The crypto market

Why crypto became an investment, how to buy a slice of a bitcoin, how to read a pair like BTCUSDT, where your coins are kept, and the most common scams. At the end, a bot's first rule.

Bitcoin makes no profit and pays no dividend. Its price comes only from supply and demand: what people will pay for a coin with a limited supply that no government or company can issue at will. Some buy it to hold for years; others buy to trade the swings.

The market is open 24 hours a day, every day, worldwide. Since January 2024 the United States has had bitcoin funds traded on the stock exchange, the ETFs, and big investors came in through them. According to the IMF, since 2020 bitcoin's price has moved more in step with stocks.

Prices move in long cycles, and the drops are deep: BTC has lost more than 70% from its peak in 2011, between 2013 and 2015, in 2018 and in 2022. The chart is a simulated cycle with that shape. Pick the month you bought.

One bitcoin costs tens of thousands of dollars, but nobody has to buy a whole one. It splits into 100 million parts, and each part is called a satoshi, after its creator.

On the big exchanges you can start small. On Binance, most pairs accept orders from about 5 dollars.

Pick how much to spend and see the slice of bitcoin it buys right now.

Every coin has a short code, the ticker: BTC for bitcoin, ETH for ether, SOL for solana. On an exchange they trade in pairs, two tickers stuck together.

The first ticker is the coin you buy or sell, the base. The second is the coin the price is written in, the quote. BTCUSDT is the price of 1 BTC in USDT, which in practice is its price in dollars. ETHBTC is the price of 1 ETH in bitcoin.

Build a pair and read its live price.

A centralized exchange, like Binance, is a company. You open an account with ID, deposit, trade on an order book, and can ask support for help. While your coins are there, the company holds the keys.

A decentralized exchange, like Uniswap, is a set of contracts. You connect your wallet and swap directly with a pool, with no sign-up, but there's nobody to turn to if you make a mistake.

In November 2022 FTX, one of the biggest exchanges at the time, collapsed and froze customer withdrawals. The numbers the bots here read come from Binance. Switch the kind of exchange and see what happens in each case.

Crypto draws scammers, because a blockchain payment can't be reversed and many people are still learning. The scams change costume but repeat the same tricks: urgency, guaranteed profit, someone pretending to be support or a famous person, and a request for your recovery phrase.

Two rules stop most of them: nobody legitimate asks for your phrase, and nobody guarantees profit. Also be wary of anyone who offers to recover money from an old scam; that's another scam.

Open each message and see the signs.

Everything you've seen becomes a number on an exchange: price, change, volume. The bots here read those numbers from Binance in real time and send you a Signal when a rule you built becomes true. They don't buy or sell anything for you.

This is a simple rule, checked right now on the live feed: is BTC's change over the last hour at or above the threshold? Move the threshold until the condition lights up.

The next lessons explain each number a bot can watch, starting with price and candles.

Three quick questions, then a challenge.

There are seven messages. Say which are scams and which are fine.