Free isn't free, when it comes to free coins, but coins are there for the getting!
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I know a lot of people who want free coins, but there's always a cost
Cryptocurrency coins have a cost, regardless of how you look at it, there is going to be some cost to acquire coins (unless your just gifted or donated them, then someone else paid the cost for you, but a cost was still paid).
A friend asked me if it would be a good idea to rent a music studio and set up miners in it for FREE POWER!!!
In his mind all he sees is the free coins coming in, but doesn't see all the costs and obstacles that would come with this plan. In order to make this profitable, you'd need to buy a lot of mining equipment to maximize your free power and Internet use. This may work for a bit of time, but I do imagine that this music studio will start to wonder why this one rental space is using an obnoxious amount of power and Internet bandwidth. At this point, I imagine they would ask you to stop, or leave, or significantly raise your rent. I told him he'd probably lose his ass if he tried this.
Buy it with fiat!!!
The easiest way to get cryptocurrency is to just "Buy It With Fiat!" This is how I started getting into cryptocurrency, and my only regret is that I didn't buy more when I first started buying. My only regrets since then have been not buying more, every single time I've bought cryptocurrency. When looking at the cost of buying vs mining, I think it's a gamble, and one could pay off more then the other depending on many factors, but simply buying cryptocurrencies is the simplest to calculate the cost factors on, it's simply a matter of how much fiat are you putting in, and if your buying a crypto you believe in, it's probably a lot less then what that coin will be worth in the future.
Investing your time, is not free...
You can invest your time as well, that's what we're doing on Steemit. This isn't "free" coins we get with rewards, it's rewards being paid out for your participation in the platform. A platform cannot grow without community members, especially a social media platform. As I get older I am looking at investments of time as being most costly then investments of fiat currencies. Just like these LIMITED coins, our time is also limited...
It requires action
The key component in any method of coin acquisition is action. You got to do something, invest your time, invest your money, or both (that's kind of how I look at mining unless it's cloud mining). You gotta do something if you want these coins though, you can't sit on your hands. I've made a lot of my mistakes in my process of learning to trade coins and one of the biggest mistakes is just sitting on the sidelines too long and not making any moves. I find for me, it's hard to do nothing and earn, but when I put in effort, earnings come in, sometimes much greater then I had expected.
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed the thoughts and ideas I've shared in this post!
Forgive me if hisnisna dumb question but I'm fairly new here. What is mining?
I'm still learning about it myself @thesimplelife, but there is mining hardware that computes crazy algorithms in search of bitcoin or whatever alt coin you might have it attached to. You might also have seen mention of faucets? I believe it's along those lines on a much larger scale. Faucets literally drip BTC, or DOGE, or whatever...into your wallet. It's a little time consuming if you don't mind captchas but it's fun to watch the numbers grow.
Ops this was the first time I had heard of faucets, so thanks for the introduction and the explanation!
I like what you posted, it down the lines that I am now taking to make money with crypto. Thank you
This makes a lot of sense. I had also thought about mining for coin when I first started to learn about crypto. But the up front cost of buying an antminer, the increased electric bill... and it's not a sure thing how much you could make. LOL I'm happy to just earn my STEEM and SBD through blogging, buying it on the market and trying to make gains where I can. LOL
Very valid points @merej99.
However I have wondered (admittedly, originally with regards to alternative energy investments rather than crypto-mining) why such "antminer" machines could not have part of their costs fronted by investors.
I mean, if I were (simplistically speaking) to invest sufficient amounts toward 10% of the cost of a rig - and accepted to deduct 10% of the costs from my share of the gains made, then would not the bar for entry into mining drop by 90%?
I also must admit that the note about participation on Steemit involving a trade-off of the very finite currency of our time has also hit its mark. As for fiat-to-crypto - I remain quite too ignorant of such matters to comment.