I’ve read through a few of these answers, and I’m going to give some realistic numbers behind some of the ways I’ve earned free crypto over the past six months to illustrate how it’s a rich person’s game:

1 – Mining

I picked up an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 LHR that gets 70 MH/S mining rates on NiceHash with the LHR nerfs (should do 100; used to do 55). It earns me about $60/mo in profit after paying for electricity, but the math really isn’t that simple. Bitcoin’s price is volatile, and only a month ago, my profits were next to nothing.

Because of GPU supply shortages, the card cost me $1200 on the secondary market, so it’ll take about two years for me to make up my money. And that assumes that the price of Bitcoin is at least $40k when that point comes.

If it hits $60k again in the next year, I may cash out then. If it crashes below $20k, I may end up holding long term.

This is because when you mine crypto, your assets are in crypto. The real value in USD won’t matter until you pull out. But I neither pulled out nor leave much sitting in my mining wallet. Instead, I transfer to Coinbase and convert to interest-bearing altcoins.

2 – Staking

Prior to 2021, I mostly avoided exchanges because of fear of hot wallet hacks. Instead I kept my crypto in cold storage. My Coinbase the wallet had about $120 sitting in it, and I’ve since transferred about $400 into it that I’ve mined. I then convert it into whatever earns the highest interest for staking.

I do have other tokens staked other places with better rates than Coinbase, but it’s just the easiest way to go about diversifying from NiceHash. This screenshot is 4 months of interest off $600 spread across them. Cardano is off because I recently switched from Algorand when its rate dropped.

The extra $80 is attributed to pure luck in the BTC exchange rates at the time I converted to the other tokens. Right now, it means I can add another $85 to my total earned off mining, and I’m paying my graphics card off a little early. That can change tomorrow. Earlier this week, it was more like $130.

Although the interest rates are slightly higher than I get from my bank, it’s also in a volatile asset that could be worthless by the time I’m ready to cash out in two years. Or it could be worth 100x. That USD exchange rate at the end of 2023 will be vital in making my investment worthwhile. And even then, I can choose to let it ride.

You can mitigate some of the volatility by staking a stablecoin like USD in Voyager but you also risk long term liquidity problems as it’s not as stable a project as Binance or Coinbase. And really any of these exchanges can go down at any moment.

In the meantime, let’s explore the other free crypto options.

3 – Learn & Earn

Coinbase does give you some free crypto for taking courses, but it’s a lot less than it used to be. Was once $10 then slid gradually down to $3, and I’m pretty sure I got $1-$2 of the last couple releases, and now they’re making you sit there for a minute when I could easily answer any of those quizzes based on prior research and intuition.

Most of the coins performed poorly since dropped, but there have been a few gems like Polygon that earned me something like $3 off $5.

Overall, I think I earned about $120 off Coinbase Earn since 2017 for maybe an hour of my time total.

4 – Gaming

Play-to-earn is the biggest scam in gaming, and that’s saying A LOT in an industry notorious for loot boxes, freemium paywalls, and other money-grubbing tricks.

I’ve played a few games that are decent but none that required me to pay anything (unless I knew a friend who had it). You’ll be lucky to earn $10/day or $300/mo. That’s more money than I earn from my mining/staking setup but also requires you to play and be great. Not good -great.

As a full-time job (which is what it would need to be), it won’t cut it.

5 – Participating

The final way to get free crypto is to integrate “web3” tools onto your daily life. When people discuss airdrops, they are referencing free tokens simply dropped into your wallet out of thin air. Most airdrops are garbage these days, but the ones that are earnestly trying typically airdrop to early adopters in their community.

You can join Discord servers and Telegram groups, tweet hashtags and follow accounts, and of course use the actual products. A lot of projects start as airdrops, and some have maintained some level of success. And you can earn crypto from some of this stuff too.

I earn Brave for using its browser, Presearch for searching online, and have blogs and videos repurposed from Medium and YouTube on Hive, Mirror, Steemit, and D.Tube. Of course, I’m not going full time into these, simply syndicating existing content to have a presence. Each of these methods provides a small contribution to my total crypto assets though.

A bunch of places give you some free crypto to join, and you can collect a few hundred dollars that way. DAOs are also becoming popular, and there’s no shortage of those looking to pay you in their own proprietary tokens.https://youtu.be/Shxiy7l5b_4

I can’t tell you how many job offers I’ve had over the years looking to pay in random crypto. I wish I could hire a whole team and pay them in Brian Pennies.

