The Computer Tutor

There is yet another virus making the rounds on Facebook, and it’s tricking a lot of users into clicking on it and infecting their computers.

Here’s what the message looks like:

I’ve gotten these Facebook Messenger messages from several of my FB friends. It always has the same content – your first name, followed by “it’s you?“, along with what looks like a link to a YouTube video.

This is a very common tactic in virus emails as well – it’s specifically designed to arouse your curiosity. In fact, one of the most effective tools for spreading malware is the curiosity of the recipient. Lots of people read that and think, “What is this? My friend found a video of me on YouTube?” Of course, they could reply to the message asking about the video and wait for a response from their friend. But that might take too long, right? Curiosity demands an answer now!

The easiest thing to do, to satisfy that curiosity quickly, is to just click on the link and see that video. Except it’s not a video. The image in the email is created to look just like what a YouTube video link looks like, but instead of taking you to YouTube, the user gets redirected to a website that LOOKS just like YouTube (or some other video sharing site), but then a pop-up appears that says you need to install something to allow you to view videos. Completely fake of course, but it’s designed to look completely authentic.

Again, for some people this could still seem to be legitimate, since there are often pop-up messages telling you you need to update this or that software. So they figure they’ll just get this quick update and then be able to view that video they’re dying to see.

But rather than installing or updating a video player, the link they just clicked instead installs malicious software that compromises their Facebook account. And then guess what happens? They start unknowingly sending Facebook message to all of THEIR Facebook friends, with the same link and the same vague “___, it’s you?” message. And the cycle continues.

Except now instead of your friend sending out the fake, malicious messages, now it’s YOUR Facebook account doing this to all of YOUR Facebook friends.

This goes back to one of my top rules for using the internet: Don’t click on any link unless you know exactly, with certainty, where it will take you.

And for the people that “only click on something if it came from someone I know” – this fake Facebook message will ONLY come from someone you know. So the criteria of “someone I know” is not relevant.

You’d think after this same message keeps sending out the same malicious link and download, Facebook might get the hint and block those messages. But so far that has not happened. It’s up to you to be vigilant.

If you do find that your Facebook account has been infected like this (or with any other malicious software) get in touch with me (or whoever you use for computer service) to get it cleaned up. This can be handled remotely so you shouldn’t have to bring your computer anywhere to get it resolved.

Scott –

You’ve piqued my interest with this sentence that you sneaked into a recent podcast: 

“Really, sending pictures by email is a bad idea to start with, but that’s a story for another day.” 

How about making that day next week’s podcast?  I want to know what you recommend.  Photos are a problem I constantly struggle with – both sending and receiving.

Keep up the good work.  Cheers, Terry

You shouldn’t send photos as email attachments. Especially if you have a lot of photos you want to send. Here are a few reasons why not:

It’s inconvenient for you.

It’s inconvenient for the recipient.

They might not get sent.

They might not get opened.

Email attachments are still one of the best ways of spreading a virus, only because people are so easily tricked into clicking to open them. You might get an email from Fedex saying they are having trouble delivering your package, and the invoice is attached. Even if you are actually expecting a package by Fedex, that email did not come from Fedex and the attachment is actually a virus.

The only exception I make to opening an attachment is if the person sending it to me tells me ahead of time what it is and that they have sent it. This information cannot be in the email itself – it has to be knowledge or information I have gotten separate from the email (such as by a phone call or by speaking to that sender in person). That’s the only way you can know for sure what an attachment is, and that it’s safe to open.

Imagine mailing a full-size brick by sticking it in a padded envelope. It’s a pain for you to send it, a pain for the recipient to receive it, and it most likely won’t make the trip. That’s how inefficient it is to send a set of photos by email.

So how DO you get a picture (or group of pictures) from your computer to another person?

The basic process is this: you upload the pictures to the “cloud”, then get a link you can share for those pictures you just uploaded, and you send an email that includes that link.

That sounds a lot more complicated than it is.

If you saw last week’s blog post, that was when I showed you how easy it is to automatically backup the photos on your phone (and on your computer) using Google Photos. Google Photos is an example of cloud storage (“cloud” just means some other computer than yours – your pictures are on Google’s computers).

When you go to photos.google.com, there are all of your pictures, available for viewing. You just need to choose which ones you want to send, and get a link to just those pictures.

