Five ways for beginners to get cryptocurrency with near-zero costs

in #technology6 years ago (edited)

This article discusses five ways to start getting cryptocurrency with near-zero out of pocket expenses.

Image Source: pixabay.com; License: CC0, Public Domain

Introduction

As you may know, there is a fixed supply of bitcoin. In the end, around 2140, there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins. Of those, somewhere around 17 million have already been minted. So let's set a very conservative portfolio goal and divide today's population into the total number of coins that will ever be minted.

21 million btc / 7.55 billion people
= 0.00278145 btc per person.    

So maybe that's a reasonable accumulation goal for someone to dip their toes into the cryptocurrency waters without jeopardizing large amounts of real money on a high risk venture. At today's prices of $6350 per btc, that's about $18 dollars. If a large portion of global population starts competing for those 21 million coins, than $18 in bitcoin will have returns like a Mega Millions Lottery. If not, it won't hurt much to lose. (As they say, this is a high risk endeavor. Never invest more than you're willing to lose!)

Of course, there are tons of other cryptocurrencies that might interest you, and each of those offers their own growth potential and portfolio goals, but for this article I'm going to focus on a few coins where you can get started without in depth technical knowledge and without putting any substantial amounts of your hard-earned cash at risk.

In coming sections, I'll be telling you how to obtain five cryptocurrencies without laying out financial resources. They are: bitcoin, STEEM, PRE, LVTC, and STORJ. I am assuming that you have a Windows computer. Most or all of these options may be available for other platforms, but I just haven't looked into it.

Section 1: Bitcoin / The Old Standard

Bitcoin is the granddaddy of cryptocurrencies. It's been around since 2009, and on average it has doubled in value every 5 months. Even factoring in the reversal that we've seen in 2018, it still averaged a doubling in value every 7 months during the last two years. So this is the first cryptocurrency that gets most people's attention.

The conventional wisdom is that you can't mine it with a PC and that it's not worth the electricity for most home miners. However, if all we want to do is harvest about 0.0027 btc / $18 dollars, the conventional wisdom is not entirely true. At current prices, bitcoin mining actually is profitable for most places in the US.

If you have a relatively recent Windows computer or two, you can achieve your goal in a period of months using a software product called, Honey Miner. Here's my referral link where they'll give you 1000 satoshis (0.00001000 btc) just for signing up. There's a little bit of arm-waving there because Honey Miner doesn't actually mine bitcoin. It mines other currencies based on profitability, and pays its rewards in bitcoin. But at any rate, it's easy to set up and the marginal electricity cost won't be noticed on your electric bill. Also, you're not mining for today. You're mining it for its potential as a never-expiring "lottery ticket." (just remember that it may eventually go to zero! There are no guarantees.)

You'll also need a wallet so you can withdraw your payouts. There are many choices out there. I've recently seen recommendations for Abra, so you can try that, or you may want to do some research and choose your own.

Image Source: pixabay.com; License: CC0, Public Domain

Section 2: Steem / Social Media

Another of my personal favorites is Steem. This is a blockchain that was built for social media. The main interface is steemit.com, but an entire ecosystem of web sites is presently emerging, so keep your ear to the ground. My personal favorite at the moment is steempeak.com.

To get an account, you can just click on the "Signup" link. It takes some time for an account to get approved, but hopefully the process is not very difficult (and after next week's hard fork, it should probably get even easier).

Once you have an account, you can collect cryptocurrency doing things like blogging, commenting on other people's posts, and sharing videos, links, and memes. Here are some sites that all provide unique interfaces onto the Steem block chain:

Once you have your Steem account, you can use it with any of those sites. One word of caution is that you should never use your password or "Owner" key with pretty much any site. You should use your "posting" key most of the time, and only use your "active" key if you need to be able to transfer cryptocurrency.

Section 3: Presearch / Web search

At the moment, the Presearch web site just provides a front end for a bunch of others like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, but the difference is that they pay you "Pre" tokens for your searches (referral link - https://presearch.org/signup?rid=101127). Eventually, I believe they plan to add their own decentralized search mechanism to compete with the old centralized search dinosaurs.

Section 4: Livestoken / Maxthon Browser

If you download the browser from maxthon.com and add the mining plug in, the browser will track your daily web browsing and pay you Livestokens (LVTC) for your activity. The plan is to integrate this into an advertising and commerce foundation known as the Symbiosism Economy.

Maxthon was previously MYIE2, and I have been happily using that browser family on and off since the early 2000s. LVTC mining was just added within the last year.

In addition to browser mining, another of my favorite features of the browser is the split browsing window. You can hit the <F10> key and look at two web sites side by side in the same browser at the same time. If you sign up for the "cloud browsing" feature, it also lets you share your bookmarks between computers and provides a "OneNote" type of capability that I think actually predates OneNote. It also has numerous plugins and comes with AdBlock Plus.

Image Source: pixabay.com; License: CC0, Public Domain

Section 5: Storj / Rent out your unused disk storage

If you visit the storj.io web site and download their client, it will walk you through the process of carving out some of your unused disk space so you can rent it out to the Internet. As I understand it, the files are encrypted and fragmented, so there should be no security concerns for the people who use the disk or for you.

As with bitcoin, you'll need to provide your own wallet. You may want to use the web site, myetherwallet.com with the Metamask browser plug in or else do some research and choose your own wallet.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Five ways to start accumulating cryptocurrency for almost no money by using computer equipment that you already own. The article covered ways to start collecting bitcoin, STEEM, PRE, LVTC, and STORJ. The hardest and most intimidating part of getting started with cryptocurrency is probably choosing your wallet, but the good news is that if you get more serious about it, you can always find another wallet if you're not happy with your first choice.

I also wanted to mention that you can run the World Community Grid BOINC client and use it to mine both Gridcoin and ByteBalls (referral link, simultaneously, but that set up is a little more complicated, so probably not a good jumping-in point for a beginner.


Thank you for your time and attention.

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

He is also a co-founder of the Steemit's Best Classical Music Facebook page, and the @classical-music steemit curation account.

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Coins mentioned in post:

CoinPrice (USD)📈 24h📈 7d
BTCBitcoin6416.155$0.89%0.19%
PREPresearch0.094$-0.83%3.26%
STEEMSteem0.817$1.04%14.83%
STORJStorj0.289$8.1%27.83%

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