Once you’ve set up your crypto account on an exchange and have your crypto stored on some kind of a wallet (on the exchange) or on Metamask or on a physical key or USB stick, you can then spend it.
There aren’t alot of places outside of the online gaming/metaverse market the and NFT market to spend your crypto but that’ll soon change in 2022.
Tesla has announced that they may take crypto payments in the near future and you may have noticed that even some local small stores in your area may accept crypto.
Most people in the beginning may not want to spend their crypto but they just want to invest it and either just leave it where it is or transfer it to different types of crypto or wherever there is more money to be made.
But for now lets just assume that you want to spend it and perhaps buy an NFT piece of digital art or maybe go onto one of the virtual worlds and buy an avatar or some furniture for a house that you may be buying on SecondLife or the Sandbox.
Now to do this you usually you can’t just transfer money directly from your exchange but you must first transfer it to another site like Metamask and from there you can spend it.
People in the NFT space constantly talk about putting their Ethereum into MetaMask and then going on the OpenSea website to buy their NFT digital cats or dogs or monkeys or drunken apes on battleships etc.:)
Now if you wanted to give somebody standing in front of you or on the telephone some crypto, then you must get their crypto address NOT their private key but their wallet address.
Now these addresses are usually long about 20 characters so most people would use their smartphone and scan the persons QR code if they are standing in front of you.
You need to know what type of coin you are sending or receiving because the addresses are different.
If you are sending ethereum there will be a fee like a wire transfer fee called gas fees.
Some exchanges like Coinbase have a nice policy that if you send crypto by email then you are not charged a fee but check with your exchange to verify their policies.
When you start to send people some of your crypto then you will dealing with their public key which they will give to you.
They may be a charity and they may list their preferred crypto coins that you can donate with their public key beside each one like this example:
BTC: 1EhL4JM3vUkHc0NvysXyg1DYKhDsu4sdcf
ETH: 0x8db33E38Ef4801Fe64C6aEaD1F51Ee29e0ce6e3d
TRON: TEh8MPtnXVZNgA49QGkRo3pVCsDaJ1gpE5
BSC: 0x04baE02393aEa96eFbaF9427Db01af0B3395A873
DOGE: DPwWWfS63cWxcuhUbP2bZc8puLry2P26gU
TRON: TEh8MPtnXVZNgA49QGkRo3pVCsDaJ1gpE5
(under construction Jan 2022)