Here’s an example. In my Google Photos, here are a couple of pics of my little Fenway. These were taken shortly after he came back from having some dental work done, so he was still a little sedated. Anyway, let’s say I want to send these two pictures to someone:

When you move your mouse over a picture there, you’ll see a little checkmark appear in the top left corner. Click that for each picture you want to send. You’ll see how many you’ve selected:

Now go up to the top of the window and click on the “Share” button:

In the new window, in the options at the bottom, click on “Get Link”:

Next window will display the link – that’s what you want to include in your email. But you don’t even have to highlight it – just click the word “COPY”:

Now go to your new email and in the body of the email, do a right click and choose “Paste”. That places that special link right in your message. All you need to do is address the email to your recipient, put in a subject line, and maybe add some text to the message so that person knows what you’re sending.

And when your recipient clicks on that link in your email, what will be displayed is your Google Photos page – but only those two pictures:

Of course, if you wanted to, you could just as easily have put a checkmark on 10 pictures, or 50 pictures. No matter how many pictures you want to show him, you still only need to send the one link that gets generated.

At that point he can just look at the pictures, or he can download them and save them to his computer if he wants to. Or he can share them with other people. And he never had to open an email attachment.

What do you think of this? Let me know in the comments.

For a lot of people, the most valuable thing stored on their computer (or their phone) is the collection of photos. A lot of things can be replaced, but not the photos. In case you didn’t know, there’s a way to back up your photos that is 100% automated and completely free. You should be taking advantage of this.

This is one of those things that I do as second nature now, and for that type of thing I sometimes forget that not everyone knows about it so it might not occur to me to do a blog post about it. But recently I’ve talked to some clients that were completely unaware of this service, so it reminded me that I need to talk about it here.

For a quick overview, here’s what I am able to do now. Once this is set up, you can do the same thing.

Like most people, I take pictures on my phone. It’s an Android phone, but iPhone can do this same process.

So let’s say I walk out my front door and take a picture of my car:

I can then walk back inside to my office, and see that the picture I just took is already viewable on my computer. I didn’t have to click “upload” on any program, I didn’t have to connect my phone to my computer with a USB cable, and I didn’t have to pull out the phone’s memory card and plug it in to the computer. It’s all automated.

So that means even though I might have a ton of important, irreplaceable family pictures on my phone, they wouldn’t be lost forever if my phone got dropped in the ocean or run over by a truck. I can still get them on my computer (or any computer with an internet connection).

To do this, you’ll need a Google account. If you have Gmail, that’s the same thing so you already have the account you need. If you don’t have a Google account, just go to Google.com and create one (it’s free).

On your phone, go to the Google Play Store (Android) or the App Store (iPhone) and get the Google Photos app and install it.

Open the app, click the 3 horizontal lines in the top left, and choose Settings. The very first one in the list is called “Back up and sync”. Click that and make sure it is enabled.

This means that any picture you take will be automatically uploaded to Google Photos (photos.google.com) immediately after you take the picture. And the fact that it’s automated is critical. I mean, if you had to remember every so often to manually back up the pictures on your phone, how often would that happen? If you’re like me, not very often. Automation means you don’t have to worry about forgetting to do it.

And this isn’t just for your phone – you can upload all your pictures from your computer to Google Photos as well. Think about that – a free, automated backup for all your pictures. No more excuses for not backing up!

I would definitely not recommend that Google Photos be your ONLY backup, but it should absolutely be PART of your overall backup strategy at least. If you need help setting it up, get in touch with me.

If you’re using Windows 10, your computer has the built-in ability to bring up a chat window so you can communicate with an actual person from Microsoft. You don’t have to go to their website, and you don’t have to pick up your phone.

All too often, someone will contact me about a computer problem, and the conversation starts with that person saying, “I was just talking with Microsoft on the phone, and they told me…”. At that point I already know what has happened. In most cases, I’ll let them continue and tell the rest of the story though. A lot of these people really want to tell me the details.

But in the end, I already know that the person they spoke with was not Microsoft, it was just a scammer pretending to be Microsoft. So I always have two questions:

The answers to those two questions will determine how we proceed. I still find it pretty amazing that people will still believe and trust a random stranger on the phone who claims to be with Microsoft, even though the scam is so widely known now.

But what if you need to actually talk with someone who really does work at Microsoft?

Maybe you got a new computer, and you’re trying to install Office 365, and it keeps coming up with an error. Well, Office 365 is a Microsoft product, and you paid them money for it, so they should be available to help you install it, right? Of course.

