I was going to give you a rundown of my portfolio, but that’s boring. Instead I’ll share how I’ve been attempting to build a passive crypto income.
The idea was born when I saw how a friend of mine was making big bucks running Master Nodes for various coins. The long crypto winter was rather depressing… seeing that red day after day gets to you! Perhaps if I could see income coming in, that would help me through the long dark nights?
My initial aim: $100 passive income a month. An arbitrary amount. But if it can be achieved then I can ‘turn up the volume’. That’s the theory anyway.
First I acquired a ZenCash secure node which pays out about 0.8 ZEN a month, let’s call it $20 (the price recently declined due to the 51% attack). I think this coin will grow in value in the future, I intend to just accumulate Zen and Hodl. Then the Master Node research began...and then stopped again as I just kept concluding that they are mostly sh1t coins with no purpose in existing (except to maintain a Master Node ecosphere). Their websites were near identical, their plans often bafflingly grandiose, or just the same old-same old. What I DID notice however was that they are often traded on a little exchange running on Bitshares called Crypto Bridge (https://wallet.crypto-bridge.org/) . It turns out that you can stake their token and earn a healthy percentage of their trading income. THIS seemed a better way of gaining passive income. With MNs, many will fail, some will endure. But an exchange will just churn out profits whatever coin does well. I liken it to being the guy running the general store during the California gold rush. Most prospectors went broke, but the store owners got rich selling everyone the picks and shovels.
So I bought some Bridge Coin (BCO) and staked it for a year. Every two weeks I get an income in BCO and BTC. It’s currently a VERY small amount, but I’m monitoring it and hope it will grow over time.
This got me interested in decentralised exchanges in general. Where there anymore offering staking? Yes as it happens. I’ve been slowly accumulating Easydex which is another DEX running on Bitshares. Whereas Crypto Bridge seems to specialise in the sh1tcoins that the major exchanges ignore, Easydex had a different proposition: Ease of use and a fiat gateway. They are aiming for widespread adoption. It’s an exciting project that I feel I’ve gotten into very early. You can pick up EasyDex tokens right now at a very cheap price (maybe 2 bts or thereabouts!) due to the OpenLedger fiasco. This investment hasn’t started paying out yet, but I have hopes it will give me a growing income. I currently own 0.2% of all tokens (is this what being a whale feels like? Ha ha)
I also bought 5TH/s of Genesis mining when a window opened up a few months ago. It pays out every day but it’s TINY (and dropping daily). I suspect that I’ll not make back my original investment. I’d only speculated with a small amount (800 bucks), but it’s taught me not to put any more in. Cloud mining doesn't pay it seems.
Finally, I attended Coinfest in Manchester a few months ago and got talking to EasyCryptoHunter (https://www.easycryptohunter.co.uk), a company that builds and sells GPU miners. To be honest I thought the days of mining rigs in your spare room were long gone. It was not something that I’d looked into very much. Imagine my surprise when I heard about Nicehash, a program that will run on your rig automatically mining whatever sh1tcoin is most profitable at that moment, then convert it to BTC and pay you each day. That meant, unlike with cloud or ASIC mining, you wouldn’t be battling against ever increasing difficulty levels and getting diminishing returns. When that coin dropped in my brain I thought, 'Brilliant, I want some of that'! They bandied around some figures of potential profits, which of course only applied when BTC was sitting at $20,000, but it seemed that it would still be profitable at lower bitcoin prices. The rigs on offer WERE quite expensive £9000+ for a 6 card rig using 1080s GPUs. I hummed and hawwed and then decided I could save thousands just building it myself. Lots of YouTube tutorials later I had a parts list. I was going to build a 4-card system using 1060 GPUs. These weren’t as powerful, but were renowned for being efficient (not too thirsty for electricity). Then I had a brainwave… interest in bitcoin has nosedived since January, maybe there were people giving up and selling their rigs cheap on eBay?
Turns out there are... and I bought one! MUCH less effort, and I got myself a little bargain. I’m now the proud owner of a 6-card 1060 GPU miner for the princely sum of £1400 (less than the cost of the parts). The previous owner had built it in December 2017 and had been just converting the earnings straight to fiat. In those days he was making a nice daily profit. Now the earnings were much lower and he felt it wasn’t worth his time/electricity. May aim is much different: I want to build a passive crypto income. It’s a magical machine that converts fiat into bitcoin (anonymously)
She’s whirring quietly away under the desk as I type this and has been paying out well. It’s currently paying out around $180-a-month, so I’ve now exceeded by $100/month target just with this rig alone. Maybe I need to up my goal to $300-a-month.
What happens when/if bitcoin takes another lurch upward? I’ve been trying to figure out the dynamics.
For the next few months I don’t plan on adding anything more to my little passive portfolio. I will record the income I’m receiving and hopefully I’ll see a nice increase each month as the DEX get busier and their payouts larger.
Of course all this might not be necessary if EOS does what I hope it will :-)
Block one & others funding all those DAPPS that will send me all their lovely airdrops is something I look forward to. (maybe I don't have enough going on in my life!)