Crypto Round-up or What I (L)earned during April

The world of crypto is very different to how I remember it from way back in 2009/10. It's been good to see how things have progressed. Now instead of a single blockchain they seem to be in double-digits (possibly even triple or more). Things which have stayed the same include wallets with 12-word security phrases to secure them and the odd opportunity here and there to earn a small amount of crypto-currency. Things which have changed include the number of exchanges to swap coins and tokens, games using blockchains and collectible NFT's with built-in provenance.

I think I can safely say that those with wealth have a lot more opportunities to invest in digital assets but only time will tell if the current plethora of chains and systems will continue; maybe some will contract or consolidate. It's hard to imagine what will happen at that point. A lot of their data appears to be provided by decentralised storage-providers while the blockchains appear to just hold account and transaction details. Will we eventually see entire blockchains being archived and if so, what happens to the items being traded on those chains if there's no way to update them? Maybe they will be moved onto other chains as 'wrapped' assets. Is the current situation a bubble and if so, when the first blockchain gets archived will we see a nervous shift back to physical collectibles and assets?

One thing I have learned recently is there are things called 'faucets' which are like dripping taps in that they reward you with tiny amounts of crypto for fulfilling certain tasks. I hadn't realised that these are very much a part of most modern blockchain systems, usually intended to whet the appetite and incentivise investment. I had no idea there were so many different versions of these until I saw this article about them from coinmarketcap.com. 

I suppose this will continue to be the case with blockchain games. While Alien Worlds has the potential for you to drop a valuable NFT, this does not seem to occur frequently so the trickle of trillium which can be converted into wax could now be considered a faucet in my opinion. Mining yields from basic tools have not recovered since the whole Binance project took off a few weeks ago. I would have liked to have been able to own land in the game however the current cheapest listing on AtomicHub is at 55,000 wax (about $14,000) which makes virtual land ownership very much a rich persons game (as in real life). At the moment it really feels like developers are selling off the treasure before they've built their game(s).

For those coming into crypto without capital (like myself), this world is full of barriers to entry. There appear to be those who get early access to crypto games who continually jump to whatever the latest game is only to cast it aside the following day for the next new best crypto game ever. As someone who put in many hours of gameplay into Guild Wars 2, developing a character and building up an inventory of relatively rare items I would urge developers to consider equalising opportunity for those likely to stick around. If you are always poor in-game, then you eventually stop playing. Those you sold your treasures to early on are not the people likely to be your long-term customers. They will sell their magic staves and swords the moment they show a nice profit. Unfortunately so will many newcomers to a game who suddenly find themselves torn between keeping a lucky drop or taking value from it to help with real-life problems.

Still I have digressed again and that was not the purpose of today's post. I said I would review how far I've got from an initial investment of absolute zero (when I said I had no capital, I really meant it). I am therefore very grateful of the people and developers out there who have enabled me to have greatly increased the value of my initial investment (of absolutely nothing). Rest assured once life gets back to normal, I shall remember where my crypto-victories came from. For now, let's have a look at those who've been a praise-worthy part of my recent crypto-exploration.

Theta.tv (article): (TFUEL)

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I've been running their edge node software on this PC and more recently on my older laptop. So far it has netted me 4.0427 tFuel. I love this project even though it's far from profitable. I have yet to see if they will transfer these earnings into my wallet. At a current price of $0.39, this equates to $1.58 which is more than I earned from watching content on YouTube during the same period. Last night I was watching the CryptoStache channel and the show ended with a raid. Essentially all the viewers jumped onto another streamers channel. This guy (Stumpie) then proceeded to dish out a bunch of freebies to the new audience. He had some interesting things to say about the crypto-verse and I wish I could have stuck around for longer but it was after 2am. I will be checking out his channel again soon (if only to find out what he uses on his rig to mine Etherium).

Update (9thMay21): Today my 4 and a bit tFuel have moved from the pending section in the node software to my Theta wallet. I will now have to work out what use it has from my perspective. I'm unlikely to ever stream myself so it may be a good way to support those who are building communities on theta.tv. It's great that I got this reward just for supporting something I believe has great potential. 

CryptoTab: Bitcoin (BTC)

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I still can't decide if it's a scam or not but it definitely pays out. This is faucet territory though. My main system varies from 2k to 4k hashes per second with my old laptop running at about a quarter of that rate. So far I've only hit the payment threshold once but after that I tried out NiceHash and have now decided CryptoTab is the lesser of two evils. It is definitely more of a mini-me than an Austin Powers but did pay out the 0.00001 BTC within 24 hours. I'm currently running it on my main PC, old laptop and now also on an antiquated system which I use as a crypto-heater in my office and I'm half-way towards the next pay-out. I gave CryptoTab a green-light after the first payment came through but have since revised this to an amber-light (use with caution). Their twitter account lacks any attempt to create an online profile and was also suspended. I also think it may be problematic to uninstall for many people should this ever be needed and they also show no interest in responding to their critics on TrustPilot.

