Understanding Crypto is hard

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine where he needed to get his hands on a wallet somewhere because he wants to buy vaping gear in Vietnam and I guess it is highly regulated / illegal because the only people he can find that supply it will only accept crypto and don't tell you where they are located.

He has never been involved in crypto so he came to me and explained that he was having a great deal of difficulty establishing a wallet and how it was all very confusing to him. For me, and in particular with exchanges without KYC I feel as though this was the easiest part of the process. I would imagine that the rigors associated with actually using the crypto that he acquires and the massive keys that you need in order to actually send any of it anywhere would be very daunting to him. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a massive learning curve there before someone "gets it."

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Combine this with the fact that this particular friend of mine is the kind of person that routinely locks himself out of social media and emails and needs a recovery password sent to him and I was thinking to myself that he is definitely someone that is going to lose all of whatever crypto he gets involved in.

I just offered to pay for the vaping stuff for him in exchange for cash but that is not really the point I am trying to get to in this. I am not a crypto master by any stretch of the imagination. I have wallets, I have holdings, I DO trade, but as far as truly understanding what all the information on my Blockfolio screen actually means, I don't pretend to really "get it."

I also don't really understand where the numbers come from and presume, much like the stock markets of the world that the prices are driven by simple supply and demand. But then there are strange happenings like what is going on with SBD right now and maybe someone can explain it to me.

SBD is constantly jumping up and down at the moment and i regularly see that it is worth 2-3 dollars per. Yet when I go to look at one of the exchanges I use such as ionomy in the "markets" section where trades occur, no one is actually willing to pay that much. Sure, everyone is SELLING it for that much but there are no open orders for anything near $2-3. I didn't bother digging any deeper to other exchanges but this is just because I am not really interested in selling my SBD anyway.

So maybe someone can tell me where this "market rate" comes from? I presume it can't just be made up but when I look at my various exchanges this market price is often dramatically overstated on a wide variety of coins and occasions. The tend to be quite accurate on the big boys such as ETH and BTC but once I drop out of the top say, 25 or so, the rates seem to vary wildly from one exchange to the other.

Maybe someone out there wants to help me understand this and if you can it might be time for me to open another wallet somewhere.