14 Ways to Earn Bitcoin on the Internet
By: Stephene Macharia
Tags: Marketing, Videomaking, Bitcoin Mining, Dollar

Bitcoin is slowly growing as an alternative to PayPal when it comes to making money online. More websites are accepting it as a form of payment — places like Fiverr, where you can pay people for gigs, they accept Bitcoin as payment from clients, although they don’t pay people who do gigs in bitcoin, yet.

Why Bitcoin is good for doing jobs online is simply because it’s less hassle. At least in SA — and I’ve written about this at length in the past — there are difficulties in setting up a PayPal account, or at least linking it with a bank account, and then not to mention the fees, which would eat into any money that ends up in your bank account. The same can easily be said about Payoneer.

With Bitcoin, all you need is a bitcoin wallet — no banks, no cards (unless you want to buy and fund a debit card with bitcoin), and very little in the way of fees.

What is bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a “cryptocurrency” or virtual money that came about around 2009. Nowadays it is referred to as the currency or money of the internet, and you can earn it, buy it, sell it, and buy things with it. Several major retailers like Newegg and Overstock accept bitcoin, and the list is growing.

Bitcoin is a decentralised currency, meaning that no government or bank has control over it.

A lot of people only really associate bitcoin with illegal trade but they forget that illegal trade can and does involve real or fiat money too. They also think it’s shady because of the perceived anonymity of it, but places like Coinbase, for example, tracks coins and clamps down on illegal activities like fraud.

One of the downsides is that it is highly volatile, meaning the price of it rises and falls, more erratically than fiat money. But as more and more people accept bitcoin as a means of payment, whether it’s employers looking to pay their workers or shops accepting it as payment for goods, the currency should become more stable in time.

Some have labelled bitcoin as the digital gold of the new millennium, and more and more people are looking to get into it.

By Gastev (Mirko Tobias Schaefer) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Bitcoin mining

How this traditionally works is you use a mining rig which has has preferably a very powerful GPU or graphics card, download a program and then link it with your bitcoin wallet. Your GPU will solve complex equations and this is called mining. You will receive the bitcoin that you’ve mined into your bitcoin wallet.

If you don’t have the money for a powerful mining rig, you can rent one for a fee and use that instead. Or you can even engage in cloud mining where you don’t need a rig. You just pay a monthly subscription fee.

Drawbacks here include the fact that the money you pay in electricity fees and internet costs will likely outweigh any money that you make from mining — this is especially true now that it is widely accepted that the time for mining bitcoin is long over. Cloud mining is also viewed with suspicion nowadays since some websites were revealed to be nothing more than a scam. The subscription fees can also end up being more than what you’ll earn from mining.

You could try and mine alt coins, and then sell them for bitcoin (I’ll cover this later).

By User:Pmsyyz (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Gift card exchanges

Have you got a lot of gift cards lying around that are of no use to you? You can exchange them for bitcoin.

If you’re in the United States or Canada, you can make use of cardforcoin.com. There’s also raise.com where you can sell gift cards. There’s even a subreddit called r/giftcardexchange, where you can get offers for gift cards as well. This is better if you’re outside the US — because a lot of those bitcoin for giftcard websites will only trade with those in the US or at most the North American continent (including Canada), generally.

You just need to make sure you can find a trustworthy trader. 80% of the value is what you’ll be offered most of the time depending on which store gift card you have, maybe 85% — 90% on lower value cards.

Jobs for bitcoin

There’s a subreddit called Jobs4bitcoins (r/jobs4bitcoins) where you can do jobs and be paid with bitcoin. It mainly caters to programmers and graphic designers from what I can tell.

There’s also r/slavelabour. The payout is usually less than what is offered on r/jobs4bitcoins, but then the jobs are smaller, often just paying people for finding information online, or other “quickies”.

Don’t expect the pay to be very high, but you can make a bit in these places. Also check out r/bitcoin and r/cryptocurrency for the odd opportunity.

Some people will pay you straight into your bitcoin wallet, or if you prefer, you could opt to use ChangeTip.

ChangeTip is good because it does grant you some extra privacy in not having to disclose your bitcoin wallet address to the employer or person paying you, and ChangeTip transactions are referred to as being “off the blockchain”, meaning that you won’t pay any transaction fees for tipping people, or for withdrawing to an external bitcoin wallet.

There are other subreddits and websites that allow people to pay with and accept bitcoin as a form of payment for goods and services. Bitcointalk, a cryptocurrency forum, is one of these places and r/bitmarket is another.

There are bigger job boards out there like Bitlancer, XBTFreelancer, Coinality, and Bitgigs.

You could even start your own website and provide a service of sorts and allow people to pay you in bitcoin. BitPay can help you here as they will provide invoices and offer other services for your startup business, making things easier for you.

