Genesis Mining

This year has seen the arrival of a number of “cloud” mining services - companies that will sell you mining contracts and pay you out with the proceeds. Generally this means you’re renting mining hardware directly, and you get paid out with whatever that hardware produces.

Genesis Mining is a bit different, in that you don’t rent the hardware directly. Instead, you get a contract for a set amount of hashing power, which you can target against various alt-coins like DarkCoin, LiteCoin, etc. At the end of the day, Genesis Mining converts your mining efforts back into Bitcoins and pays out into your own wallet.

The site has a nice dashboard that lets you allocate your hashing power to one or more alt-coins, or just set it to auto and they’ll calculate the most profitable coin to mine for you.

I signed up a bit over a month ago, and purchased a total of 6 MH/s, for 1.52954788 BTC, or about $940 USD at the time. I’ve left the mining set to “auto”, so Genesis Mining can figure out which coin is the most profitable.

While I’ve made back 0.351144 (23% of my initial investment) in a bit over a month, you can see that payouts are definitely trending down. I’m happy with the payouts so far, but I would like to know, on a daily basis, just what my MH/s are being used to mine.

I’ll update again in the future to show how it’s going. Hopefully, I’ll at least break even by the 6 month-mark.

Easy ways to earn Bitcoin for Beginners

The following is a guest post, written by John Delano.

Bitcoin has recently gained a lot of awareness from the press, due to its exponential price growth. People from all over the world are beginning to use the digital currency, looking to strike it rich, or simply take advantage of its unique features.

Scrape Bitcoin faucets

Bitcoin faucets have played an essential role in the history of Bitcoin. Faucets are websites which automatically dispense free BTC to a user who enters his or her Bitcoin address. This is an ideal way for newbies to get a small amount of BTC for free.

There are many different faucet websites, each with its own unique features. For example, some websites require players to complete a simple game, instead of solving a boring old CAPTCHA. A number of Bitcoin casino sites give out coins which can be used to bet on a dice roll or sports event. You could potentially earn a lot more from these sites, compared to regular faucets.

Mine Bitcoin

Mining is the process of generating Bitcoins through solving computationally-difficult problems. It also serves the purpose of confirming transactions, which secures the network. In layman’s terms, this simply means that you can use computers to crunch numbers, and earn BTC as a reward.

Bitcoin mining is actually a lot harder than it sounds. In 2009, when the virtual currency was first released, you may have been able to mine hundreds of BTC with any regular computer effortlessly. Today, miners employ specialized devices in a race to earn the 25 BTC block reward. In fact, the Bitcoin network is around 256 times faster than the world’s top 500 supercomputers combined.

So is it possible for ordinary people like you and me to take part in the Bitcoin gold rush? The answer is simple. You can join a mining pool to work with other miners, and then split the reward based on how much computational work you did. USB-powered mining hardware, such as the ASICMiner Block Erupter, are readily available, and affordable to the average Bitcoin user. Although there is a chance that you won’t make back the money you spent on purchasing hardware, you will still learn how Bitcoin works, and earn some extra money along the way.

Sell goods and services

Instead of simply purchasing Bitcoins on an exchange, you can also earn it through selling useful items and services to the community. If you’d like to sell something, you should consider accepting Bitcoins, instead of simply listing the item on eBay. Even a number of Subway shops now accept BTC as payment.

One of the key features of Bitcoin is that it allows you to send and receive money from anywhere in the world. That means that you could make money by providing useful services to international customers. If you are skilled at a particular job, such as programming, or graphics design, you could earn a good amount of Bitcoin doing freelance work.