Rule #1 is don’t do a Google search to find their phone number. If you do that, it’s very likely you’ll be talking to another scammer.

And the truth is, you don’t even need to call them at all. And you don’t need to try to navigate the Microsoft website trying to get to tech support. You can bring up a Microsoft tech support agent in a chat window – right from your computer.

Here’s how you do it:

1. In the search box in the lower left corner, type: Support

2. In the search results that come up, click on “Contact Support”

3. Now you’ll see a chat window come up:

Don’t get too excited yet though, because you still haven’t contact a real person from Microsoft. This is just their artificial intelligence robot that they would like you to try to use first.

4. At this point, you can try typing your actual question, such as “I can’t install Office”. But that means you’re going to continue to have to work with the robot as it tries to figure out what your problem is. Instead, if you want to get to a real person, just type “I want to talk to a real person”. Then type it again.

5. They’ll still want you to at least indicate what kind of problem you’re having by choosing from a couple of dropdown menus:

So just choose the proper selections. In this case, in the first menu you would choose “Office” and in the second list you would choose “Tech Support”.

Then you get to find out how long you’ll be waiting. In this example, it was prime time – 8:30 pm on a weeknight – and I would have either been waiting about 1 1/2 hours for a call back by phone, or for the 15 people ahead of me in chat to get finished.

I usually prefer to use the chat window, since I then have a record of the conversation that I can refer back to if needed. And I don’t have to try to understand what the agent is saying if his non-US accent makes conversation difficult.

When you choose Chat, you’ll see a countdown so you’ll know when it’s getting close to being your turn. For some reason, even though there were 15 people ahead of me, in the chat window my position was 22. Not sure how that happened.

When your turn comes up, you’ll actually be chatting with a real live person from Microsoft! Well, more likely someone working from their home in India or the Philippines, as a contractor for Microsoft. But at least you’ll know you’re not speaking to a scammer.

You probably already know you can go in to your web browser’s settings and clear ALL your cookies for every website you’ve visited. But did you know you can also go in and clear out the cookies for a specific website? You sure can.

And why would you want to do that? In some cases, a website might be using an app that is not working properly and you want to view the site “cleanly” (without cookies from previous visits to the site). In my situation as a tech, sometimes a client will tell me that they’re having trouble with a particular website, and if I have visited that site in the past, the cookies from that site might prevent me from seeing the same thing my client is seeing.

You certainly could go in and just clear ALL the cookies from ALL the websites you’ve visited, but that becomes really inconvenient because it might cause you to have to log in to all those sites again when you go back. In this case, clearing all your cookies is kind of like demolishing a house and rebuilding it just to replace a broken window (yes, there are other options which I’ll cover at the end of this post).

So rather than clear the cookies from every website, you want to just clear the cookies from the one website that is giving you the problem. Here’s how you do that.

How to clear cookies from a single site in Chrome:

1. Click on the Settings icon in Chrome (the 3 dots in the top right)

2. Click on Settings, then scroll down and click on Advanced

3. Scroll down to the Privacy section and click on Content Settings

4. Click on Cookies

5. Click on See all cookies and site data

Now you’ll see a (probably long) list of the websites that have stored cookies on your computer. If you want, you can scroll down the list and find the site you’re working with. But the easier way is to just put the domain name (or part of it) in the “Search cookies” field to go straight to the cookies for that site.

Then when you see that site name, just click the trash can to the right of it to delete the cookies for just that website. When you’re done, just close the Settings tab.

How to clear cookies from a single site in Firefox:

1. In Firefox, click the settings button (3 horizontal lines in the top right)

2. Click on Options

3. On the left side of the window, click on “Privacy and Security”

4. In the History section, click on “remove individual cookies”:

Then you’ll see the list of the individual sites. Just like in Chrome, you can scroll down the list and remove the one you’re looking for, or you can type the domain name in the search at the top.

There are a couple other considerations when thinking about this process.

If you don’t want to clear ALL the cookies and other information because your browser stores all your passwords and you’d have to log in to each site again, I would encourage you to rethink your password storage process. If your browser stores your passwords, they are not secure. Anyone that uses your computer (or hacks into it) can have your entire list of passwords within a few seconds. You should use LastPass instead. It’s free and secure. I wrote about LastPass here.

