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My apologies if these questions have been asked and answered before.

I am relatively new to crypto. I started mining Bitcoin back in June (2021) using Nicehash Quickminer (www.nicehash.com)

I have also managed to transfer some of my Bitcoin over to Crypto.com in order to trade for other coins not available on the Nicehash exchange.

Basically, all of my coins (I own maybe 15 to 20 types of crypto now) are currently living on the exchanges mentioned above.

I heard that keeping your coins on an exchange is unsafe and that they should be moved to a cold wallet when not used for trading. Which cold wallet? What are the differences between all the cold wallets? Is a hardware wallet safer than one online? Do all places hosting online wallets hold every kind of crypto?

And finally, when it comes time to trade in my crypto for actual currency (CAD in my case), what needs to be done? Do I connect my bank account to whatever site is hosting my wallet? Do I have to put the coins on the exchange and trade them for CAD there, before moving the CAD to my bank account? How long do transactions take? Will I be paid at the rate displayed when I clicked SELL or at whatever rate is there when the transaction is completed?

So many questions, but I'm basically asking for a roadmap of how the coin goes from mined to bank. This is not specific to Bitcoin.

PaulG
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    Welcome to bitcoin.stackeschange.com. This Q&A website only addresses questions about Bitcoin, not altcoins and works best when you ask one question at a time. I suggest you edit the question to focus on the one Bitcoin question that is most important to you right now. – RedGrittyBrick Oct 05 '21 at 15:12

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I think you have two main questions -

  1. What is safe way to keep coins?
  2. What is the process to convert coins to Fiat money when needed?

Answer-1: Hardware wallets are safest like Trezor, Ledger etc, you can research more about how do they differ and buy based on that. Software wallets are bit less secure but wallets like Electrum provides ways to make them super secure if you use their multisig features. You can search and learn more about Electrum, though it works only for BTC. There are other software or hot wallets but I would recommend hardware wallets for sure. Whatever wallet you use, do follow their backup mechanism so that you can restore your coins if something happens to the wallet. Cold and hot wallets have their own software to help you do all of these. To send money to wallet, generate a address in wallets software then go to the exchange where your coin is and withdraw to your wallet’s address. it is that simple.

Answer-2: To convert to Fiat money, you will need to go to your exchange account, copy receive address from there and then send the coins from your wallet to the exchange address. Cold wallets have their own software to help you send the coins to any address you want. Once you receive coins on exchange you can convert that to Fiat money and transfer to your bank. Transfer time from your wallet to exchange really depends upon how much transaction fee you pay and how clogged the blockchain network is. In Bitcoin case it can be 10 minutes to few hours based on fee you paid. From exchange to Bank really depends upon bank transfer timelines and your exchange can let you the estimated time.

Noncentralised
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