Why Bitcoin Has Got too much Attention

Looking to earn some extra cash or build up your wealth portfolio? Bitcoin is a great option for doing so. When most people think of earning money through bitcoin, they think about mining and investing in the all-digital currency, but these days there are numerous other methods people can use to generate bitcoin and cash for themselves.

Let’s go over some of the most well-known and reliable ways of making money with bitcoin.

The most effective way to make money with Bitcoin

One overlooked method to make money with Bitcoin is to build and manage your own Bitcoin faucet. You can earn anywhere between $50-$800 a month by running your own Bitcoin faucet. The process of running a faucet is pretty simple and it’s all explained in detail in this guide.

By running your own Bitcoin faucet you will be paying out small amounts of Bitcoins to your users (automatically) but will be gaining much more revenue through ads you put on your site. Here’s how to get started with your own Bitcoin faucet.

Setting up your own Bitcoin website to generate a passive income

One of the most under looked opportunities to make money with Bitcoin is probably to start your own Bitcoin information website. Unlike a faucet, this type of website will basically explain the basics of Bitcoin to new users, while making money from ads and affiliate offers. It takes a bit of time and a small amount of money to get started but in the long run will probably yield the best return on your investment. Here’s a video course explaining this whole process.

A good example for such a website is 99Bitcoins.

Mini Earnings- A bit of your time, a bit of cash

There are a wide range of websites that will pay you small amounts of money in exchange for completing certain tasks. Most of the time these so-called “faucets” involve looking at ads in one way or other.

Basically, site owners get paid when people view and interact with ads. A few websites, such as bitcoin faucets, will share some of those earnings with their visitors. What you have to do to earn your bitcoins varies from website, to website. With some, you’ll kill aliens or feed animals, with others you’ll simply watch videos or click on ads.

Be warned, however, some websites will infect you with malware and viruses.

Writing- Turn your literary skills into cash

The Internet is filled with endless forums and message boards, and this creates opportunities. These forums offer great opportunities to spread word about products and services, and some companies will even pay you to promote their products on these forums. Often, this involves little more than modifying your signature and putting an ad code into it.

Other websites will pay you in bitcoin to write articles and blog posts. You could also set up your own blog, place ads on it, and get paid in bitcoin. If you happen to know another language you could also do some translation work for bitcoin.

Either way, if you know how to write, you can earn bitcoin. Most opportunities are in English, but there are some opportunities in other languages.

Selling products and services

Remember, bitcoin is a currency. This means you can earn money off of selling just about every type of product and service simply by accepting bitcoin as payment. Even major websites, like Overstock.com, now accept bitcoin as payment.

If you happen to be a top-notch marketer, or are good with arts and crafts (among many other things), you can sell your services and wares, and accept bitcoin in exchange. As with any other type of business you will have to get out there and market yourself and your products or services.

If you’re already selling something, you should consider accepting bitcoin as payment, if you haven’t done so already. If you aren’t selling anything, now is a great time to look at the market to identify needs, and to find ways to meet those needs. Bitcoin offers a wide range of entrepreneurial opportunities for the bold and ambitious, and the all-digital currency makes conducting business around the world cheaper and easier.

Bitcoin mining- Mine your own wealth

Bitcoin mining is arguably the oldest way to create wealth through bitcoin. Bitcoins are created through solving complex algorithms that create blocks that are added to the public ledger. The public ledger is the history of all transactions conducted through bitcoin.

Long story short, miners basically build the public ledger and allow the whole bitcoin system to function. As they create new blocks, miners are rewarded with new bitcoins. This encourages more miners to get in on the action, which allows the bitcoin community to grow.

Once upon a time, people could use their home PC to mine bitcoins, but over time mining has become more difficult as the algorithms have become more complex. Now, you’ll either have to buy a specially built mining rig, or join up with a bitcoin mining pool that harnesses the power of multiple computers.

If you want to check out the profitability of Bitcoin mining today use a Bitcoin mining calculator.

