For those of you who are new to the world of cryptocurrency, you're paying too much to trade!

Ahhh Coinbase. The simple, easy on-ramp to the world of crypto. It is very user-friendly and allows for a relatively frictionless way to buy cryptocurrency with fiat (your government-issued money). For now, it only offers a few major coins: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin, with more coins coming in the near future.

For convenience, you can't beat Coinbase. But it's like that jug of milk you picked up at the convenience store around the corner. The price is marked up big-time. For a better deal on a jug of milk, you go to Costco, right?

Coinbase is the convenience store of the cryptocurrency market. Once you have become comfortable with using it, however, it's time for an upgrade. Fortunately, it's not too difficult to get set up. The GDAX exchange is already available to every Coinbase user as it is the "back-end" that is operating all of your transactions. You can log into it with the same credentials as your Coinbase account at this link (don't forget to use Google Authenticator!).

Once in the GDAX exchange, you can trade for the same currencies, but purchasing, sending, and swapping your currencies is cheaper. You can, for example, buy Ethereum on GDAX, then send it to another exchange such as Binance or Bittrex for much, much less than it would cost to do so with Coinbase. Both Bittrex and Binance are also quite easy to set up through a registration process and authentication (Google Authenticator is superior to SMS verification for security, by the way). Once on a full exchange such as Binance, you can trade your BTC or ETH for a wide variety of coins. This is considerably cheaper than exchange services like Shapeshift or Changelly that are built into some multi-coin wallets.

Important tip: Don't leave your coins on any exchange for a long period of time. Send them to a supported wallet. If the exchange has an issue, gets hacked, goes out of business, or whatever, you will not have access to your funds if they are on the exchange. Always send your funds to a wallet where you control the keys.

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https://techcrunch.com