Sell your used goods for bitcoin

You can create listings on some of the aforementioned places like r/bitmarket or bitcointalk and sell your second hand goods, or you could even try and sell items on more mainstream places like craigslist and ask for bitcoin as payment. First check that the website where you’re going to list your items actually allows this.

By Ángelo González from Dodro, España (faucet drop) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Bitcoin faucets

How these work is you link your bitcoin wallet address to the website, and then every time you visit the website, you get free bitcoin! Some faucets will pay you automatically without you having to even visit the website.

Faucets are considered to be a slow way of earning bitcoin though, but if you sign up with enough of them, and only go with the high paying ones, you might be able to make something.

Bitcoin rewards

This idea is similar to Bing rewards, Qmee, or Swagbucks, except instead of being paid in gift cards, you can earn bitcoin by using a website for doing searches, etc.

Check out bitcoinget.com, which allows you to do surveys and other tasks and get paid in bitcoin, which will get paid into your bitcoin wallet.

Websites like tremorgames and stuffpoints operate in much the same way. You can be rewards by downloading apps, doing surveys, playing games, etc. The only difference here is that you aren’t paid with bitcoin. You earn points which can then be exchanged for bitcoin.

By Agne27 at en.wikipedia (Transferred from en.wikipedia) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Bitcoin rebates

You can get bitcoin for shopping at a participating store. Sign up at coinrebates.com by linking your bitcoin wallet address and then click through on the store you want to buy from. Then buy the item and wait for you rebate to come, which will then be sent to your bitcoin wallet.

Just make sure to not use adblocking software or private windows in your browser when doing this. Cookies should also be allowed, because you want your purchase to be tracked, otherwise you won’t get your bitcoin rebate.

First time rebates are also eligible for a bonus as long as they are members of coinrebates.com’s sisters website, bitcoinget.com

Get a hold of cryptocurrencies and play the market

Recently there was Stellar, and launching at more or less at the same time but lasting for longer was CaptCoin. If you were able to get a hold of these coins, you can trade them for bitcoin at various exchanges once the price goes up.

Alt coins, as they call them (as in alternative to bitcoin), are often given away or can be mined, so you don’t have to buy them.

Bitcoin giveaways

Occasionally you’ll come across a bitcoin giveaway.

A good place to looks for these is on reddit, although other websites can host bitcoin giveaways. Sometimes it might be something simple, like posting a comment in order to receive some BTC, or with the bigger giveaways, entries might involve something like following Facebook or Twitters accounts.

Referral programs

Cardforcoin has a referral program where even if you don’t exchange a gift card for bitcoin yourself, you can enter in an email address or wallet address and receive a referral link. Then when anyone ends up on the cardforcoin.com website after clicking through on a link with your referral code in it, if they exchange a gift card, you will get a small commission off of that sale deposited into your bitcoin wallet.

Coinbase also has a referral program, where if you get someone to join up and they buy $100 BTC through coinbase’s exchange, then you can earn $25 in BTC — and this is per person referred.

By Havaysard79 (http://moneypantry.com/tip-jar/) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

Accept bitcoin tips

You can build a website, a blog, or a forum, and allow people to tip you with bitcoin, much like they would do with PayPal, usually.

There’s even a subreddit called r/bittippers, where people will ask questions and people might get tipped for their opinions, answers, or feedback. This can be accomplished by using changetip, which has recently integrated with Reddit. Otherwise one can receive reddcoins or reddit gold from people which you can then exchange for bitcoin.

By Tomas Castelazo (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Beg for bitcoins

There are places on Reddit that cater to doing this, like r/RandomActsofBitcoin, where you can ask or beg for bitcoin and see what happens. You have to have quite a convincing story, I would imagine.

Bitcoinbeg and bitcoinbums also offer you the opportunity to do some virtual busking in order to perhaps be given a tip. It won’t be much, more than likely, but could be worth a try.

Earn with ads

This is an idea that is catching on, and that is to offer advertising space on your website or blog to people, with the stipulation that you must be paid in bitcoin.

If you don’t have a blog or website, you can also offer advertising space in your signature on a forum (if the forum allows it).

An affiliate program called a-ads, similar to Google AdSense, also offers you the opportunity to put their ads on your blog, and get paid in bitcoin. There are unsubstantiated rumours that Google AdSense itself may offer a bitcoin payout instead of cheque or EFT in the future.

Sell your own books for bitcoin

You can write books and sell them for bitcoin. BitbyBooks.com will allow you to self-publish ebooks, and consumers can pay per chapter. If they like the first chapter of your book, they can choose to pay for the entire book, all in bitcoin.

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