So you want to invest in Crypto but don’t know how?

9 min readApr 3, 2021

I’ve been dabbling with Cryptocurrencies for the past 7 years or so. Since summer 2020, I’ve been sharing some profitable strategies I use with friends on social media. People often ask me:

“I want to invest but don’t understand it or know where / how to do it”

or some variation thereof :-)

In this post I will try to answer those questions and explain:

What is ‘Crypto’?
Investment basics
The easiest way to invest and earn 100’s of %’s via Knepala’s fund on Iconomi

You can skip 1 & 2 if you want but since you’re here you might as well take that little bit extra time to get a deeper understanding :-)

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. It’s just me trying to explain what Crypto is in my own words, give you some basic investment lessons and showing you one of the things that worked for me. Do your own research & decide for yourself. Crypto is a volatile market, only invest money you could stand to lose.

What is ‘Crypto’?

Cryptocurrencies & Blockchain technology

Before we get into it, I’ll very briefly explain how a bank transfer works. Basically, your bank keeps a list of people and how much money they have & where. When you wire money to someone, you tell your bank to deduct X from your account, your bank tells their bank to add X to their account. The banks are necessary here to verify this transaction and establish what is true. WIthout the bank as an intermediary, this isn’t a safe system and fraud could happen.

Cryptocurrencies work differently. They are decentralised and based on cryptographic mathematics.

Now don’t freak out, let me try to explain:

Decentralised means that there is no central authority (like a bank) necessary to say something is true or happened.

So how do we know something is true? Because of the underlying cryptographic mathematics:

With Bitcoin there is a proof of work consensus mechanism that verifies what is true by solving mathematical problems.
The work is done by Bitcoin miners by running computers that try to solve the maths and when they do, they get a reward (Bitcoin). This incentivizes the miners to do the work.
In this process, by solving the maths, they verify transactions and put it on the public ledger, that anyone can see.
This ledger is called the blockchain because it is a chain of blocks. (over time more and more blocks are added to the blockchain)

Wtf does this have to do with sending money to people?? Well, a bitcoin address & private key are the cryptographic puzzle the network is trying to solve for. You can compare it to your bank account & password except the bitcoin address & private key have a relationship that is mathematically very special. It’s easy to get the address from the key but almost impossible to get the key from the address. You can sign a transaction very easily with your private key but it’s hard to verify the transaction if you don’t. That’s why the network does all the work but also what makes this system inherently safe. The bitcoin address is also called the ‘public key’.

Basically, a bunch of computers around the world are racing to solve mathematical puzzles. When they do, they figure out if a transaction is valid / true, get a reward and put it in a decentralised database called the blockchain.

In summary, Bitcoin could be called ‘the currency of the internet’. Cryptocurrencies are also called ‘Blockchain technology’.

There’s also other Crypto like Ethereum (like a decentralised computer that can run all kinds of apps and smart contracts for example to distribute share to holders of a coin) & digital assets (like NFT’s — Non Fungible Tokens or ‘Digital Art’).

What does this mean for humanity?

Essentially blockchain technology allows for the next step in the evolution of digital technology. Strangers can establish trust or verify truth without 3rd parties like banks or governments involved. Similar to what the internet or social media allowed humanity to cooperate on a higher level, blockchain technology is a next step in this process.

Some examples of what is currently possible with Blockchain technology:

a person in India can send money to someone in South America from their phone. No banks or expensive intermediaries necessary.
You can store files in the cloud, on other people’s computers instead of in Google’s data centre
You can outsource your computing work to computers all over the world instead of Amazon Web Services. People that do your computer work get paid directly.
This Twitter thread contains a nice summary of the big picture of Crypto in 2021

Imagine your life 20 years ago without the internet, Google (Maps), Social Media, Smartphones etc. Now imagine life in 20 years with a similar jump in technology because of blockchain technology. That’s the big promise of this space. Things that were not possible before, are now or will be soon.

Why should I invest in Crypto?

Investing in cryptocurrencies could be compared to buying internet infrastructure in the 1990/2000’s. On the other hand, some technologies might go away just like in the dot com bubble.

In the past 6 months we saw the beginnings of a Crypto bull market (prices going up) after a couple of years of bear market (prices going down). Last time this happened, we saw prices of Bitcoin go up 20x and other coins multiples of that.

The difference now is that we are seeing mainstream adoption. Visa & Paypal are allowing crypto payment settlement on their platforms, bigger investors & funds are allocating a part of their portfolio to Crypto, Tesla bought Bitcoin & Elon Musk keeps tweeting about it.

New blockchain technologies are invented at a rapid pace and you can buy them on different kinds of exchanges or platforms, betting on the company or technology (and the price going up).

Further resources & learning

I would advise you to read and/or listen to some of the following if you want to understand how this all works a bit more and understand what could happen in the coming years:

The Tim Ferriss Show Podcast has some great episodes on Crypto:

And:

‘Life after Google’ by George Gilder (Book)
But how does bitcoin actually work? (26min Youtube video of what I summarised in the first part of this post)
Bitcoin wikipedia page

There’s also a debate about the energy consumption of proof-of-work based blockchains since they spend a lot of energy, 2 sources you can read here. I haven’t found a resource with a balanced approach to it but I’m linking 1 for each side of the polarised conversation here:

You can also join ‘The Crypto Knowledge Pool’ community on Telegram (a messaging app), where I learned most of what I know about Crypto over the years if you wanna learn more.