Also, there’s a different way to view a website and not have it affected by cookies, history, passwords, cache, or anything. Just use your browser’s “incognito” mode. In Chrome, click the Settings button and choose “New Incognito window”. In Firefox, it’s the Settings button, then “New Private Window”. When you open a website that way, it’s as if you have never visited that site before – so no cookies will be in effect (and visiting that site will also not be stored in your browser history).

A lot of people have HEARD of “zip files” but are not really familiar with what they are specifically. Here’s how they work.

Part of the confusion with this is that it’s not really obvious or clear what is meant by a folder being “zipped”. I mean, everyone knows what a zipper does, but how does that relate to computer files?

It might be easier if “zipped” were replaced with the word “compressed”. A zipped folder is just a folder that holds other files or folders, but compresses them so that they take up less space.

Think of it like this. Imagine you’re out camping, and you spend the night in your sleeping bag.

When you wake up in the morning and you’re packing up to hike for the day, do you just scoop up the sleeping bag and start stuffing it into your backpack? Of course not. It’s going to take up too much space, and it will be awkward and frustrating to carry it around like that.

Instead you carefully and strategically fold it, then roll it up to be as small and compacted (compresses) as possible:

Now you can fit it in your backpack for easy transport, and still have room for all your other essentials. I love efficiency!

A zipped/compressed folder does pretty much the same thing.

Let’s say you have a folder on your computer, and there are 20 pictures in that folder. You want to send those pictures to someone through email. Well, it would be pretty cumbersome to attach 20 pictures to an email. Or send 20 emails, each one with an attached photo. (Really, sending pictures by email is a bad idea to start with, but that’s a story for another day.)

Instead, you could “zip” all 20 photos into a single folder, then just attach that one zipped folder to your email. Not only is this more efficient, it’s actually going to be a smaller overall file size. The 20 pictures might have a total size of 9 mb, but compressed into a single folder you might have a total size of 7 mb.

The email recipient gets the email and opens the zipped folder (we’ll talk about this process in a minute), and there are all 20 pictures.

Another practical use: You have thousands of pictures and you want to put all of them on a little flash drive to carry with you, but your flash drive is an older one that only holds 4 GB. Putting the pictures on there directly would mean they wouldn’t be able to fit. But in a zipped folder, you can get them all on there.

You also sometimes see zipped files being used on websites, for downloading software. Rather than having you download the full (uncompressed) file, the website might offer the option of downloading a zipped file. Since that file size will be smaller, the download will be faster.

Here’s how you can create your own ZIPPED folder:

First, you start with a folder on your computer that has several files in it. This can be a folder full of Word documents, or PDF files, or pictures. Doesn’t really matter what type of files you use.

With that folder open, hold down CTRL and tap the letter “a”. This highlights all of the files.

Now, do a right click on one of the highlighted files and choose Send To – Compressed (zipped) folder.  You’ll see a new folder there on your screen. That’s your newly-created zipped folder, and it has all those files in it (even though you still see all the files in the same place they were in that folder already). That’s how easy it is!

Now you can do whatever you want with that zipped folder. And if you delete the zipped folder, all of your original files will still be in the original folder just like they were when you started.

Hello Scott,

My daughter got me addicted to podcasts, and I follow about 15 different ones.  Yours is the one I look forward to the most.  You provide a great service to a  growing audience.  Thank you.

I have a Windows 7 desktop and it’s time for a new one.  I am planning to buy a Windows 10 PC in a month or two.  I am very concerned about how to get all my files (Word/Excel documents, photos, music, videos, etc.) onto my new PC.  When I upgraded to Windows 7, I recall purchasing software that came with a cable.  I connected the two computers together, and my files magically appeared on my new PC.

I don’t see such a device being available today.  What is the best way for a novice like me to get all my files to my new PC?  And how can I confirm they all actually arrived?

Thanks, Scott, and I hope you find my question to be of general interest!  -Richard

Thanks Richard! This is a good question, and probably a timely one since lots of people got new computers at Christmas and might be wondering how to get all their “stuff” over to the new one.

Richard mentioned previously using a type of “data transfer cable” and a program that somehow moved everything over. Personally, I don’t recommending doing that. I don’t know if they are even still available. I experimented with something like that many years ago and it didn’t work very well.

