I have been in my current job for more than two years now. Over the years, I have witnessed my financial situation change quite rapidly from being in dire straits to being quite comfortable in making ends meet. While I earned in fiat over time though, for the most part I neglected my investments in the cryptospace.
Yesterday I was talking with a friend who was trying to get me to purchase one of the meme coins and he referred to someone who took crypto trading as a full time job and had made hundreds of thousands of dollars from it. Of course such figures always beat my imagination and I decided to let my mind wander a bit.
I got into the crypto space relatively early through Hive (then steem). If I had remained consistent through the years I would be in a better place investment-wise by now. Yet, FOMO probably wouldn't have prevented me from spending some crypto earnings as 'necessities' if I remained unemployed.
However as a side gig I am able to better hold and build my earnings while I largely spend fiat. Of course this still isn't set in stone, but the need for a powerdown has been abated and allowed me accumulate.
One thing I have noticed about many of the Holders I follow on Hive is that they virtually had other things going for them which prevented the need to live off crypto. I can name a few but people like @Tarazkp and 
Living off Crypto Vs Investing in Crypto
However, there are tons of crypto investors who have profited greatly taking investing as a full time gig. The primary difference is that they don't necessarily stake but the focus is on making the best margins from trading, While this may appear easy on the surface, it certainly requires consistency beyond a risk appetite to understand better, and of course a bit of work.
Hive as a platform rewards us for content which serves as some sort of payment for it. Of course the majority of users on the platform are consumers and not investors, meaning that any Hive earnings is free to be spent the way users deem fit.
In this manner, it becomes difficult to accumulate as someone unemployed and requires strong discipline to continue doing so.
Yet for me who could have afforded to combine these two activities, I was lax and comfortable just entering fiat until I made a comeback in May this year.
Crypto as a good side hustle probably needs something holding it rather than letting it fizzle out. For those willing to take more risks and trade, the doors are limitess and will likely set a lot of people who come into the space for one reason on the other make decent returns on their investments.
Conclusion
A platform like Hive that works on the principle of compounding will likely work best if there is something on the side covering most of the bills. That said, growing in the space is still an individual thing, and growth can be achieved irrespective of circumstance.