Like the rest of the entire world, I’ve been reading headlines about Bitcoin surging astronomically in the last few weeks. I’ve wondered why I didn’t buy those bitcoins I thought about buying a year ago. Jealousy levels were peaking.

Hack reporter Stephen Stockwell told me that it’s “too late” to get in the game, but he’s also been saying that for over a year (when Bitcoin was worth less than $1000), so obviously Stephen doesn’t know shit.

So I decided to take a punt.

Trouble was, I had no idea how to actually buy bitcoins. So I did this:

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3.3 million search results come up. Nice. Am I out of my depth? Clearly. Will I keep going? Most definitely.

Doing research was getting pretty boring after I read a few articles. But people kept talking about an app called “Coinbase” so I downloaded that to my phone.

Easy enough. I went through the steps of setting up an account - verifying my phone number, country, currency.

But to start buying, I had to verify my identity. So I followed the instructions and uploaded photos of my driver’s license. Turns out I wasn’t the only opportunist out there, and I ran into a roadblock: Coinbase wasn’t coping with its high volume of traffic.

I kept trying, but then got locked out of my account for trying to upload my ID too many times. They made me wait 24 hours.

No joke: that night I had a dream that bitcoin surged from $24,000 to $64,000 overnight. I was fuming. Then I realised it was a dream, checked that the price was still relatively stable, so it was all good. Is it problematic that I’ve already started dreaming about Bitcoin, after just downloading an app and reading half an article? Probably. Let’s move on.

I finally uploaded my ID the next day and got the all-clear. I linked my debit card to my account, and then got this very satisfying tick, meaning I could start buying.

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I noticed that the price of Bitcoin had dropped overnight, and with my extremely limited knowledge about how markets work, I figured that now was a relatively good time to buy. You don’t want to buy when the price is surging right? That feels logical.

So how much am I going to buy? I’ve been inspired by this advice: only bet what you’re willing to lose. And honestly, the idea of losing any money stresses me out, so I let myself part with $20 AUD.

Coinbase takes a fee, so I actually only end up with $18.52 worth of bitcoin, which is 0.00086094 bitcoin.

I’m officially in the game. And I’m drunk with power.

I figure I better “diversify my portfolio” because that’s seems like a thing. So I instantly smack down $20 on Litecoin and $20 on Ethereum - two other forms of cryptocurrency you can buy on Coinbase.

Their value is much lower than Bitcoin - at the time of writing they were at $976.32 and $411.76 respectively.

I’m basically a cryptocurrency lord right now. I don’t know what to do with myself, but I make like a vegan and tell everyone about my new lifestyle.

I’m curious to figure out how I’ll actually sell my bitcoins once they surge to even bigger heights and I can reap my fortune. So I hit the ‘sell’ button on Coinbase to see what happens.

This happens.

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Yeah. You can’t actually sell bitcoins in Australia on Coinbase. You can go through some steps to transfer your coins to a different wallet and then sell them, but it doesn’t seem that straightforward.

Have I just wasted $60 on cryptocurrency that I can’t actually sell? Possibly.

My next step is to hit up my friend Dave, who knows a lot more about Bitcoin than I do.

Here's Dave’s advice to me:

If I want to cash out the coins I have on Coinbase, I could start up an account with another exchange, and invest them in smaller alt-coins (alt-coins are cryptocurrencies that aren’t Bitcoin). It’s actually pretty easy.

Remember that if I’m gonna keep this up, the exchanges are open 24 hours a day, unlike the stock markets which run 9am - 5pm. Something crazy could happen overnight while I’m sleeping - so it’s worth setting up a trigger on my account that will automatically sell (or buy) for me at a certain price.

I could always just “hodl” my coins as is. Basically “hodling” is slang for keeping your coins - not buying or selling. It originated from a message board in 2013 when someone made a typo for “hold”.

If I want to get serious in investing, keep an eye on forums like Bitcoin talk, or look through subreddits for other altcoins.

The moral of the story

Even though it’s a fall-back career for former politicians like Queensland's Rob Pyne, I’m not quitting my day job to trade crypto. And if you’re going to invest some cash in bitcoins, do a lot more research than I did.

I would suggest, at the very least, reading this informative explainer about Bitcoin here.

I’d also suggest that you read up on the exchange you’re looking to buy from: if you’re after a short-term investment, how easy is it to actually cash-in and sell? And what are the fees associated with that?

I’d also advocate for the one piece of advice I did actually follow: only bet what you’re willing to lose. While I basically lost $60, at least I didn’t ride that adrenaline rush and buy more.

Although, I will say: in the week that I’ve been watching my micro-investment grow (and fall), my $18.52 of bitcoin did, at one point, reach over $22 - which is about a 20 per cent increase. If I managed to actually cash out, I could have bought a whole coffee.

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For those of you playing at home: a week on, my portfolio of Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum is only worth $56.