There are only 21 million bitcoins that will ever be issued of these a total supply of 18,558,825.40 BTC has been issued (as of the time of writing), you could get your hands on some of these Bitcoin by:
- Exchanging them for goods or services.
- Buy Bitcoin an an exchange.
- Mining it.
– Exchanging Bitcoin for goods and services is a great way to earn your bitcoins and start saving some, for example lets say you have some stuff laying around the house that you want to get rid of you could sell those for Bitcoin, If you have your own business or a side hustle you could ask to get paid in Bitcoin for your services.
– There are several exchanges that sell Bitcoin for Fiat or allow you to exchange it for other alt cryptocurrencies, I will focus here the ones that in my opinion are the easiest to start.
- Cash App you may already have cash app installed on your phone (available for both Android and IOS) and you may not realize it but you can buy Bitcoin directly on the app which also happens to be a wallet, from here you can also have people send Bitcoin to you for services that you may have rendered or for goods that you may have sold you can also send Bitcoin to others. You can also setup recurrent buys daily, weekly or monthly this helps you dollar cost average the volatility of Bitcoin.
- Coinbase when I started getting into cryptocurrencies this is the place at the time that was the easiest and the one that everyone was aware and pointing people to, Coinbase is available online and on apps for both android and IOS, I have since moved from coinbase and currently do not use it.
- Swan Bitcoin allows you to go straight in to dollar cost averaging “Buy automatically every day, week, or month, starting with as little as $10”, once you have setup your account and your withdrawal amount and that amount is reached it will automatically transfer the bitcoin that you have accumulated to the wallet that you have indicated, this process will repeat again and again until you change it, this is an extremely easy way to start stacking while maintaining custody of your bitcoin.
– Mining Bitcoin is a totally different matter and something that is hard to currently make profitable. I will make an attempt here to explain how mining works, miners use computer equipment call ASICs computers that are designed for the purpose of mining Bitcoin these computers run 24/7/365 and their job is to verify transactions in the blocks the miner that resolves the block 1st gets awarded freshly minted Bitcoins (currently 6.25) plus the transactions fees for that block, this process is very expensive due to the equipment and energy requirements.
UPDATE: Since the writing of this post I have become aware of Compass Mining they are making accessible for everyone to mine by buying your own miner from the them and hosting it at one of their facilities with a lower power rate, for more information and check their rates please visit their site compassmining.io