Earning "Free" Bitcoin?

Since I've found out about Steemit I've been doing some research on alternative ways to acquire Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies through social means or without buying them outright. After a couple of days of being on Steemit I came a across a new service called Earn.com. Earn.com used to be a company called 21.co and had previously selling bitcoin mining hardware via it's its flagship Bitcoin Computer. They pivoted from that, rebranding in October of 2017, and focusing on social digital currencies. They describe the service as this:

Replace your public email with an inbox that pays you

Set up an Earn.com profile to receive paid messages from people outside your network. Keep the money, or donate it to charities like Black Girls Code. It's like LinkedIn InMail, except you get paid!

Essentially, you can earn digital currency by replying to emails, inquiries, and completing tasks. There's a mobile app too, so it works on your phone, in any country, and with no need for a bank account.

Start Earning Bitcoin In 4 Steps:

1. Signup At Earn.com

Head over to earn.com and sign up for an account. You'll be asked for some details to set up your new account. You can also login through Facebook to speed up the process.

Full Disclosure: Once you hold a verified account you are given a referral link that earns $1 in BTC for each new signup. If you find this article to be helpful, using my referral link below costs you nothing. Plus, you get you own referral link once you complete you account. WOOT!

https://earn.com/mariogiancini/referral/?a=7aatuxixgiev2s6t (gives me $1 in BTC)

https://earn.com (non-referral)

2. Verify Your Email

After your account creation you'll be prompted like any other decent service to verify your email.

3. Complete Initial Tasks

Once you verify your email you'll be taken to your account dashboard that offers you a couple of initial tasks, each earning you up to $0.50, paid in Bitcoin.

Task 1: Complete Your Profile To Get Verified

The main point of Earn.com is to offer your expertise on various lists within the community, where individuals pay to send you a message and get a response from you. This list ranges from CEOs of Startups to Front End Developers to students, where the price of a message can be $50 or the minimum price of $1. Completing your profile is an important part of being approved to join one of these lists. Earn.com will give you a walkthrough dialog to help you setup your profile for success. I highly recommend linking as many social profiles as possible to help with the verification process. I linked all that where available (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Github) and was verified in less than 24 hours.

Task 2: Start Accepting Messages

After you submit your profile update and link your social media accounts you'll get a message to start accepting messages and set your initial message price, which gives you a few options between $1 to $100.

Task 3: Read About Their Token-Based Social Network

Granted, you don't get paid for this one, but there is a message for you to read up about the Earn.com's token-based, verified social network at https://earn.com/token. There are some elements of it that sound a lot like Steemit, and others that don't. You can read the white paper here, and I'm still walking through it at the moment. Earn.com has this to say about it from the account message:

To participate, all you need to do is complete the verification task. We will send verified users a notification when the token goes live.

Once the token is live, you will be able to complete tasks and reply to emails to earn Earnable tokens. You can hold these tokens, or turn them into Bitcoin as you see fit. Prior to the token launch, you can still earn Bitcoin for doing tasks and replying to emails in your Earn Inbox as normal.

If your new account has been verified, click on the Signup button on the page you should see a popup like this:

4. Wait For Account Verification

Patience young padawan. ;-)
Once you've submitted your profile and linked your social media accounts, Earn.com will get back to via your email when your new account has been verified. Again, as I said earlier, I HIGHLY recommend linking as many social accounts as possible. Doing that and uploading a high quality profile picture got me verified in under 24 hours.

AWESOME! You Made It This Far!

So that might've seemed like a lot, but it may be worth your while to signup for a brand new token-based social media platform. With all the new coins, cryptos, tokens and such popping up everywhere it's hard to truly judge which ones will be winners and which ones will fall by the wayside. Granted, a common thing I've seen for promising winners, like Steemit, is some form of account verification promise. So congrats on getting in on the ground floor.

Applying For Lists

Now that your account has been verified, you can start applying for lists. Lists are groups of Earn.com members that fit into a certain category, like CEOs, Back End Developers, Programmers, Designers, or even Students. This is the primary way that people can pay to message you through the platform. You can find which lists are available here. Just choose the list(s) you want to be a part of and click Apply.

At the time of this writing I've only just done this a few hours ago, so I'm not certain of the turn around time for List Applications, but I will keep you updated in the comments when/if I get approved.

Bonus Tips

There's a bunch of new features that Earn.com has rolled out, one of which is linking your Gmail account. Doing this allows you to send an automatic message to non-contacts, people outside your network, which prompts them with a friendly message to value your time and pay for a reply.

You can set it up through your account dashboard, and the process is pretty straight forward. It will automatically Whitelist all of your contacts, and you can manually add or remove emails as your go. Also, it's smart about including mailing list emails and other messages that you've opened previously that may no be an actual contact, but you've opened before. The is a switch to bounce new senders that aren't on the whitelist.

Thanks For Reading

I hope this was helpful. Let me know what you think of Earn.com in the comments. Though I'm still a complete noob, I'd be happy answer any questions you might have based on my learning and experience.

Signup for Earn.com: https://earn.com/mariogiancini/referral/?a=7aatuxixgiev2s6t (referral link)

Sources:
https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/earn/
https://news.earn.com/make-money-online-by-joining-21-co-lists-b90e6d119ab7