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Depends on what cryptocurrency you want to experiment with. Bitcoin Cash looks to have $0.0007 transaction fees [1]. Seems like $5 would get you some basic experience. Another option is to get some free tokens from a testnet faucet, then everything you play with is free.

[1] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/charts/median-transactio...

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You're not going to be learning much about smart contracts, DeFi, NFTs, etc. on obscure chains though.

Depends on what you want to learn. Rocketpool has a testnet setup so you can play with ETH staking: https://docs.rocketpool.net/guides/testnet/overview.html

Get some free testnet ETH and try it out!

I haven't looked into minting NFT on testnet. You can write your own contracts on testnet tho but that's a heavier lift.

Disclosure: I own crypto and think ETH will be <$0.05 USD for a transfer within 4 years.

Depends, a non technical friend of mine asked me about polygon because their favorite artist was mining NFT's. The coinbase -> metamask -> mint process was less than .25cents

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