started a little website on the dark web will find hundreds of millions of dollars sitting in their bank account. They say, I'm just going to disappear and live the life of my dreams in fucking Barbados. I know you all have been waiting for this part. This is the part where I take my hat off because we're going over how to earn lots of money with your coin. This is fantastic. And there's two main ways to earn money with Bitcoin. Okay. The first is price arbitrage. I'm talking about literally just helping people buy or sell Bitcoin. There's two sites. There's local crypto and local Bitcoin. I'll have my editors roll the video of these websites, but you can make as like 25% markup on just helping people buy and sell crypto on these sites. So check these out. Very easy way to make money. And the other way to make money is you buy crypto or Bitcoin at one price and you hope it goes right and you sell it at a higher price. And the usefulness of that is just like stock trading or whatever. You're just trying to make money on the price differential supply and demand basic stuff. Okay. This is more like gambling. Whereas the other side, there's always going to be a winner and a loser when you're trading in the stock market. If somebody's putting money in, somebody's making money out. So always keep that in mind folks because you might see on Instagram, all these freaking Bitcoin and crypto millionaires, billionaires, et cetera, but understand that that money came from somewhere and somebody's losing money too. So just keep that in mind. People don't talk about their losers, right? People don't talk about when they just lost a million dollars because it's hard, right? It's difficult, it's embarrassing. But everybody's going to talk about their winning. So just keep that in minds to not let yourself get FOMO. And if you have FOMO, which is fear of missing out, type in FOMO down below. Okay. Another way to make money using crypto is selling things. Okay. And there are a lot of affiliate networks. I'm going to have my editors throw on all the different affiliate networks and offers that will pay you in crypto, in Bitcoin, for selling stuff. And this is what I do. I do affiliate marketing. You know, I made my first million dollars finding products where I can pick $1 to advertise them and I can make $2 when I get a sale of them. And yeah, it did well for me. So let's move onwards and upwards. There's a lot of ways to make money in crypto. I definitely suggest you get some sort of Bitcoin crypto in your portfolio. Now, last but not least, I have two sort of bonus sections for you. And this is really important. Now, one of the biggest problems with having all of this crypto and Bitcoin and all your money in a sort of like a USB, a computer device, like my ledger right here is that you could forget your password. And these things, all these crypto accounts and whatnot, they require crazy sophisticated passwords. They're talking like they want you to have like the exclamation point, the question mark, the dashes, the like weird symbols. It's just, you know, it's kind of confusing. Billions, tens of billions of dollars of crypto has actually just gone missing because folks that bought all this Bitcoin years ago forgot their password. There's been a recent case in the news about how some guy is locked out of $220 million worth of Bitcoin he has because he forgot his freaking password. Don't be that guy. And now my little trick to this is I actually use a, I have a secure USB device. And this is, this is an unhackable USB device because this is actually, this is Apricorn. I love this thing. Apricorn is a US government contractor. And this is what the US government employees get issued to store their files on. And it's mechanical encryption, not software encryption. Now, what's the difference between hardware, hardware, mechanical encryption versus software encryption? Well, the difference is, is that hackers can get into software. Hackers can find their way in if it's digital, sort of password type of protected format, anything hackers can get into. Okay. That's why there's so much stuff being stolen. The US government issues these two folks as hardware encrypted because you physically have to press these buttons. You physically have to do something and have the password or else physically there's mechanical instruments inside of this that lock folks out. Okay. So I don't know. Maybe I'm butchering the technology, but this is what I use. And I know my, my little pin code here. Basically, I just, I press the, the unlock button. And then I press the series of numbers that I know is my one pin and all my passwords open up when I stick this in. It's fantastic. And this allows me to remember my passwords and feel safe and secure because I'm using US government military technology. Shout out to any veterans in the house. If you are a veteran of not just the US military, but any military service, say, say who raw or just, just say I'm a vet in the comments below because I just want to let you know I respect you. Thank you for your sacrifice for your country, whichever country that is your work defending your country is a lot harder than any of the work I do to, to squeeze money out from the internet. So thank you so much for all your hard work. Let's go to the next one. Hey, paying taxes. So paying taxes, there's great, there's great website. It's called taxbit.com and they go over, they connect to all the major cryptocurrency accounts and that will help you keep compliant when you're doing your taxes and if you own a lot of crypto. I hope you guys got a lot of value from that. And as always, let me know in the comments, what was the most useful thing for you to learn about today? Remembering passwords or paying taxes, earning money? Was it how to store your money or just where to buy your Bitcoin? And also let me know in the comments below, would you like me to talk more about crypto in general? Or would you like me to talk more about Bitcoin specifically? Just type in Bitcoin or crypto in the comments. And as always, make sure you subscribe to this channel. Make sure you hit that like button if you are learning something and help that G-Daing Google YouTube algorithm. And yeah, love you guys. Great talking to you and I'll see you in my next video. Bye.