Stake or Not to Stake???

When I first got into Crypto almost a year ago I told myself that I was going to just do mining and let the money pour in without having to do anything else. Boy was I wrong, I wish I knew then what I know now and would have probably not invested so heavily in mining from jump. Mining is great as long as the block difficulty never increases and with cloud mining you really are at the mercy of the mining provider so you really don't know how much actual reward you are getting. Some of the better mining operations like BitClub are not open to US residence. Here is what happens when you try to sign up.

BITCLUB NETWORK IS NOT AVAILABLE IN THE UNITED STATES
You are seeing this message because you are attempting to access this page from a Restricted Country

BitClub Network is no longer offering any products or services to members or any country/territory controlled by the United States. Why? Because the United States is not friendly to Bitcoin so we are focusing on the rest of the world.

If you are a US Citizen please DO NOT Join BitClub Network!
So what other options are their if you don't want to mess with Cloud mining, buy your own ASIC mining hardware or just buying coins and hoping they increase in value. Well I am here to tell you there is STAKING!!
Staking is when some cryptos pay dividends to people for holding the coins in a staking wallet. Staking provides dual benefits of securing the blockchain network as well as creating an opportunity for users to get incentives or dividends on their holdings. So recently I have been on a mission to find some Alt coins that I can buy and stake that have long term potential.
Here the Top 5 I have come up with:

DASH
NEO
PIVX
OKCASH
LISK
I am not going to dive deep into each one in this article but I will give you the high level overview.

DASH - minimum to stake is 1000 DASH, at its current value of $586 that would cost $586,000! Don't know about you but that is a little out of my range....lol.

Neo - No Minimum, that I know of, current value of $109.

PIVX - No Minimumand current value is $5.23

OKCASH - No minimum current value is $.23

Link - no minimum current value $22.27 but you have to get delegate votes from community.

So I have decided to go with NEO.

neo matrix.jpg

No Not this Neo....lol. Even though he was pretty cool in the Matrix Trilogy!

I am going to purchase some NEO because it has great upswing and real world use. It has been touted as the Chinese Ethereum. By Staking NEO tokens you generate GAS. Yes folks I said GAS, not the kind you get from eating too many beans but a crypto called GAS. I just love saying I am going to earn some GAS.....hilarious.

A service fee is charged when someone creates or changes an asset on the NEO blockchain. GAS is used to pay for this service fee, which is then distributed proportionately to NEO owners. GAS can be traded on exchanges, so you can convert it to BTC, ETH, etc.

There are 3 ways to stake NEO, 1. on an exchange, 2. desktop wallet or 3. web wallet. I will be using the desktop wallet because i dent trust leaving my cryptos on an exchange because you never know if they get hacked or just close down suddenly then poof there goes all your crypto.

This seems to be the easiest to stake with no minimum required to generate GAS. You need to pay attention to the exchange you buy it on and see if they payout GAS or not. You can use this calculator https://neotogas.com to figure out how much GAS you will generate with a certain amount of NEO.

Neo crypto.jpg