Earn free bitcoins

In this section, you can see different ways how to earn free bitcoins. If your are interested in buying bitcoins for dollars or euros via paypal or credit card see here.

Mining cryptocoins:

Mining bitcoins : The bitcoin algorithm is such that the mining difficulty increases with the network power so that the amount of mined coins remains constant. Nowadays a huge power is put in bitcoin mining over internet. Mining bitcoins with CPU or even GPU is in general not profetable. You may need to invest in sofisticated hardaware in order to make a good outcome out of the mining activity.

Mining altcoins: Many other cryptocurrencies are still easy to mine. You can mine those altcoins and then exchange them with bitcoins via an exchange platform (e.g. bter).

Pay-to-work websites:

There are also many websites proposing Paid to Work similar to Amazon's Mechanical turk where you get paid a small amount for doing a task like ranking the quality of translation or so. Paid to click websites pay you a small amount of money (or bitcoins) to visit an advertise's website.

Pay-to-click websites:

coinad is one of these Pay-to-click website where you get paid for clicking on ads and viewing them for a minimum number of seconds. Click here to register and start to make bitcoins immediately.

btcclicks is another Pay-to-click website. Here also you get paid bitcoins for viewing ads. Click here to register.

There are other Pay-to-click websites that pay in bitcoin or in dollars. However, do not expect to earn a lot with those sites. Most of them will allow the user to only visualise a handfull of ads per day. The rates are also very low ranging from 1 to few hundreds Satoshi per click (1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 Bitcoin). All you can make per day and per site is equivalent to less than 1 cent.

I'm waiting to obtain few refferals to test this option too. I will write about it later.

Webmasters, put ads on your website : 

If you own a web site, you can use coinurl service. This service is similar to Google Adsense. By diffusing ad units on your website you get paid on a Pay-per-click or a Pay-per-view basis. Coinurl seems to have a problem with blogs. They say that they reject 99% of blogspot or wix websites.

Shrink urls and make money:

Short urls are useful when you want to put the link in a tweet for instance, where the message has a strict limit in terms of number of characters. You can turn the long urls short and earn money when the users click on them.

Coinurl url shortner :

You can also use Coinurl service to shorten urls. Shortened urls show interstitial ads to the user before the target website is open. Try here a shortened link to Wikipedia to see how it works.
The payout for their Coinurl url shortening service is low. It ranges from 50 to 250 Satoshi per view. They also say that they accept only one view per IP and per day. Additionally they can decide when and how many views are valid and reject what they consider illegal clicks.

Coinurl is offline as of March 2015.

Adfly url shortner :

If you can receive your money in Paypal or Payza than Adfly is a better choice for you. The payout is higher than coinurl. Especialy if you have a good traffic from the US. The payout depends on the location of your visitors and the type of the ads (interstitial, banner, popup).
Follow this link to create an account on Adfly and start monetizing your short urls.

Get paid to share your links!

 Adfly also started recently its popads service.
I have read numerous positive reviews on Adfly and tested it myself. They pay timely when the gains are above the 5$ threshold.

Trading cryptocurrencies with bter

You can use your bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies as stock deposit. Otherwise, you can trade them and try to make a profit. Put in mind that cryptocurrencies market is very volatile. You can make substantial earnings but losses can also be very large.

When I talk about losses, I refer to various kinds of risks that are inherent to the cryptocurrency market.
- Market is very volatile. Prices can change rapidly. The extent of those changes might also be very high. It can happen that the bitcoin price changes by 30% in one day.
- Exchange market are subject to security failures. Many examples are by now available, including Mt.Gox, coinex.pw, bter and others. When a site is hacked and coins are stolen, their is often no way to recover your deposits.
- Bitcoin has no central authority behind, no guaranty as well.


Cryptocurrencies trading platforms:
Bter (RECOMMENDED)
Coinex.pw (Offline since March 2014, shut down)
Cryptsy (NOT RECOMMENDED)
Vircurex (not yet tested)
Coins-e (not yet tested)

Cryptocurrencies markets are still very volatile. Prices can go up and down in short time. You can make money but you can lose as well. So, do not invest in those exchanges more that you can afford to loose. Finally, this post is for information only and may not be regarded as recommendation of any type.

BTER :
bter.com is a cryptocurrency trading website. You can here exchance a cryptocurrency for another or for chinese yuans. If you don't yet have an acount then click on the link bellow to open an account and get 10% discount on your trading fees for 6 months:

Open a bter account

If you already have an account, login into your account using the link bellow to benefit from the 6 months tranding fees discount:

 Login into your bter account

You need to deposit some funds in your account. The simplest way is to use cryptocurrencies like bitcoins or litecoins. Deposit of chinese yuans might be more complicated.

In early 2015, bter announced that a substantial amount of bitcoins has been stolen from their cold wallet. After going offline for few weeks they finally reopened the site and resumed withdrawals gradually. Trading was again enabled by March 12th.


COINEX.PW (NOT RECOMMENDED) :
After the spectacular collapse of MtGox last month, many other exchanges show difficulties. Coinex.pw a cryptocurrency exchange has shut down operations in March after being victim to cyberattacks resulting in the theft of considerable amount of coins belonging to the costumers. The owner has first deleted his accounts on Reddit and GitHub. He reappeared later, and promised that coinex.pw will refund the costumers from his own coins. He also revealed that the same thing happened in the past and that the stollen amount were refunded from the company's account.
It seems that the website is again operational but withdrawals are not possible. Any amount you deposit there will probably be lost.

coinex.pw has been shut down.

CRYPTSY :
Cryptsy, another popular cryptocurrency exchange is also experencing difficulties probably due to hacker's attacks (they say: our wallet that was bloated by transaction spam and moving to a multiple wallet system). But it seems that Cryptsy is having a particular problem. They process deposits fast, transactions are also going but if you try to withdraw your coins then you get stuck. Withdrawals may remain in "Pending" status for a long time, sometimes for many days. By the time you get you coins, the valued might have been droped by a considerable percentage. It took me 5 days to get my IFC coins out of this exchange. A quick search on many forums reveals that Crypsty is being exprencing this kind of difficulties since several months already. Some users report withdrawals pending for over a week. Some also reported the same difficulties with other coins than IFC. Overall, despite a good market depth and intersting prices, I do not recommend this exchange.

How to buy bitcoins using paypal or credit card

There is no direct way for buying bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies with paypal. The reason behind that is that Papal paiements can be reversed while bitcoin transactions cannot. A buyer can pay with Paypal, recieve the bitcoin and then make complaint and cancel the paiement.

You can however use your paypal account to buy bitcoins by following the steps detailed bellow:

virwox is exchange site for vitrtual currencies. In particular, the site exchanges Linden dollars for US dollars, euros, swiss francs, .. and bitcoins. The Linden dollar is the virtual currency of the virtual reality game and social network "Second life". You can open an account, fund it with US dollars, euros or swiss francs using paypal or credit card. Then buy some Linden dollars and exchange them again for bitcoins.

Click here to open a virwox account :

 

You need first to deposit some funds in your account . You can use one the available options:
- Paypal
- Credit card
- Bank transfer
-...

Go to "Exchange" section to buy Linden dollars for your mony.

Again, in the "Exchange" section, you can sell your Linden dollars for bitcoins.

Finnaly, you may withdraw your bitcoins to an address of your choice. To do so, go the the "Withdrawal" section, enter the amount of bitcoins you want to withdraw, your bitcoin wallet address and confirm the operation.