Happy New Years everyone! I know all of our arms are tired from holding them in the air during that roller coaster cryptocurrencies went on as a whole last year but, believe me this year will be even more crazy. Although Bitcoin is still the granddaddy of them all, last year was really more of a great year for altcoins. The percentage of the total market cap for crypto went from over 80% Bitcoin in the beginning of 2017 to now just a little under 50% of the total market cap with the rest going to Altcoins. With all this sweet new money in alts, I wanted to take the opportunity to share 3 gems I found that can help make you some easy money in 2018.

CPU Mining with Monero

Monero is one of the few CPU-mineable coins that is actually profitable. It is a privacy coin with stealth addresses and a solid community behind it. The devs and supporters stay pretty active on Reddit at r/Monero and on twitter @monerocurrency and it almost has a cult-like following but the tech seems solid. If you have a computer laying around that you can plug up in a corner somewhere and let run then you can be earning passive income by mining Monero. I suggest setting up a computer with a fresh install of Ubuntu server without the GUI then run it headless once the miner is setup so that you don’t waste any of the computer’s resources on unnecessary stuff. I used this guide here on cryptocurrencyfreak.com to setup mine and there are a few other guides for mining XMR on other OS’ at the bottom of the guide if Ubuntu is not your flavor. You probably wont break the bank with what your making, depending on what kind of hardware you have laying around, but you can make a couple of dollars. You can use an XMR mining calculator like this one to see how much you can make. With the current price of $378 per coin at the time of writing this, its not a bad choice when picking an alt to mine.

Staking Vericoin

Although there are quite a few coins that are verified using the POS(Proof of stake) model, many of them require a large amount of the coin already to start staking like Dash which requires 10,000 coins to run a node. With the current price of Dash at $1,183 per coin that is a lot of damn money, and unless you already have a lot of those coins from the early days or are loaded that may not be something viable for you. Vericoin is different in that they use POST(Proof of stake time) where there is no minimum amount of coins needed to start staking and staking starts automatically after just 8 hours of the coins being in your wallet. You can grab the latest version of the official wallet here and check out the white paper while your there, the idea of a binary-chain with Vericoin as the spend coin and Verium as the digital reserve is pretty damn unique and worth hodling anyways. By grabbing some Vericoin and storing it in your official wallet on your computer you can start earning interest on the coins you have daily. They start off pretty small, especially if you dont have much, but over time should increase. Vericoin also has an active community on Reddit at r/Vericoin, Twitter @Vericoin, Slack, and Telegram.
You can pick up some Vericoin on

• Shapeshift
• Bittrex
• Poloniex
• Livecoin
• Cryptopia
• CoinEgg
• Bleutrade
  

Creating quality content on Steemit

Last but certainly not least is Steemit, the social media site in which you are reading this article on right now(for those visiting). Although I am new to creating content myself on Steemit, I have been lurking and voting for some time now and am a huge fan of the platform. Steemit is a decentralized social media platform that pays content creators to create quality content that is curated by the Steemit community, it is pretty much that simple. Steemians are paid in Steem coins which they can then spend, trade, or hodl but in all cases it is real money. The best place to check out Steemit is on Steemit.com and it is completely free to get started. The thing I like most about Steemit that I have observed thus far is that the content that is of the best quality gets voted up by the community rather then the content that is the most viral and that is some kind of refreshing.

Honorable mention: Running a Substratum node

Not only is Substratum a big fat middle finger to the loss of net neutrality in the US but it also promises to be V3 of the Internet and a damn good use-case for blockchain technology. Currently SUB coins are only available for trade on Binance but the dev team will be releasing the beta software for running a node on your computer some time this month (January) and when they do you will be able to earn by running a node. Now I am no expert but if you read through their whitepaper here you can see for yourself that these guys seem to know what they are talking about and it could really change the way the world accesses information, especially in places where the government filters what the people can see on the Internet like China or Russia.

Anyways, I hope you all enjoyed this post and just as a disclaimer I AM NOT A FINANCIAL ADVISER. I'm just a guy that has been around, done some research, and wants to share the wealth so we all win. Stay classy internet!