safe exchanges I would recommend if you want to buy btc is coinbase, and bitterex.com
Crypto I recommend
1st DGB (Digibyte - Most secure, fastest coin - developed by Stanford and MIT students voluntarily, Best technology. Cheap to buy and use day to day, a real replacement for FIAT currencies. They don't give a fuck about hype they purely focus on developing the technology. Longest running blockchain apart. They never got funded but an ICO, all purely volunteers with vision, no developer for DGB gets any payment or salary for developing it. Opensource and many coins actually use their technology but don't really disclose they do Decentralized, They created a validation system to replace login password and username and masked. Lots of incredible tech years before many other crypto claim to be the first to release. Digibyte is actually the first in almost every technology currently available for crypto)
2nd BTC (Bitcoin, Open Source, vanilla foundation of crypto, will never go away but price is highly manipulated similar to stock market Decentralized, no real innovation since its inception.)
3rd ETH (Ethereum, Open Source, good alternative to BTC, excellent roadmap and a genius founder that is all about the tech and not the money, Decentralized Backed by many Tech Companies, e.g. microsoft, google, etc)
4th XLM (Stellar Lumens, open source, fast, Backed by IBM, Microsoft etc. An alternative opensource, ledger based )
5th Litecoin (Decentralized, cheap, no real innovation since its inception)
6th XRP - (This is a co-op between banks to enter the crypto market, it is extremely manipulated, centralized. coins created and destroyed at will by the creators, basically a bank system on a crypto platform. No one trusts banks and wallstreet anymore. It is still an interesting alternative but a pain in the ass to setup with a minimum required amount you have to keep in your wallet.)
Coins I do not recommend
Everything else
Heisen can chime in here with what rules I put down for him with crypto.