Earn FREE Bitcoin - Is it possible?

So far in this series of articles, I have covered getting paid in crypto while you browse the web using Brave browser and getting started with Alien Worlds; a free-to-play digital card-game which occasionally pays out random NFT prizes. I've also covered the process of trading in your mined TLM virtual ore for other crypto or actual cash.

Today, let's look at possible ways to earn Bitcoin. I found this video on YouTube from Guy at the Coin Bureau channel. He suggests avoiding mobile games and a few other things... well watch the video. I wanted to know if the things suggested in the video would apply to people in the UK and if they were really genuine. After all, if it sounds too good to be true...

Anyway I watched the video and then looked into each suggestion. Here's what I found

The Fold App.

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This appears to be a cash-back rewards site where the cash-back comes in the form of bitcoin. There appear to be two different levels of membership - 'Premium' or 'Intro'. Premium costs $150 per year but has no activation fee. Intro on the other hand has no annual fee but a $21 'activation' fee. It may be that I've got the wrong end of the stick on this one and the app might be free to use and these costs only apply to obtaining a visa card from Fold. As a non-US dweller though the 3% international transaction fee on both would also have me questioning it's usefulness to people in the UK. They also state the cards are only for US residents. Reviews also suggest the reward game may only apply if you spend $100 in a transaction and the only UK store where you could use this app is Starbucks. I know Starbucks might not be the cheapest coffee but I doubt I'll ever spend $100 in there, so for now I'm ignoring this one.

Comments check

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At this point I checked the video comments and to be fair Guy points out that the Fold app and Lolli are for US residents. He also states that you now have to go on a waiting list to be a part of Coinbase Earn. I had a look at this to see if that was worth the effort and the current list of learn to earn opportunities added up to $31. I would say this puts it in the further research pile. A free $31 is enough to cover an indie game title or two on Steam or some other game crypto to get you started on Enj games or similar. It all boils down to whether or not there's a buy-in transfer required and the size of that waiting list.

Crypto.com Card

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This appears to be an app with a linked  pre-payment card. This is like a debit card but you load it with money by transferring funds to it. A good idea if you shop online as having your credentials stolen from a hacked shopping site should mean the hackers are unable to spend any more of your money than you have pre-loaded onto the card. However I am discovering that user feedback is essential when considering crypto services and I have read a lot of very negative reviews about crypto.com on the Apple app-store. It sounds like they make it very easy to deposit GBP but nigh on impossible to withdraw it. One reviewer on the app store even suggested moving coins to a coinbase or binance wallet instead. 

Brave Browser

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It's good to see that my own advice on signing up for this one is aligned with Guy's video but these others now have me crossing my fingers that Brave is genuine. Brave browser doesn't actually pay out in Bitcoin though. It supposedly pays out in BAT tokens (nothing to do with Batman). I've covered getting started with Brave browser here and I will post on my eventual success/failure to extract earnings.

Verdict          -    NO !

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The premise of this video is to avoid penny-earners and delve into some higher untapped earnings potential. Guy stated it was not about mobile games and yet I think Brave browser does fall into this category since my own earnings experience suggests that $1 per week is typical (and since the minimum to create the Uphold wallet is $25 that's at least another 22 weeks before I can test if they really do pay out). At least I have time to look into this. Maybe being in the UK is the reason why we don't have many opportunities to join in these free Bitcoin schemes but possibly genuine ones don't really exist.

As we can see the crypto road to success crosses many minefields and I'm not going to be as critical as other reviewers yelling 'SCAM' at all these things. Sometimes projects take a while to get going and to sort out issues and then other problems can arise when things scale up. As ever, my findings here are personal research and should not be construed as financial advice (usual disclaimers!). For now I will continue chasing pennies with Alien Worlds and hope for a bit of luck on the NFT drops. For what it's worth, I agree with Guy that penny-chasing activities are seldom worth the time investment. I do however think they serve a purpose which is to allow us to self-educate while minimising risk; and if they add in a bit of entertainment along the way they are serving their purpose.

Oh Well

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It should be remembered that the video I have commented on here is now almost a year old and we have seen just how much the world can change in a year. Guy is the first to point out his video's are for entertainment only and I still think he does an excellent job of explaining some pretty complex topics. If you are looking into crypto as a result of the convergence of gaming and crypto, I encourage you to have a look at the other videos on his channel, especially if you are considering a hardware wallet purchase at some point.