WAX: Blockchain (WAXP, TLM, AETHER +more)

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Wax was great for me, partly due to timing and partly due to some inspired decision making on my part. I was lucky to get some above base-level mining tools in Alien Worlds which I sold when prices started rocketing. I was then lucky to discover selling TLM on Alcor. I was lucky to have found channels like CryptoStache on YouTube and I was lucky that I opted to buy a couple of R-Planet NFT's from the AtomicHub market because I liked the art. These rose in value just like the mining tools of Alien Worlds. I haven't sold them yet as I have them staked in the game and they are currently earning a small amount of passive income. I just have to log in now and then to claim the Aether (the reward token which can also be traded for wax via the Alcor exchange). So far I have not taken a penny out of the wax system as I believe it has the potential to grow huge. I also reinvested some into KOG's (Keys to Other Games) as I think their project looks interesting.

I staked some wax and reinvested my remaining wax into NFT's from the AtomicHub marketplace. When I sold my Alien Worlds tools I actually earned over $200 worth of wax due to an influx of new players. I started to buy NFT's from new artists - just art I liked and intend to hold. This included my R-Planet rigs NFT's which I bought not knowing they could earn staking rewards. Since the process of going from wax to other mainstream crypto still confuses me, I just keep reinvesting everything back into wax projects and I continue to play Alien Worlds. It's kind of hard to say how much I've earned from wax as it's all reinvested. Just like CryptoStache, I want to stash it rather than cash-out. The TokenHead wallet suggests my accounts are worth around $250 at present but this includes some dubious valuations of NFT's (it's not clear if these are based on listings or actual sales). Even so, this propels wax to the top of my earnings list for the month. It wouldn't be enough to live on but as a side hustle with long-term possibilities, I'd say it's the next bitcoin.

Brave Browser (BAT)

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Almost bang on-cue to ensure I don't forget about it comes Brave browser. Not only has it just announced the months earnings are ready to claim, but I think I also got a bonus 5 BAT for dragging the logo symbol onto an empty template space. My balance currently stands at 7.250 BAT (currently just over $10). I'm still a good way off the 25 BAT required to set-up the uphold wallet but it does appear to be growing slowly and it's more than I earned from using Google Chrome last month (which was nothing). 

Pi-Coin (PI)

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It was the discovery of this on 3/14 that got me looking into the crypto-world again. It's still under development which means you can't use it for anything yet but you can still get involved by downloading the app to your phone and pressing a button every day. As yet I can't see a need it fulfils but hopefully that will come around before or soon after the launch.

So that's the good guys, now for the ones I'm dropping this month.

NiceHash

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It was inevitable after my experience with trying to withdraw my earned bitcoin from their custodial wallet to my own. I now refer to them as Not-So-NiceHash and they will not be getting any more of my mining resources. It appeared more efficient than CryptoTab but it's quite boring to watch. Using CryptoTab instead allows you to turn any browser-game into a crypto-game so the slower earning rate can be offset by using it to play Alien Worlds or any other faucet you might want to try out. 

XMRig

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This is the miner I previously ran on my crypto-heater. It was great for producing heat, but I only earned 0.00001247 after 8 hours. With a minimum of 0.1 XMR for the payment threshold (about $42 at the time of writing), I've estimated it will take 334 days of running 24/7 to reach that threshold. Even if I was assured the $42 return and that would cover running the rig for all that time, I still wouldn't need to run it for 334 days per year. Here in the UK we usually get at least a brief summer when my heater is not needed. So XMRig has been relegated and the heater now adds a small extra boost to my CryptoTab earnings when it's running.

Still lots more things on my radar to try out so I will keep the articles coming for as long as I can. This week I've discovered chain(o) games and been hearing about music NFT's on Phantasma and a secret society experimenting with a human blockchain?. I also saw an advert for an interesting looking project called Kanaria however as the image below shows its already beyond my means.

There always seems to be so much going on in crypto.

Free crypto & free NFT's = Free money! - Yes it's possible

Ok; that sounds enticing and it's not an April fools day prank. Don't get too excited though as we're not talking about Beeple here (at least not yet). If you're pressed for time, you can skip this intro & background material and scroll down to the how-to section for part 1. What follows is some background information regarding my crypto challenge.

