WAYS TO EARN BITCOINS

Bitcoin is the newest craze. You’ve heard the stories of the average Joe whose initial small Bitcoin investment turned into millions nearly overnight. Unsurprisingly, you want to get in on the action. Fortunately for you, it isn’t too late! Bitcoin is a very young currency and it’s growing every day. Many bitcoin enthusiasts believe that people who invest even today are ‘early adopters': people who are taking the leap to try out Bitcoin and may get large returns on their investment in the future. 

There are many ways to earn bitcoins. Any job that you can do to get paid for in a national currency, you can in theory get paid for in Bitcoin. Here are some things you can do to get Bitcoin:

Mine

If you’ve been following Bitcoin in the news recently, it’s likely that you’ve heard of ‘Bitcoin Mining’. And no, get that image out of your head of thousands of people traveling to a physical underground cave and mining bitcoin ore. Bitcoin mining all takes place on a computer: the computer attempts to solve a mathematical problem, and everyone who’s mining for Bitcoin competes to solve it first. Whoever solves it first gets about 25 bitcoins. It may seem like computers can solve the problem in a few seconds, but this isn’t the case. As bitcoin mining has evolved, people have been creating computers specifically made for mining Bitcoin. As the problems are solved faster, the difficulty of the problems increase and become harder to solve.

You can try to mine bitcoins, but at this point it isn’t likely you’ll make a profit anytime soon. People and companies have invested millions into mining hardware, and it’d be difficult for a small-time miner like you to compete against them. Taking into account the cost of the electricity your hardware uses to mine and the difficulty of the problems increasing, your chances of making a profit are slim, and it’d take months for you to make a return on your investment if at all. Your best bet would be to try to find a place with ‘free’ electricity; an example of this would be an apartment where the electricity comes with the rent, so you won’t be directly paying for all of the electricity the miner uses.

Here are some terms you should know while doing research:

• ROI: Return On Investment. The amount of time it’ll take to start to make a profit on the miner. This may or may not take into account shipping, electricity and/or pool fee costs.
• Hash: How many calculations a miner runs through in a second. One hash=one calculation. Note: Every hash unit (e.g. Kilohash, Megahash) from here on out has 1,000 times the hashrate of the last.
• KH/s: Kilohashes/second. One Kilohash=1,000 hashes.
• MH/s: Megahashes/second. One Megahash=1,000,000 hashes.
• GH/s: Gigahashes/second. One Gigahash=1,000,000,000 hashes
• TH/s: Terahashes/second. One Terahash=1,000,000,000,000 hashes.
• PT/s: Petahashes/second. One Petahash=1,000,000,000,000,000 hashes.
• W: Watt. A measurement of the amount of electricity the miner uses. A higher wattage means the miner uses more electricity, and your electric bill will be higher.
• ASIC: Application-Specific Integrated Circuit. In general, an ASIC is an electronic chip designed for a specific use. Specifically in Bitcoin, ASICs are powerful computer chips used to mine Bitcoin. The introduction of ASIC chips greatly increased hashrates for Bitcoin miners.
• Algorithm: Each digital currency has an ‘algorithm'; quite a few algorithms exist. Bitcoin uses one called SHA-256. If you see a miner called a ‘Scrypt’ miner, it probably doesn’t work with Bitcoin. However, all miners that are ‘SHA-256′ miners can be used to mine Bitcoin.

Find Work

As stated above, you can theoretically get paid in Bitcoin for doing anything you can get paid for in any other currency. As Bitcoin is so young and constantly growing, newly-created Bitcoin companies are almost always hiring. You can try to find a job for which you’ll get paid in Bitcoin at any of these sites:
• Coinality.com– A Bitcoin job board. People post jobs that they’re hiring people to do and people looking for work apply for the job if they’re interested.
• /r/Jobs4Bitcoins on reddit– Offer your services and hope someone contacts you with a job offer or browse listings of people looking for people to hire.
• Work For Bitcoin (BitTask)– Another Bitcoin job board.
• BitcoinTalk Services forum– Similar to a Bitcoin job board but in forum form: businesses can offer jobs and users can offer their services to work. Interested users either reply or private message the offering user.