The process that I use is pretty simple. The only extra equipment you’ll need is a USB portable drive, such as this one (which is available on Amazon):

This little drive comes with one short cable, which plugs into any of the USB ports on your computer. When you plug it in, it will show up as another drive (such as drive E or drive F, whatever the next available drive letter is alphabetically).

Here’s the process (and remember, we can only copy files and folders – actual programs such as Microsoft Word, etc. will have to be installed directly on the new computer from a disc or a download):

1. Plug the portable drive in to your old computer. On that portable drive, make a new folder called “Documents”, and open it (it’s empty of course). Drag that window to the right side of your screen.

2. Open a new File Explorer window (Windows key + E) and move this window to the left side of your screen. Open the Documents folder so that you can see all of your files and folders in that window.

3. Select everything in that folder by clicking Ctrl + A. On one of the selected items, do a right click and choose “Copy”.

4. Now click back over to the other window – the one showing the empty “Documents” folder on the portable drive. In the middle of that window, do a right click and choose “Paste”.

At this point, you’ll see the computer go through the process of copying the contents of your old computer’s Documents folder over to the Documents folder on the portable drive

5. Repeat steps 1 through 4 for each folder you want to move over to the new computer. This usually includes Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos, Desktop. Those folders are easily found. Website Favorites/Bookmarks can be moved over but the process is different based on what web browser you use. Outlook emails can also be moved over but the process is more involved than what this blog post is covering today.

6. Connect the portable drive to the new computer and open it in a window which you’ll move over to the left side of the screen. Open the “Documents” folder on that drive so that you can see all of your documents. Hit Ctrl + A to select all of the documents, then do a right click and choose Copy.

7. Open a new File Explorer window and move it to the right side of your screen. In that window, click to open the Documents folder (which of course would be empty at this point). Somewhere in the middle of that window, do a right click and choose “Paste”. Now you’ll see the Documents that are stored on the portable drive being copied to the Documents folder on the computer.

Repeat that process for each folder on the portable drive. When that’s done, your computer will now have your data in the right place and ready to use.

Of course, there are a lot of other things that need to be done when setting up a new PC (particularly a Windows 10 computer) but following the process above will at least get your important files and folders copied to the new computer so you can use them.

If you use Word and sometimes put pictures and captions in your documents, you will probably find today’s tip helpful. Sometimes when you have a picture and a caption in Word, and you try to move the picture, the caption doesn’t get moved like you would expect it to. Here’s how to fix that (and thanks to reader Marloes for suggesting this as a tip).

Here’s a little background, if you’re not familiar with this.

Let’s say I have a blank Word document, and I put in a picture of my dog, Fenway:

I can right-click on the picture to get a menu, and you can see that one of the options is that I can “Insert Caption”:

So I do that and type in his name, and now my picture has a caption:

But here’s the problem. If I decide later on, maybe after I’ve typed up 10 pages in this document, that I want to move that picture to a different spot, it doesn’t work properly. I can drag that picture wherever I want it to go, but the caption still stays back in its original place. Why is that? That’s a good question to ask Microsoft, since they designed Word to work this way. I cannot think of any logical reason for it. Obviously if you made a caption for a picture, the caption should move with the picture. But it doesn’t.

But here’s the fix.

Before inserting the picture, you just insert a 1×1 table:

Then, you put the cursor inside the table and insert the picture there.

Then you add the caption.

By default, the table’s borders will be visible in the document. If you don’t want that, you can right click on the table and choose Table Properties – Borders and Shading and choose “none”. When you do that, anyone reading the document would not even know a table is there – they will just see the picture and the caption.

So now you have a table, with your picture inside the table, and the caption under the picture. If you want to move the picture somewhere else in the document, you don’t move the picture – you move the table. And whatever is inside the table (the picture AND the caption) just comes right along with it!

It’s unfortunate that we have to create workarounds like this just to make a Word document appear like we want it to appear, but that’s the way it is. At least this particular problem is solved.

Today’s tip comes from a question I got recently:

Is there a simple way to type a single word and have it list the font name and display the word, so you have a sample of all your font styles? Thanks – Stephen

Yes, Stephen, that is possible!

A few years ago I did this in MS Word, the hard way. I typed out the alphabet and the numbers 0 through 9 in a Word document, then copied and pasted it so I had that same set of characters displayed like 60 times. Each one was on its own line.

Then I went back to the first one, highlighted it, and changed the font to the first font in the list. Then I went to the second one and changed that one to the second font in the list. I went through that process for every line, so that I could see all of my fonts displayed in the same place. What a pain that was! But I only had to do it once, then I printed that multi-page document and kept it around for handy reference.