A couple of weeks back I set myself a challenge. To gain some crypto-currency for free. We're not talking about life-changing sums of money but as a casual gamer I started to take an interest in crypto games where players could win prizes which can be traded outside the games. I remember  a scene in 'Ready Player One' where the hero receives new hardware as a reward for playing and I wanted to know how far we are from that becoming a reality. Imagine if all the PS5's and Xbox X's had gone directly to players instead of scalpers last Christmas. 

Some of these games require you to already have NFT's (digital collectibles) or crypto-currencies before you can even try out the game. I found one where you needed three NFT's which were priced at around $800 each. That's a big entry barrier for most players. There are other games which are less expensive so my challenge was to overcome the first step of being excluded from the system (yes it would be easy to buy crypto but not for kids who won't get debit or credit cards until they're 18 and I'm being frugal and don't forget the challenge!). I guess this is why Wade Watts has to be either 18 or 19 in Ready Player One, to get around the question of how did he get started on a path towards ultimate victory? How else could he have bought the game or any in-game items if he was legally unable to pay for any of it.

I spent a couple of weeks doing research at this point and much of what I found is useless. Yes, technically you can mine bitcoin on a gameboy but I urge you not to get your hopes up. Likewise if you have an old laptop or desktop, disabling anti-virus or system protections to install some command-line miner is probably not going to be worth the time it takes to set-up. In the early days of crypto, this might have been profitable but in recent times mining rewards are lower. If you think your old computer has any chance of competing with a warehouse full of custom-built crypto-miners then reality will kick-in about the same time the next electricity bill arrives. If however your reason for mining is to produce heat to keep a building warm over winter then maybe it does make sense if that heat is generated by mining crypto.

It's also worth keeping in mind that some crypto-currencies (like ethereum) are moving away from Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining. This has upset a lot of miners who have invested heavily into planet-trashing, resource-burning hardware over the last decade who really don't want their ability to earn to be diminished by a switch to Proof-of-Stake however it's hard to imagine how any crypto will survive while being attacked by mainstream financial institutions on one side and the green movement on the other. People are already talking about the amount of energy used for crypto-mining and this has put some artists off turning their work into NFT's. Artists are also concerned that the fees charged for selling their work as an NFT could be as much as 80% of the sale price. This may just be because NFT-mania has increased the value of Etherium. It's enlightening to see this system from both sides. If miners earnings are going down and artists are being stung with charges, who is benefitting from this (looks like the exchanges to me but I could be wrong).

There are plenty of sites where you can now create your NFT's but you don't pay anything until they sell. If this is something you are interested in, I suggest you also check out this video about some of the legal issues which can arise with NFT's. 

How-to get free (sort of) crypto

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So my challenge was to use my electricity and available hardware to generate some crypto by earning it for free (apart from the electricity). So let's get on with it.

The first thing to do is install Brave browser. This is a custom build of Chromium  which is actually pretty decent. I don't earn anything from that link but I might consider becoming a contributor (meaning I could earn tips) once I've received my first pay-out. Brave also has a shields setting which blocks a lot of trackers while browsing but can be quickly turned off if it breaks a website. It occasionally launches a fairly non-invasive notification for products or services you might be interested in. Brave share the revenue earned from these adverts with the users and pay-out when you've earned 25 bat (basic attention tokens - roughly worth $1 at present). While the original purpose might have been to get web-surfers to contribute a regular donation to content-creators, I imagine most users turn off the auto-contribute feature (see below) and then allow the ad revenue to build up instead. 

At around 1 bat per week, it's going to take a while to earn but tomorrows post will deliver another crypto booster to use with Brave. I should point out here that if you are using an iPad/iPhone or Mac, you can find a version of Brave in the app-store however recent changes made by Apple now stop you from being able to earn with this. There was some sort of one-off transfer process when the changes occurred but I think the iOS versions should make all the details completely clear on the start-up page. I uninstalled it from my iPad when I found out about this because of the apparent lack of transparency. I do miss using it but now I've got used to the idea of my attention having value, I want to replace my old iPad rather than keep using Brave on it.

I hope you've enjoyed my rant / information. Tomorrow I will post how to obtain some free NFT's and tokens then turn them into real money. For today, try out your new browser and learn all there is to learn about BAT.

The usual disclaimer:

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I'm not a financial advisor, legal or medical expert, I only state my own opinions and blog about what works for me personally. Nothing in this article should be construed as financial, legal or medical advice and you should ask local professional advisors before investing time, money or any other resources into anything mentioned.