Investment basics

Investing 101: make your money work for you instead of keeping it in a low (or zero) % interest fee bank account.

Sidenote: with current interest rates your money will depreciate in value. This means that €100 of today’s money, will probably buy you around €98 worth of stuff next year. Inflation is around 2% but might even be higher because of recent monetary policies like quantitative easing due to the pandemic. This is why we see people and organisations move (part of) their assets into Bitcoin, and not keep it in the US dollar or Euro.

There’s different ways of making your money work for you, ranging from low risk / low reward (bonds) to high risk / high reward (stocks) to higher risk / higher reward (Crypto). Depending on your age, risk appetite and the market you will diversify between risks, rewards, platforms, geographical areas etc.

The Crypto market is very volatile, so you should not put all your pennies in 1 Crypto basket. I have a rather high % of my investments in Crypto because I believe the possible upside heavily outweighs the possible downside. I am young and can find work easily so I am not risk averse.

A conservative advice will say to put 1 or a couple % of your money in Crypto. Less conservative (ie. more risk) will say 10% or more. This is a personal choice of course and you might decide differently, as I did.

There are some books I can recommend on investment principles like ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ or ‘Money, Master the Game’ by Tony Robbins. I also highly recommend you listen to Naval’s podcast on How to get rich so you can understand some underlying principles and pick up some life lessons along the way (seriously, he’s one of the smartest people out there with a gift for explaining).

If you wanna go all in on crypto, just make sure you have 3, 6 or even 12 months of expenses in savings on your bank account (a rainy day fund) in case shit hits the fan (like say, a pandemic occurs and you lose your job and can’t get government support -_-)

The easiest way to invest and earn 100’s of %’s

EDIT: a lot has changed after writing this article. I don’t have any money invested on Iconomi anymore as the platform itself has pulled some weird and downright shady moves. Check out my google doc if you want some more info (linked a bit below) and the CKP telegram groups

3 months ago, Knepala, the founder of The Crypto Knowledge Pool started a fund on Iconomi and has shown amazing results:

***Orange*** *line = Bitcoin’s price over the past 3 months.* ***Green*** *line = the fund’s performance over the past 3 months.* ***Blue*** *dots = when I put money in & fees where deducte*

As you can see, I was lazy and didn’t get in right at the start but if I did I would’ve made almost 750% profit in 3 months. If I would’ve put in €1000, I would now have almost €8500. I have however made a nice 115% profit with the money that I put in the fund so far so am not complaining. Keep in mind my profit % is averaged down because I’ve been putting money into the fund in the past couple of weeks as well. My first investment in the fund at the end of January has gone 5x or so.

Obviously historic performance is not a guarantee for future performance so why this fund? Why now?

The consensus in the Crypto community is that the bull market is just getting started and profit will only accelerate (ie. go up faster)
Knepala does the research and finds the new technologies & coins I mentioned in part 1 for you. These smaller cryptocurrencies still have the potential to go 100–1000x unlike most ‘bigger’ cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin & Ethereum.
He’s a full time trader and takes profit & rebalances the portfolio when needed so you don’t have to keep an eye on the prizes of all the different coins.
Knepala’s strategy is one of the best performing funds on Iconomi which shows in the €3 Million & 724 people following his strategy
The CKP community has been sharing the fund with record inflow into the fund past couple of days, pushing the price up
According to Knepala, bigger investors (with a similar effect on price) will invest in the coming months.

So what is this Iconomi?

It’s a platform where you can follow certain investment strategies in exchange for a performance fee paid to the fund manager (fee is charged only if you make a profit and the listed %’s are with fees deducted!).

Some concerns you might have:

Aren’t the fees quite high?

Yes and no. 11% is hefty but the %’s you see are after fees. There’s a reason the strategy is one of the top performers and that’s because Knepala’s time / skills are worth it. More info on the fees here.

What’s in it for you?

I get a part of the fees you pay (you pay the same).

Isn’t this a pyramid scheme?

No, the returns are based on market returns & actual coin prices and not on people referring people until there aren’t anymore people to refer and the house of cards starts tumbling down.

What if Knepala runs away with my money?

On Iconomi, the platform basically copies Knepala’s trades so your money never leaves your account.

Do I have to pay taxes on my profits?

Probably, depends on your local tax laws which I can’t figure out for you. You can also spend your profits directly by using a service like crypto.com’s visa cards or vouchers.

If this sounds like something for you, here’s the steps you need to take to set up your Iconomi account and follow the Knepala strategy

Use my referral link to sign up here https://www.iconomi.com/register?ref=21ShT
Verify your identity by providing a valid ID & proof of address.
Deposit Euros from your bank to Iconomi
Bank transfer arrived the next working day from my Dutch bank account. You can also use a credit card but there’s a fee. Crypto transfer from another platform / exchange works as well (<5min for me)
Optionally, but 200% advised: Set up 2FA via Settings — Security
Follow Knepala’s fund via this link: https://www.iconomi.com/asset/KNEPALA?ref=21ShT
I think you can only fund the strategies with EUR, BTC or ETH, not USDT. You can swap USDT into BTC on the website before funding.

If you’re looking for other smart ways to make a passive income with Crypto, check out my other guide here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VuodEXJpNXntuiTvomlNQ1S1M-pnW51ntFVT5hCO53Q/edit#

Hope this answers the questions I hoped to answer, if not, shoot me a message so I can tweak this guide!

Thanks for reading,
Cheers,

Timo