Investing- Tap into bitcoin’s ever growing value

Back in October bitcoins were selling for less than $250 dollars. As of writing this article, Bitcoins are selling for more than $450 dollars. If you had invested in bitcoin back in October, you would have nearly doubled your invest in the course of a few short months!

Since bitcoin is limited in supply and production is tightly regulated through the algorithms themselves, bitcoin has numerous anti-inflationary considerations built it. This means that over time bitcoin should gain in value.

Gambling- If you got some luck you might make some money

By now, you’re probably familiar with online casinos. They’re pretty straightforward. You play a game of luck, or skill-based game like poker, and if you win, you earn some money. Bitcoin makes it easy to gamble and you can earn some huge amounts of bitcoins if you score a major jackpot. Of course, when it comes to gambling the house always wins in the long run, so risks are high.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a form of digital currency, created and held electronically. No one controls it. Bitcoins aren’t printed, like dollars or euros – they’re produced by people, and increasingly businesses, running computers all around the world, using software that solves mathematical problems.

It’s the first example of a growing category of money known as cryptocurrency.

What makes it different from normal currencies?

Bitcoin can be used to buy things electronically. In that sense, it’s like conventional dollars, euros, or yen, which are also traded digitally.

However, bitcoin’s most important characteristic, and the thing that makes it different to conventional money, is that it is decentralized. No single institution controls the bitcoin network. This puts some people at ease, because it means that a large bank can’t control their money.

Who created it?

A software developer called Satoshi Nakamoto proposed bitcoin, which was an electronic payment system based on mathematical proof. The idea was to produce a currency independent of any central authority, transferable electronically, more or less instantly, with very low transaction fees.

What is bitcoin based on?

Conventional currency has been based on gold or silver. Theoretically, you knew that if you handed over a dollar at the bank, you could get some gold back (although this didn’t actually work in practice). But bitcoin isn’t based on gold; it’s based on mathematics.

Around the world, people are using software programs that follow a mathematical formula to produce bitcoins. The mathematical formula is freely available, so that anyone can check it.

The software is also open source, meaning that anyone can look at it to make sure that it does what it is supposed to.

What are its characteristics?

Bitcoin has several important features that set it apart from government-backed currencies.

1. It's decentralized

The bitcoin network isn’t controlled by one central authority. Every machine that mines bitcoin and processes transactions makes up a part of the network, and the machines work together. That means that, in theory, one central authority can’t tinker with monetary policy and cause a meltdown – or simply decide to take people’s bitcoins away from them, as the Central European Bank decided to do in Cyprus in early 2013. And if some part of the network goes offline for some reason, the money keeps on flowing.

2. It's easy to set up

Conventional banks make you jump through hoops simply to open a bank account. Setting up merchant accounts for payment is another Kafkaesque task, beset by bureaucracy. However, you can set up a bitcoin address in seconds, no questions asked, and with no fees payable.

3. It's anonymous

Well, kind of. Users can hold multiple bitcoin addresses, and they aren’t linked to names, addresses, or other personally identifying information. However…

4. It's completely transparent

…bitcoin stores details of every single transaction that ever happened in the network in a huge version of a general ledger, called the blockchain. The blockchain tells all.

If you have a publicly used bitcoin address, anyone can tell how many bitcoins are stored at that address. They just don’t know that it’s yours.

There are measures that people can take to make their activities more opaque on the bitcoin network, though, such as not using the same bitcoin addresses consistently, and not transferring lots of bitcoin to a single address.

5. Transaction fees are miniscule

Your bank may charge you a £10 fee for international transfers. Bitcoin doesn’t.

6. It’s fast

You can send money anywhere and it will arrive minutes later, as soon as the bitcoin network processes the payment.

7. It’s non-repudiable

When your bitcoins are sent, there’s no getting them back, unless the recipient returns them to you. They’re gone forever.

So, bitcoin has a lot going for it, in theory. But how does it work, in practice? Read more to find out how bitcoins are mined, what happens when a bitcoin transaction occurs, and how the network keeps track of everything.