I'm posting this question here as someone mentioned to post this in the altcoin subforum. I ask this because i notice Ethereum price has gotten way up... its already $225 or so already. I have heard about this and litecoin previously but didn't think much about it. I took a look at ethereum and it was around $10 a coin earlier this year.
you have only heard about ethereum because they advertise it a lot and do it all over the internet!
otherwise there have been a lot more altcoins that have gone up a lot more than ethereum had percentage-wise.
so if it is profit that you are looking for then a lot of altcoins are a choice for you.
That means if you had bought say 100 coins, well that $1000 would be already $22500 or so. If you bought 500 coins, that $5000 would be over $100,000 as of now.
exactly what I meant by "percentage-wise". if you invested $1000 in another shitcoin that had gone up 6000% (a lot more than ETH had) you could have made it into $61,000.
and in the same period of time ETH has gone up only 600% meaning $1000 turns into $7000
Does anyone know if it was easy/hard to acquire ethereum earlier when it was $10?
similar to all other altcoins you go to a trading platform and buy these. and it is super easy to buy these with bitcoin and a bit harder with fiat since you have to verify your account.
....
you buy altcoins from exchanges
you can mine them also if you have good hardware and cheap electricity
you keep them in their wallet, which would be something similar to what bitcoin core is (not exactly but it is a good comparison considering size).
most of them don't have SPV wallets such as electrum so you either have to download their whole wallet (blockchain) and store it on your computer or use web wallets or exchanges to risk and store them which is not recommended at all.
also altcoins are good for trading only. don't try to keep holding them for long, if you want to start with them just learn what trading is and do that. otherwise stay away because you WILL lose money.