First time I was exposed to bitcoin's (see http://www.tokentalk.co/brand/bitcoin) existance, it was back in 2011, and bitcoin's price was trading from 13 USD.
My friend Sami, who heard it from bloomberg, and I were super interested, and bought about 10 bitcoins as soon as we could (transfering the money to the British based exchange office, intersango, and then buying it took a couple days, and the price was already 20 USD by then).
Next up, I went and bought two ATI 6990 graphical processing units and a 2000 Watt PSU to get on to mining bitcoins.
After a few days of research and fiddling around, I was mining BTC at the rate of 0.2 bitcoins per day, and at that rate I was pretty disappointed but I cracked on and did it for a while, ending up with 10 more bitcoins eventually.
I kept my coins for a few years then sold when I wanted a new laptop in around 2013-2014, and half of my other coins were stolen by bitcoin-24.com...
Long story short I've eventually lost half of them and spent the other half on a laptop, but I never stopped keeping an eye on altcoin prices on coinmarketcap.com, investing small amounts from my salary monthly and reading about up and coming projects and ICOs, learning about solidity programming for smart contracts development on Ethereum network, as well as taking part in a new start up called http://www.tokentalk.co, a blockchain social network project we have been working on recently with one of my colleagues.
All of this was because I have always been a firm believer in blockchain technology, and know that one day IPOs will be replaced by security token/coin based Initial Coin Offerings when legalities are dealt with.
And in longer term; banks and current financial system with its central banks together with its FIAT currencies will all be replaced by crypto currencies and decentralized exchanges and other monetary systems (or rather than replaced we can say evolved as banks area already showing lots of interest, hence Ripple Net's success - read more on http://www.tokentalk.co/brand/ripple).
In a series of future articles, I'd like to focus on different ways of passive income I established for myself within the crypto world, where some proved better and more consistent than others, some failed over time etc. For now I'd like to share my insights on shorter sections below on 4 different types of passive income I setup for myself and know quite well about.
1- Contract based crypto mining:
I have been researching companies providing contract based crypto mining since the days of home mining with GPUs (the noise and the heat was impossible to deal with, and eventually had to stop due to high cost of electricity in London as well as unbearable noise).
I have paid to mine with genesis-mining.com and bitcoin.com over the years. Trouble with Bitcoin.com's mining contracts was not only the fact that they were more expensive with less return (higher maintenance and electricity costs) but also all their contracts were close ended, longest one being 2 years. At that rate it is close to impossible to calculate the rate of return (Bitcoin price and mining difficulty being volatile, and electricity costs in their region). I ran a 6 month mining session that returned roughly 95% of my capital investment, which means loss, so I wouldn't repeat that mistake.
Biggest trouble with these mining firms are the time limit and unpredictable nature of mining difficulty, but being a firm believer in crypto, I have no doubt that asic mining bitcoins will be lucrative for the long term, because of the fact that current monetary system and its fronteers tried a lot to bring bitcoin down, but every crash it came back with stronger support, also my past 4 years of daily income I received from genesis-mining (rates used to be over 100% of your capital returned per year, with recent pricing vs difficulty it's around 50%, which is still better than a lot of other conventional investments and rather less risk as they offer open ended contracts), I realized that contract based asic mining is here to stay, and if you are confident enough to read their terms and conditions carefully, and then try with a little money and cry when you see bitcoins in your wallet daily (obviously this can vary regarding the amount of investment and minimum pay thresholds, bitcoin mining being 0.0035 btc/day at the time of writing this article) and then make a move if plausible.
Downside of Genesis Mining is that there's so much negative press coverage out there and so many "scam" posts for them, I'd believe the same if I didn't use them, but so far so good, they've been sending my earnings daily. I was thinking of giving you my discount code which I make money on, but I will not as it would have been bad practice, you can setup two accounts and buy from one and setup a referral code on the other to score some extra hashing power. I have to also stress the fact that, if bitcoin crashed dramatically for any reason and stay that way for excess of a month and you have happened to have bought your contract at that time, you'd lose all your money instantly, this is a real threat with this method, thankfully hasn't happened the past 4 years but I'd be very cautious.