Raspberry Pi - The Time-lapse Dolley Project and Windows compatible SD partitions

About a week ago I sat down and thought about our impending VC visit to see our little Raspberry Pi lab and I started thinking about what we could do as a little example project. I've deliberately kept this as my little secret because I wanted to do something that nobody else here has thought of but what to tackle and could I do it in a week?

I started to think about what visual computer-jiggery (technical term) has most impressed me this year and the answer came from Netflix. Yes I was impressed by the opening credits for the US version of House of Cards. The technique they use is called motion-time-lapse. Time-lapse is where you create an animation from single photo's or stills taken every minute or so then joined together into a film. It looks far more effective with the added motion though. This comes from something called a time-lapse-dolly which is a technical term for slow-moving-thing-that-the-camera-sits-on.

I've recently been playing with 'Motion' on the Pi, which is a great little web-cam application that can also do time-lapse. I did some time-lapse using windows applications a few years back so I already knew how to do that part (as you can see here). I can say that if anything, Motion makes the process even easier as it will chain the stills together for you and output an Mpeg clip.

So my challenges now are two-fold. I would like to output the clip to a windows box so I can add some music. I want this to be from the Schizm tracker (ie produced on the Pi). I doubt the Pi is quite powerful enough to do the video editing - at least not in the timeframe required (tomorrow). I'm not even sure if my old Amiga Pro-tracker days are enough to quickly get me up-to-speed with Schizm tracker but that's for later. First I need a motion-platform and I'd like that to be controlled by the Pi and I also need to be able to get the footage off the Pi for editing.

Luckily I have an 8GB SD-card with a 4GB Wheezy image installed so that meant there would be space. I had to use 'sudo apt-get gparted' from the terminal to install Gparted which didn't seem to be there to start with. If that command fails, remember to try 'sudo apt-update' & 'sudo apt-upgrade' and go for coffee while they do their thing). Once I got Gparted installed, I could run it from the terminal but it wouldn't let me create a dos-compatible partition. Odd I thought, and then I went down the CFdisk route (cfdisk /dev/mmcblk0) which did the same thing. It turns out the Windows file-system support comes from another package which may not be installed. Try 'Sudo apt-get install dosfstools' and at this point the fat16 & fat32 (ie MS Windows compatible) formats appeared in Gparted - they also fixed the command line version 'mkfs.vfat /dev/mmcblk0p3' which was previously not working. Now I just need to mount this at boot time and get Motion to output it's files to the Windows compatible partition - I will find out later if this works.
== Edit ==
While the extra space was usable by the Pi, my Windows XP box insisted the data partition was not available because "the partition or volume is not enabled"? Restarting my PC as suggested obviously did nothing to fix this. It looks as though Windows is not inclined to play nicely with partitions on SD cards so in the end I used winscp to copy the files I needed over to my Windows PC.
== End Edit ==


It's typical that with this rush job on the go, I've had loads support of requests further depleting my available time. Luckily I started thinking about the dolley last week and this is where my lack of electronics knowledge has let me down a little. The more I read about interfacing the Pi's GPIO to things, the more it sounds like a bad idea and I don't want to risk my precious Pi (any of them). Anyway, back to the dolley. If you watched my timelapse example you might have noticed that my son was fascinated by recycling-trucks when he was younger. I have now recycled one of these which has a simple motor (forwards only) and makes a perfect dolly; I just need to control the motor.

Once I started reading into it, I found there were lots of ideas to try but they all seemed a bit risky. I read things which suggested the Pi should not be used to power any loads (i.e. the motor) and some even suggested they could not provide enough power to control a relay without risk. Luckily, someone out there mentioned opto-isolators and the idea took. I already have a project where the Pi drives some low-power LEDs and so far that Pi has not blown up. The recycling truck also has an LDR fitted which I figured I could use inline with a battery source to drive the motor. And this is where I really need the electronics background because it just didn't work. It seems even when you shine a torch at it, the resistance is still too high to be inline with the motor.


=Update=
I discovered some opto-isolator chips at Maplins which I figured would be worth a go for the price. Sadly I didn't manage to get the project working in time so I need to do some further debugging on the motor circuit. It works fine when the opto is bypassed and the opto works as proven by an in-line LED. The issue seems to be when the two are connected in series. I didn't manage to get this working in time but we still did a timelapse demo. Sadly I also didn't have enough time to knock together a quick Schism module as I lost a lot of time debugging sound (eventually fixed using sudo apt-get uninstall pulseaudio).