This is probably a retarded question in the eyes of regular traders

Bank transfer to a reputable exchange, then buy bitcoin and transfer it to a shady exchange like bittrex to trade the p&d shitcoins. Coinbase, Bitstamp, Bitfinex are good ones.

>>1891855
Are the good ones the reputable or not so reputable ones :P? Don't want to get them mixed up

>>1891837
I'll just talk about what I use
Poloniex is the best retail trading platform, but you can't deposit or withdraw real money; they only allow you to trade between cryptos

Coinbase is the straightest way to buy btc/eth with real money, in the sense that it is a very normal corporation that links with your bank. However, this is sort of missing the point of crypto, and they charge very high fees and do some sketchy shit during periods of high volume where they freeze balances (read my note comment below)

GDAX is also a good way to buy, it's based off of coinbase but less jewey and more professional

Whaleclub is a margin-only platform that lets you use bitcoin to trade many world markets: you can trade forex pairs, the major commodities, about a dozen blue chip companies, the major stock exchange indexes, and the major crypto pairs. Note though that at no point do you ever own anything besides bitcoin: you are merely using bitcoin as collateral to make leveraged trades on these pairs. Upside is you can get exposure with bitcoin you can't get literally anywhere else, and you can make highly leveraged trades on BTC/ETH (10x) and similar things. Downside is financing rates for leverage are often quite high, and the platform is not an exchange: like I said before, you never own anything except bitcoin. Also never ever use their "Turbo Trading" feature, it's literally just binary options that give even shittier profit %s than normal binary options. It's such a blatant scam that I'm surprised they keep it available, since it probably turns experienced traders off of the site because they see it as a hokey scam for noobs

In general you don't need to buy cryptos with USD, and all new cryptos won't be purchaseable directly with USD. What you should do is buy bitcoin with $$$, then trade bitcoin pairs with the other cryptos. What I do for example is use coinbase/gdax to buy eth/btc for holding and trading, and then do all retail trading on Poloniex and Whaleclub

>>1891884
Note comment: What coinbase does i.e. freeze balances during periods of high volatility is very frustrating because you can't always buy massive dips/sell massive pumps.

Ostensibly, the freezing is caused by maintenance/server issues during these periods, and is done to ensure they don't make mistakes and lose coins etc etc. However, it is suspicious: lets say bitcoin abruptly spikes massively, they could freeze balances, sell the contents of your wallet, and rebuy it back once btc has fallen to refill your wallet before unfreezing the balances. Basically, it has been suggested that they freeze balances to use their customer funds to open positions themselves.

In my opinion this is unlikely because as a corporation that interacts with banks they would be blasted to hell if they ever got caught, and if they ever mistime the market when doing this they will suffer massively

>>1891837
Buy btc at localbitcoins and trade them at bittrex/poloniex.

>>1891884
>>1891893
Thank you the advice is very much appreciated, screen capped and saved. Will look into all of what you mentioned in more detail :)