Bitcoin (BTC) is a decentralized, digital currency that has no central issuer. In this article, we outline the 15 Best Ways to Earn Bitcoin.
Unlike fiat currencies, Bitcoin has a fixed limit of 21 million and is not backed by any country or government. Since Bitcoin’s introduction in 2009, this cryptocurrency has become one of the best-performing assets, rising from a value of basically zero to $9,000 over its ten-year existence.
The question that is on most people’s minds now is, ‘How can I make money with Bitcoin?’. Here are the 15 Best Ways to Earn Bitcoin.
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Contents
15 Best Ways to Earn Bitcoin
1. Become a Peer-to-Peer Marketplace Trader
One way to earn Bitcoin is to become a peer-to-peer marketplace trader. You can buy or sell Bitcoin on these marketplaces, such as LocalBitcoins, HodlHodl, Bisq, and Mycelium’s P2P marketplace, and you will often find that there is a premium to buy Bitcoin.
Therefore, you could make money by buying Bitcoin from exchanges at a spot price and selling P2P marketplaces at a premium. You could also buy Bitcoin below spot price from sellers on the marketplace and sell Bitcoin above the spot price, netting a nice profit if you have a high volume of trades.
People pay a premium for P2P marketplaces because they often do not have to give up their identity and financial information, unlike centralized exchanges. Many individuals have made a living from buying and selling Bitcoin on P2P platforms.
This method to earn Bitcoin requires some initial funds to get started buying and selling, but also incurs the risk of scammers, who are prevalent in P2P marketplaces, so be sure to check the buyer’s/seller’s feedback before trading with them and meet in a safe place if you are doing a face to face deal.
2. Coinbase Earn Bitcoins
Coinbase, allows you to earn Bitcoin by replying to emails and completing micro-tasks. Bitcoin exchange Coinbase in April 2018 acquired Earn.com. If you send a lot of emails or are in a marketing or public relations role, the potential for earning money with Earn.com is quite high, as you could earn money by replying to emails.
You can also earn money for completing micro-tasks. Coinbase Earn lists are a way you can make money online by joining a list of people with similar skills and completing micro-tasks.
For instance, there is a list for venture capitalists, marketers, students, and so on, and the pay for the tasks in each list differ depending on how difficult and how much experience and skills are needed. So while the student list is quite low in terms of payments, the VC list pays much more for the tasks on that list.
3. Puzzles and Art
If you are gifted with art or puzzles and cryptography, you might be able to win some big Bitcoin prizes. Let’s start with the art aspect first. There is a growing community of artists that use Bitcoin as inspiration and sell their artwork for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
If you are an aspiring artist or already work in the arts or fashion industry, you could sell your products for Bitcoin. Not just that, but artists like Pascal Boyart have incorporated QR codes into graffiti murals and received BTC donations.
Secondly, cryptographic puzzles are also frequently set through events or just randomly by someone who wants to give away BTC. For example, events such as Hacker’s Congress in Prague always have cryptographic puzzles where you can win Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Artists like Pascal Boyart have used their art as puzzles to be solved to find the private key that holds a certain amount of Bitcoin.
If you search Bitcointalk and Twitter, you might be able to find some Bitcoin or altcoin puzzles that you can try.
4. Jobs4Bitcoins Reddit Channel
The Reddit channel r/Jobs4Bitcoins is a place where you can post your skills and what type of work you are looking for, or if you are looking to hire someone, you can post an ad for a job you want to be done.
All jobs posted here pay in Bitcoin and are updated regularly, so you may have to check the channel frequently to see anything that matches your skills and experience.
5. Bitcoin Writer Jobs
If you are skilled with words, you could also earn Bitcoin by writing for news websites, such as Bitcoin Magazine, CoinDesk, or Brave New Coin. Smaller Bitcoin media companies are always on the lookout for good writers too. Media companies will generally have a jobs page where you can find more information, and most media companies in the cryptocurrency space pay with Bitcoin.
You can also find writer jobs on other platforms, such as Upwork, where you can find jobs for writing about cryptocurrency. Although you will not get paid in Bitcoin for these jobs, you will be able to convert the fiat currency into Bitcoin.