I don’t need to go through that time-consuming process any more, and neither do you. Let your computer do this work for you, like it’s supposed to!

You do this through a little piece of software called FontViewOK. You can download it free, here. When you are at that page, be sure to click on this link to download it:

If you’re not using an ad blocker (and why aren’t you??) you’ll see a few fake “download” buttons and links so be careful.

When you have the .zip file downloaded, double click to open it. When you see the file inside called “FontViewOK.exe”, just click and drag that to your desktop. That’s it – there’s nothing to install.

Now you have this icon on your desktop:

Just double click that to run it. When the window opens, you can type the alphabet or anything you want into this field:

You also have the option of formatting the text like italic, bold, etc. You can also control the size of the font being displayed, but it defaults at 48 and I thought that was a pretty good size.

The end result is that you have a scrollable list of all your fonts showing whatever text you typed in the sample box:

And it’s handy to have the actual name of the font right under the words in that font.

If you click “FontViewOK” at the top of the window, you’ll see you also have the option to print that whole thing.

For mine, I have 208 installed fonts so it would have been a 19 page printed document. I declined to do that, but you might want to have a printed copy for easy reference.

And why would this program have an option at the top that says “Coffee”? Because it’s free for you to use. But if you get some use from it and want to thank the software developer, a man named Nenad in Germany. You can click the “Coffee” button and it will take you to a purchase page where you can send a few dollars to buy Nenad a cup of coffee.

Nenad and his son

Nenad has actually created quite a few cool little Windows programs like this one. You can see all of them listed at the home page of his website: http://www.softwareok.com/

In my podcast a couple of weeks ago I mentioned Bitcoin just in passing, and I had some listener inquiries about it. Obviously it’s been in the news quite a bit recently, and some people are asking about what it is, how it works, and how someone can actually purchase it. So today I’ll provide on overview, and some resources you might find helpful.

First things first: This post is not being offered as investment advice. I am not an investment or cryptocurrency expert and this article is presented without any legal or financial recommendation or advice. All investments have a certain level of risk, and you can lose money.

As you might imagine, a discussion about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency has the potential to get VERY technical. That’s not what I do here and it’s not my intention. The idea with today’s blog post and podcast is to present the basics and answer the most common questions, then if you want to pursue more in-depth research I’ll provide some resources for that.

Interesting story: If you had purchased $10 worth of Bitcoin back in July 2010, and kept it until today, do you know what it would be worth now? $2.1 million. That’s over two million US dollars that you would have right now, for a $10 investment. You know what they say, hindsight is 20/20.

What is Bitcoin?

In simple terminology, Bitcoin is currency that is digital rather than physical. It is decentralized, so transactions can take place using Bitcoin without the need for a bank, and without the need for a government and politicians to create and regulate the money.

Here’s a video that gives a simple explanation in 3 minutes:

https://youtu.be/gi_AbgkCYfc

How do I get Bitcoin?

That’s the big question. Bitcoin is obviously very popular now, so everyone is asking, “How can I get some?”. Basically there are 3 ways you can get Bitcoin:

There are actually even Bitcoin ATMs located in certain areas. You put in cash, you get Bitcoins in return.

Interesting story: In the early days, Bitcoin had very little value and only a very few people had even heard of it. It was kind of a “geek” thing. So there was this computer programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz who owned some Bitcoins, and on May 22, 2010 he purchased two Papa John’s pizzas from a fellow programmer for 10,000 of them. At the time, that translated into about $25 US dollars. Today, it would be around $110 million – making those two pizzas probably the most expensive pizzas in history. And May 22 is still known as “Bitcoin Pizza Day”.

Is it risky?

Yes. It is risky. There are people saying that the Bitcoin bubble is about to burst. And others are saying Bitcoin will continue to increase in value, with the value of a single Bitcoin hitting $50k or $100k within the next year or two (it’s currently around $12,000). The truth is, no one really knows. As with any purchase, don’t risk more than you can afford to lose. But the returns so far have been incredible.

There are people that play the ups and downs and try to time their purchases to buy Bitcoin when it dips slightly, then sell when it skyrockets. To me, that’s a very high-stress method. Those guys spend every minute of the day watching graphs go up and down and hoping they guess correctly.

