Money for nothing ...
I want my BTC
When it comes to cryptos I am a NEWB. I don't have a "rig" for mining, I don't game the market with several day trades. I don't have a HODL or SODL strategy.
I just take what I can get and work the angles to build a profit.
Baby Steps
My first foray into cryptocurrency was through mining with spare computing power.
Let's qualify that ...
I don't have the most impressive computer on the market. My GPU is a low range AMD designed specifically for HP and my CPU (yes I mine with my CPU) is an intel Core i5. With these stats, there are almost no pools that you can successfully mine on. In my case, I mine Monero with BetterHash using my CPU power and Bitcoin (indirectly) with Nicehash. This gets me about 0.00004 BTC per day, not the most impressive haul ... but it's free money.
Soon after came Steemit
Needless to say, Steemit is NOT money for nothing! It is, however, money for talking about what you love.
When I started out with Steemit I made a penny or two per post, all the time watching "influencers" make hundreds. At first I thought "Well this is shit...", but then I started reading about how they got there and changed my attitude to "I can do this!".
I started getting post rewards of around $10 for a little while and used some of this to up my Steem Power and some to put toward other investments...
The cloud mine ...
Okay, let's get it out of the way ...
"Cloud Mining is a SCAM, you'll never make any money, blah, blah, blah"
Well I showed you... I bought some hashing power from HashFlare using BTC from Nicehash and some converted SBD when Bitcoin was trading at around $6000 US. I reinvest about half my earnings twice a week. Now that same BTC is worth over twice that and I have more of it than I invested. If I continue the pattern of reinvesting half of my earnings, I have a growing passive income.
Finding the "Ground Floor" Gold ...
Every so often, I'll go through the list at Coinmarketcap and look for what's rising (that's how I found Steemit in the first place). When I see a promising asset I'll read up on it, look at it's charts and decide if I want to try to mine it. Recently I found ADA at $0.025 a coin ... TWO CENTS!
Because ADA is a "Proof of Stake" mining algorithm, I decided $10 (again from money I earned doing Nothing) was a pretty good investment. My $10 is worth around $250 this morning and I haven't even started mining yet.
If you think you can't get in on crypto because you have no money you're wrong
Get in on the ground, mine what you can, post to Steemit!
Everyone can be successful with a little work!
As always, I Steem for my kids ...
I don't have a rig either, I understand some facets of the market but most of the complex things are a pure confusion.
I do work on that and hope to improve with the time.
The reason why I like the Steemit, is community and the creative freedom.
And you are right, the success comes with a little bit of an investment of time and effort.
It really does. I want to see everyone get their share of wealth and happiness, so I share my experience.
Doing all the BTC transactions back and forth at such a small scale, do you worry about recording all transactions for tax purposes?
Admittedly, for 2017 I am not tracking the transactions at all. For 2018 (because of recent US legislation) I plan to set up an excel spreadsheet that includes quantity traded of each asset and USD value of the asset at the time of the trade.
Since it's currently under $600/year the government doesn't care, but there are advantages to documenting the costs involved in trading because they are deductible investment expenses.
Oh yeah, I didn't think of that... expense write-offs!
When an investment loses money (it's worth less at it's sale than it's purchase) it's a deductible capital loss. When it costs money (transaction fees) to exchange assets it's a deductible cost of doing business. When you buy a crypto with another crypto it's a "like item exchange" so it isn't taxable, but the transaction fee is still a deductible cost.
Because cryptos (so far) are considered "property" they only have a monetary value at the time of exchange to a "dissimilar asset" meaning that the FIAT value of them is only taxable if you use them to buy something that is not another crypto or if you exchange them for a FIAT currency. In much the same way as you wouldn't report finding an ounce of gold (unless you sell it), I would argue that there is no valid reason to report "finding" (mining) a crypto until I exchange the asset for something else of value.
Excellent insight, and very helpful for my understanding... thanks @timeshiftarts!
Definitely, steem has made it out of crypto genius guess.... like bitcoin....
jump like if Usain bolt ever jumps on a marathon....
but one question......... can you tell me about dogecoin???
I haven't forayed into Dogecoin myself. I've seen that a lot of small money investors seem to believe in it, so there is some potential there.
actually it is too cheap that anyone like me interested to invest...
The advantage of cheap coins is you can buy a lot of them and take advantage of relatively small market fluctuations to make money. You have to watch the markets very closely and take advantage of limit orders to really benefit from that kind of trading.
Great post!
Thanks :) I like to share my experiences and to try to have some fun with it.
good post... write more about cheap coins ready for pump pls :)
I will post about opportunities that I pursue as often as I find what I think is a good investment. I figure if I'll put my meager investment in, it's worth looking at.