6. Browser Extensions: Tippin.me and BitTube AirTime
Two browser extensions that allow you to earn cryptocurrency are Tippin.me and the BitTube AirTime extension. The first, Tippin.me, is powered by Bitcoin’s Lightning Network and allows you to link your social media accounts to receive tips. Tippin.me is still in beta but could be used eventually across social media to monetize great insights and commentary.
Secondly, the BitTube AirTime browser extension allows you to earn the altcoin TUBEs for browsing the web and consuming content on YouTube. You can also earn money by linking your social media account to your BitTube AirTime account, similar to Tippin.me.
However, you are not paid in Bitcoin and would have to convert TUBE to BTC on the Bittrex exchange, but it is an easy way to start earning small amounts of BTC. After a few days of browsing, you will receive a payout to your BitTube wallet based on the amount of time you spent on the web.
7. Affiliate Links
By signing up for Bitcoin-related services and promoting your affiliate link, you can earn Bitcoin when people sign up to these services with your link.
For example, Binance and Bitmex are two cryptocurrency exchanges that give you affiliate links, whereby you earn Bitcoin when someone starts using the exchange using your link. There are also affiliate links for some Bitcoin wallets, such as Luno, and hardware wallets like Trezor.
It is an easy way to make money, where the more people that sign up with your links, the more money you’ll make. This requires a lot of internet traffic on your social media page to generate a significant amount of Bitcoin.
8. Bitcoin Mining to Earn Bitcoin
In the early days of Bitcoin, you could have used your laptop to mine on the Bitcoin network and earn 50 BTC if you found a valid block. However, mining is now more of a professional venture than a hobby with the rise of mining giants such as Bitmain and BitFury.
Unless you have very cheap electricity and/or you have enough capital to build a large mining farm, Bitcoin mining is not likely to be profitable for the average person. To set up a large mining farm, you will need to buy some ASIC miners, which are specialized mining machines. You can find a list of ASIC miners here.
Alternatively, you could use Honeyminer if you are not able to fund a large mining farm or do not have access to cheap electricity and it is a great way for non-technical people to earn Bitcoin.
The Honeyminer app can be downloaded onto your laptop and mines the most profitable cryptocurrencies identified by its proprietary algorithm and converts them to Bitcoin for you. You can use their website to see how much you could potentially earn and you will earn more the more CPUs and GPUs your laptop has. If you have a newer PC or laptop, you could earn up to $1-$3 per day per GPU, excluding electricity costs.
9. Trading: Margin Trading/Altcoin Trading
One of the fastest and more effective ways of earning Bitcoin is through trading; however, it is a very high-risk activity. You will also need some funds to start initially. Nevertheless, timing the market and learning how to trade can reap large benefits.
There are basically two ways you can make money trading. Firstly, you could margin trade Bitcoin on platforms like Bitmex or Kraken. With margin trading, you can open leveraged positions meaning that you amplify your gains or losses. For instance, the maximum leverage on Bitmex is 100, meaning you can trade up to 200 Bitcoin with just 2 Bitcoin deposits. On the other hand, on Kraken, the maximum leverage for BTC-USD is 5, meaning you would only be able to trade a maximum of around 10 Bitcoin with the same deposit as Bitmex.
With margin trading, risk management is much more important, and you also have to think about funding costs, i.e., your short or long positions with be charged each day because you are borrowing to open a position that is larger than the collateral you have.
Secondly, you could trade altcoins on platforms like Binance or Bittrex. Trading altcoins is slightly different from margin trading, as there is less complexity involved. You buy something with Bitcoin and sell it at a profit later on. With unleveraged positions, you could make as much money margin trading since altcoins sometimes are more volatile than Bitcoin itself. However, you should focus more on the order books for the altcoins you are looking to trade and ideally ones with significant volume so you can make large orders without moving the price too much and get in and out of positions easily.
While it is a high effort venture, it can be very rewarding. Since cryptocurrency markets are very volatile, there is a lot of potentials to make profits. The author would recommend spending at least 12 months learning technical analysis and practicing before trading with real money. While there are some good technical analysis guides online, such as BabyPips, the author would recommend the following books:
- Steve Nison’s Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques,
- Trading Chaos by Bill Williams,
- Bollinger on Bollinger Bands by John Bollinger
- Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor’s Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske.