Then there are others who just buy and hold. Just purchase a certain amount on a regular basis, on the assumption that it will continue to go up over time. This strategy has made some people Bitcoin millionaires. Again, whatever method you choose, understand the risks involved.

Interesting story: James Howells is another name that is significant in the history of Bitcoin. He was one of the people who used his computer to “mine” Bitcoin. Remember, since Bitcoin is digital, you can actually store it on your computer’s hard drive. But if that drive dies or gets destroyed, the Bitcoins are gone. Howells mined about 7500 coins, and eventually stopped because his girlfriend at the time didn’t like the constant sound of the computer running. He pulled the hard drive out of that computer and put it in a drawer and kind of forgot about it. A few years later, he mistakenly threw it into a general waste bin at his local landfill. That was in 2013, so that hard drive is still there, but with more than 4 years of trash that’s been dumped on top of it. If that hard drive ever gets found, it’s currently worth over $100 million.

How do I get started?

The easiest way to get started with Bitcoin is to open an account at an exchange called Coinbase (here). This is the service that I use, and it’s the only one I know of that actually has your funds insured. That link is an affiliate/bonus link, which means that when you buy or sell $100 worth of a Bitcoin, you and I each get $10 worth of Bitcoin as a bonus.

Set up your account, and then at least connect a credit card to it to provide the funding. You’ll start with a fairly low daily transactions limit, like $250 or $500 maybe. That’s fine for getting started. If you want to connect your regular checking account with your Coinbase account, your trading limit will be higher from the start.

Once that is in place, buy some Bitcoin. $100, $200 worth, or whatever you’re comfortable with. You’ll see that Coinbase has a couple of other currencies available to purchase – Ethereum and Litecoin. I own some of those too, and they have also had great returns just like Bitcoin has. So you can buy just one or all three if you want, and watch as they change value each day. It’s kind of fun to watch, as long as you aren’t betting your rent money or something stupid like that.

Is Bitcoin really legitimate?

You’ll have to decide that for yourself. But more and more major companies are adopting Bitcoin as one of the payment options to purchase goods and services. Here are some:

And I will also accept Bitcoin as payment for my own computer services.

What are some good resources to learn more?

One thing to keep in mind – there’s a lot of good information out there, and a lot of really bad information. And a lot of scams. It seems like the nature of cryptocurrency just invites in the scammers. Do your research and stay safe.

Coinbase – This is a user-friendly site to purchase Bitcoin using your local currency such as US dollars.

Binance (affiliate link) – This is the site I use to purchase other cryptocurrency besides Bitcoin. If you want to diversify, or you want to try making some quick money by trading, this is a good site to use.

Custom Mining Rigs – this is the Facebook group I just started for people interested in mining for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

My Crypto Guide – This is a great site for a more in-depth discussion of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and how they work. Starts with an overview, then goes into all of the specific topics. I particularly like chapter 4, where the author describes several of the most popular coins, and the pros and cons of each one.

CoinDesk – This is a pretty good news site, with probably all relevant news you’ll need to keep up with what’s going on in the crypto world. Very visual. Kind of reminds me of MSN but without the overwhelming ads and idiotic celebrity news. I guess I can’t comment about the ads since I use an ad blocker and wouldn’t see them anyway.

Crypto 101 podcast – This podcast just started this past July but has already made a good name for itself as a place to learn the basics. You might want to go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes for some good “starting out” information.

There are lots of other good ones, but these are the ones I like the best.

And one other thing. As you read some of these online sites and maybe join some Bitcoin Facebook groups, you might notice something that doesn’t seem to make sense. In general, there are two types of investors. Those who like to trade a lot and try to grab profits, and those that like to just buy and hold for the long term. But what you’ll see are people saying they are planning to “buy and HODL” (an intentional misspelling).

A few years ago, someone posted a message in a Bitcoin forum and said he was going to “buy and hodl”, then he saw the typo and re-typed it and made the same typo again. So he just left it. For some reason, people found it humorous so now a lot of people in the Bitcoin world type “hodl”. Personally, I think it’s just stupid. I mean, it wasn’t even amusing the first time so how can it be funny when you see it hundreds of times? But everyone’s different and some people still seem to get a kick out of it, so whatever.

So that’s hopefully enough information to get you started down the road to investing in Bitcoin or other coins, if that’s a journey you want to take. Who knows, maybe we’ll be millionaires in cryptocurrency someday!