2- HODLing for long term, index funds and earning interest with margin funding
Hodl is a term introduced by firm believers of crypto currencies, backed by lots of memes, and phrases like "mooning", "when lambo?" etc. Unfortunately there are so many uneducated comments being made by lots of holders, the community is full of highly risky and senseless traders, but there is a strong minority that leads the future of crypto too, in the end of the day, market cap is kept by mostly market makers and professional investors, however the strongest backing comes from believers and it's a matter of education that will bring out the true potential of crypto.
Having said that, even though trading requires you to have certain targets and tresholds to realize your capital gain, since the day I bought a laptop for 10 Bitcoins, I never ever again sold my crypto, despite trading into different altcoins, and my money gained in value, despite the 2017 December massive bull run and the crash followed by months of bear market. Crypto currencies are highly volatile, but as I believe the future belongs to blockchain and crypto currencies, I will always hold.
On the topic of HODLing, I'd also like to bring attention to automated index funds, especially one an amazing crypto index fund, crypto20 (C20) (http://www.tokentalk.co/brand/crypto20), where the main idea is, there's a pool of top 20 market capped crypto currencies, and the index fund automatically trades the top 20 daily (if number 20th coin drops to 21st, the new one will be bought, selling the dropped coin) so the idea is when any prominent crypto token/coin gets a bull run, you will share a part of that earning by holding c20 coins. It's been pretty neat for me and I'm holding a small investment there for long term.
Finally it is possible to make some interest earning with your crypto, just like a saving account in a bank. It is called "margin funding" (provided by bitfinex), in a gist, it's the act of providing crypto currencies to other traders at a predetermined rate, earning interest over time.
They give you the flexibility to lock in a price from a minimum of 1 day to a maximum of 30 days. Also the rate percentage can be dictated by the market, however they allow individuals to market make, giving you the option to determine your own rates.
I have personally done a bit of it for a few days just to try it out, my biggest concern regarding Bitfinex exchange is, that they are the brand behind Tether (USDT), and they're notorious for refusing audits on numerous times and if Tether goes bust, there'll be a bear market generally as well as taking down Bitfinex forever too, so I moved away from it and do not personally recommend it without lots of caution too.
3- Short term trading crypto, buying the rumors and selling the news, moving on targets
I am not a big fan of short term trading, and prefer long term HODLing, however I have been practicing small amounts of buying the rumor and selling the news, the key here is knowing when to quit and predetermining a certain capital gain target and leave on time, as with gambling, short term trading without a scope for success will ultimately mean losing your capital, as you need to be very swift and agile and move with the waves of the markets. One needs to do a lot of reading before attempting this, it's a rather high risk high return model and can be very damaging to one's finances.
Having said that, I can give very safe examples, like the recent announcement on Tron (TRX) (more news on Tron: http://www.tokentalk.co/brand/tron) regarding their main net launch, and their promise of 30000 trades per second.
Now, remember the second part of this section's header, "buy the rumor, sell the news". Despite Tron's boss Justin Sun being dubbed as the Chinese Steve Jobs when it comes to marketing, and lots of great news and indicators about Tron project (like their github account being one of the most active in the community, very hard working technical team), most short term traders will not be interested in the content of the news, but simply buy the rumor and sell the news, so you need to be clever about this strategy and move alongside the market makers and make money on these buy sell cycles.
4- Individual GPU mining
As explained previously, I have done this at home but the noise of GPU fans as well as heat generated were so unbearable that I had to stop eventually.
However my friends have done this on an industrial scale, where they hired a naturally cold premise for putting in racks of GPUs and started mining Ethereum (ETH, more on http://www.tokentalk.co/brand/ethereum), and they are having a nice passive second income from it. The reason I did not join in was because I pretty much missed the opportunity and was only aware after they already bought the GPUs and installed them in.
Will I be looking to invest into any of the above points it when I find the money? Perhaps I will, however I may do more research to diversify my investments further, as it's a great rule of thumb to do so, to be more crash averse, as long bear markets can hurt quite a lot, mentally.
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice and only reflects a combination of my own experiences, research and gut feel, please always do your own research and experiment with bare minimal. And also, very importantly, please oh please only invest your own money which you would be ok to lose and never ever take loans to participate in crypto, it could literally be financial suicide.
Please follow my personal investor account at http://www.tokentalk.co/person/serdarsenay (my tweets are there too) if you like what you've read so far.
Thank you very much for reading!