Overall, I’ve earned about $10,000 worth of crypto from these methods. But that was over the course of 5 years from 2017–2022. And it includes everything I ever earned or was airdropped in that time. If I estimate current mining into it in a best-case-scenario, we’re looking at $3k/year average from all of this (factoring out compound interest on the staking).

In exchange, my browser and search engine kinda suck, and I’ve adopted workarounds. People steal my blockchain blogs constantly, and my electric bill is higher as I test the limits of running this graphics card (mostly) 24/7. Beyond that, my life has not changed much beyond spending a few minutes every day checking crypto prices and balances as a hobby.

I could more than double it if I dedicated my life to mastering a game like Axie Infinity, so I’d be earning $6.6k per year.

The reason I don’t is because the federal poverty line in the United States is $12,880/year. I need a real job to make up that difference just to stay poor, so I don’t have time. That’s probably why so many people choose the rug pull method of simply pumping up their token and then cashing out and walking away.

It works better as a passive long-term investment. At the rate I’m going with compound interest, it should be a decent holding in 20 years. Of course, I’m likely to have to replace the graphics card at least once and more likely 3–4 times in that timeframe. Bitcoin will half about five times in that 20-year span, which means I’ll get diminishing returns.

So, let’s say you had $100,000 to throw into staking crypto. You find a place that’ll pay 10% APY, and you’re earning $10k/year off it. At this point, you could theoretically earn your way just above the poverty line playing games, but realistically, I can’t pay my rent, utilities, and food bills without at least $20k/year. I’m not comfortable until above $40k. So I would still need a job and couldn’t dedicate the time to play games for crypto.

Time will tell how well my crypto portfolio ultimately performs against the rest of my investments. But overall, I’m just happy to test new things. It’s a fun hobby

What is LHR on graphics cards?

LHR stands for Low Hashrate, and it’s Nvidia’s attempt to curtail the mining market. In simplified terms, a cryptocurrency is mined by solving complicated math problems to create a hash. ASICS are designed to maximize potential if only solving a single hashing algorithm, while LHR cards attempt to limit this repetitive action to slow your mining speed down.

However, it’s ultimately meaningless, as NiceHash fully unlocked it in its most recent release candidate (RC) release.

Tested it this weekend on my RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra from EVGA. Jumped from 70 Mh/s to 100 Mh/s instantly. When it was initially implemented, I believe the hashrate was somewhere around 45–50 on this card. It’s been 70 all year and now up to 100. We’ll see how long it takes For Ethereum to switch over to Ethereum 2 PoS, but until then, I’m getting decent value from this card. It mines about 0.0001 BTC per day, although my VRAM temps are through the roof.

The RTX 30 series has some known cooling issues, despite me having one of the better cards in the series. I added better cooling to the case, but this weekend I finish upgrading the stock cooling by taking apart the graphics card itself to replace the cooling pads and thermal compound. I also upgraded the heat sink and fans to drop the temperature back down to workable levels that don’t thermal throttle my card.

I wish Nvidia spent as much time engineering their cooling systems as they did half ass slowing Ethereum mining for a minute.

Of course to get the best mining performance, you must overclock.

Can I overclock a CPU and GPU without liquid cooling?

Absolutely! I’m actually not a fan of liquid cooling. You only get two options: all-in-one (AIO) and DIY. AIO is less likely to leak, but it also means you have to replace the entire thing if one component fails. You can also only cool the CPU (although companies like Corsair are changing that). It’s not ideal.

With DIY, you have maintenance, and there’s a possibility you could end up leaking liquid coolant on your expensive PC parts if you’re not careful. Maybe twice a year, you’ll need to check seals and replace a few things to avoid leaking. But you do get to set up those really cool looking rigs with water blocks on the GPU, DRAM, and even SSD.

Personally, I’m not a fan of my PC glowing and opt out of all that RGB lighting and colored cooling. Instead, I just upgrade my heat sinks and fans with an airflow case. I use a Noctua heatsink and fans (have 10 120mm and one 140mm).

The heat pipes on these things and their highly engineered fan blades and heat sinks allow me to overclock my CPU quite a bit. And I OC the GPU too, which is what the airflow case is for.

Modern PC cases look cool for those water cooled setups, but they can be hot boxes for air cooling. This case has mesh on the top, front, back, and side, along with space for 10 fans. I added an extra exhaust at the bottom where my GPU is because I’m not using the interface as it’s just a Mining card that needs airflow more than anything.

Without a single drop of cooling, I can keep my entire rig running relatively cool while running some heavy loads.