You would also need to sign up for a few different exchanges to cover most of the different cryptocurrencies and an account on TradingView, which is arguably the best charting website.
10. Accept Bitcoin as a Means of Payment
If you run a business, you could choose to accept Bitcoin as a means of payment. Many restaurants and webshops accept Bitcoin. You could do so too using payment processors like CoinGate, CoinPayments.net, and BTCPay.
Alternatively, you could set up your own node and display a QR code for customers to use and pay for their goods/services. For example, Room 77 in Berlin set up a Lightning Network node to enable its customers to buy beer with Bitcoin.
If you run a website, you could use WordPress plugins to allow your visitors to pay for goods/services or give you a tip for your content. For example, MyCryptoCheckout lets you accept Bitcoin on your website but requires a membership fee of $59 per year to do more than three sales per month.
11. Bitcoin Casinos
Websites like Crypto-games.net and BitStarz are two examples of provably fair Bitcoin casinos where you can try your hand at games like blackjack, roulette, and poker for your chance to win a prize in Bitcoin.
A provably fair casino will provide a method for you to check that the results of the games you play are completely random. Obviously, gambling is definitely not the lowest risk way to make money, but you can earn a large amount of Bitcoin if lady luck is on your side.
12. Bitcoin Faucets
Bitcoin faucets are a way to earn small amounts of Bitcoin that are relatively risk-free. Every few minutes, these sites give away small amounts of Bitcoin for free. Faucets are a type of website known as “Pay to Click,” and users should be aware that there are minimum withdrawal amounts and that the faucet industry is very shady, so the best websites frequently change over time.
FaucetHub tracks Bitcoin faucet websites and acts as a micropayments wallet as well. It displays various metrics of different websites such as the amount paid in the last week, waiting time to claim more free Bitcoin, number of users, and reward.
One example of a Bitcoin faucet website is Cointiply, which claims to have paid out around $350,000 in Bitcoin to its users. You can earn small amounts of Bitcoin for micro-tasks such as watching videos, pay-to-click ads, and browser games.
13. Rent Out a Spare Room or Second Home on CryptoCribs
If you own a property or have a spare room, you could use CryptoCribs instead of Airbnb to earn Bitcoin. Even if you do not own a second property, you could use this platform to rent out your house or apartment when you are traveling or away from home.
Depending on where you live, you could generate a significant amount of Bitcoin by renting a spare room or second home. You might have to actively promote it in Bitcoin or cryptocurrency forums, as the platform’s use is not as widespread as Airbnb. But if you live in an area that has a lot of tourism or a thriving cryptocurrency community, then chances are you will make a decent side income from CryptoCribs.
14. Bitcoin Lending
If you are a large holder of Bitcoin, you can earn a return by borrowing these Bitcoin, just like how a bank borrows money from its customers for a mortgage or personal loan. BitBond is one of the leading companies that provide a platform for you to earn a return on the Bitcoin you borrow.
You can also lend your Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to exchanges like Poloniex to earn a passive income. It is one of the more high-risk ventures of earning Bitcoin, but if you do not have the time to invest in learning how to trade cryptocurrencies, it might be a useful alternative. As mentioned before, margin trading requires you to borrow money.
When you lend Bitcoin on Poloniex, you are lending to those individuals who are margin trading. The exchange ensures that in the event of losing trades, the borrower is refunded; however, it is not entirely risk-free as there are certain terms and conditions that you have to agree with the exchange. For example, in extreme situations where liquidity dries up or some other unusual financial event, the borrower may not receive his funds back.
15. Sell Your Product or Service on OpenBazaar
OpenBazaar is an open-source, decentralized marketplace that allows you to buy and sell goods and services, using cryptocurrencies as a payment method. Think of it as a cryptocurrency-version of eBay or Amazon.
There are no platform fees, listing fees, or monthly fees of any kind. So if you are already selling a product on eBay or Amazon, you can easily open up a shop on OpenBazaar and start earning Bitcoin. You can even sell services on OpenBazaar, so you do not even need a physical product actually to make money and earn Bitcoin in this way.
That’s all in this post; we will love to know which way you use to earn Bitcoin. You may be using different ways of earning Bitcoin, and it may be useful for our readers, so don’t forget to share your knowledge by commenting below.
