Friday, 14 November 2014

Earn Bitcoins in 8 different ways - 2


3. Earn Bitcoins from interest payments %

If you already have some Bitcoins, put your Bitcoins to work for you. Earn Bitcoins through interest payments by lending them out.
  • Lend directly to someone you know. This allows you to assess personally, whether you regard the borrower as trustworthy. Then the two of you only need to agree on the terms like duration and interest rate and off you go. The drawback is, however, that you probably will not have too many acquaintances who match your amount, duration and interest rate requirements. But it's a nice way to earn Bitcoins.
  • Peer to peer Bitcoin lending websites with listings from various borrowers are another option. Bitbond is such a peer-to-peer lending site. Borrowers publish funding requests and you can contribute to their loan. You can fund small portions of many loans and thereby diversify default risk. Bitcoin loans usually work the same way as fiat currency loans. The borrower gets a certain amount of money over a specified time and repays the money with interest. There are two things you need to be aware of when you lend Bitcoins. The site needs to be trustworthy and the borrower needs to be trustworthy. When the site assesses the creditworthiness of their applicants the information given about borrowers can be more credible.
  • A Bitcoin banking like model. Here you place your Bitcoins as a deposit with a site that pays you a fixed interest rate on these deposits. As everything here, this method has advantages and disadvantages. The good thing is, that you don't need to diversify your Bitcoins over many borrowers. You just place your Bitcoins with your Bitcoin bank and that's it. You earn Bitcoins as a steady stream of interest income. However, be very careful. In the previous case of peer to peer lending you diversify your lending activity over many borrowers. In the banking model you trust one single borrower which is the bank. If they don't do a good job in managing your Bitcoins, everything can be lost at once. That's because the bank takes you deposits and invests them in assets, the most important assets usually being loans. If they do a good job you are fine because you simply collect the interest payment. If they don't do a good job you take the hit. An there is no deposit insurance in the Bitcoin world, too.
To sum it up, Bitcoin lending is a good way to make more Bitcoins from what you already have. And please notice this disclaimer: only lend through sites that you trust. Such sites will comply with the usual requirements that you expect from non-Bitcoin related sites as well. That means they have proper terms and conditions in place, they disclose their status of incorporation and contact details. Some sites in the Bitcoin world do not do this and in the end people wonder what happened to their Bitcoins. Therefore, when you earn Bitcoins from Bitcoin lending watch who you deal with and only use Bitcoins which you can afford to lose.
Back to top ▲

4. Earn Bitcoins from mining 

Bitcoin mining is the process by which new Bitcoins are originated. When you perfom mining, your computer adds new Bitcoin transactions to the block chain (a public ledger where all Bitcoin transactions are saved) and searches for new blocks. A block is a file that has the most recent Bitcoin transactions recorded in it. When your computer discovers a new block, you receive a certain number of Bitcoins. Currently a block contains BTC 25. This number changes throughout time and gets smaller by the factor 0.5 every four years.
If you want to earn Bitcoins through mining, be aware that it is a costly and time consuming process. Read the respective introductions and manuals to learn more about it. This website is a good starting point. Unless you are mining just out of curiosity and want to get to know the technology, it is important to make a cost / benefit analysis. It is quite similar to what has been mentioned at the above BitcoinPlus entry. Hardware prices, electricity costs, bitcoin difficulty and the Bitcoin value influence the profitability of Bitcoin mining. If all this seems interesting to you and you want to earn Bitcoins from mining make your first calculations on the Mining Dashboard.
Back to top ▲

5. Earn Bitcoins by getting tipped 

When you earn Bitcoins through tips, it is much like accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment. You need a wallet, a QR-code with your Bitcoin address on it and the people who can potentially give you a tip need to be aware of it. There are various places where you can receive Bitcoin tips.
  • Again, your shop is the first thing to start with in case you have one. It's just a bit simpler because since tips are voluntary you don't really need to check the incoming payment and the exact amount. Simply display the QR-code and check each day what came in.
  • With tips, the nice thing is that you don't necessarily need to have a shop. A blog for instance or any other website is sufficient. You can display the QR-code or just your Bitcoin address at the bottom of your page or wherever it seems convenient and let people decide how much they want to tip you. You can also view how this looks like in the footer of this German blog bitcoins21.
  • Another really cool way to get tipped online is ChangeTip. This service allows you to integrate tips on all major social networks, YouTube and GitHub. Very nice!
  • Imagine you have a restaurant and want to encourage your customers to tip with Bitcoins, there is this nice service: bctip is a website where you can print little paper vouchers that have a certain Bitcoin balance on them. When your customer has one of these, he or she can simply give it to you or your employees and you can redeem it like a coupon.
Back to top ▲

6. Earn Bitcoins through trading 

Some people would say that trading is a form of gambling. While there these two things have something in common, there are also fundamental differences. When you gamble (and assuming that it's a fair game) you have a certain probability of winning and losing. When you trade assets, this gets much more complex. I don't want to go into too much detail here. I just want to outline the concept how you can earn Bitcoins with trading.
The safest way to make money with trading is through arbitrage. In short, this means that you see an opportunity to buy an asset in one place for a certain price and sell it immediately at another place for a higher price. It is important that you know you can sell the asset immediately at a certain price. If this does not hold, then we are talking of speculation - or gambling if you prefer.
The Bitcoin world, in my opinion offers such arbitrage opportunities. But they are not as simple to execute as it might seem at first sight. Price differences between exchanges often come for certain reasons. The speed of fiat money transfers and access restrictions are just the most striking ones. You have to find out the concrete opportunities yourself. One place to start is this thread on Bitcoin StackExchange. Also, not every opportunity is available to everyone. Go and have a look at the price differences between exchanges and check out if you can find opportunities.
If you want to give arbitrage a try, you need to get Bitcoins almost instantly. One of the few sites where you don't need to sign up is bit4coin. If you spot an opportunity and want to act on it immediately, this is a way to get a hold of Bitcoins fast. If you manage to earn Bitcoins from arbitrage, this can be very profitable after all. But start cautiously as it really does require some experience.

No comments:

Post a Comment