How to Earn and Make Money with Bitcoin

By: Ofir Beigel | Last updated: 2/16/23

A lot of people are into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in order to make a quick buck. Today’s post is dedicated exclusively to ways you can earn Bitcoins for free or make money with Bitcoin.

Don’t like to read? Watch our 2-minute tutorial instead



Earning Bitcoins Summary

While there are many ways you can make money with Bitcoin in the end there are no free meals. Earning Bitcoins online take time and money and most methods promising free Bitcoins will not be worth the time wasted on them.

How can I earn Bitcoins for free?

• Shopping rewards
• Interest-bearing accounts
• Staking
• Micro earnings
• Owning a faucet
• Signature campaigns
• Trading Bitcoin
• Affiliate programs
• Gambling
• Writing about Bitcoin
• Bitcoin-related services
• Bitcoin Mining
• Bitcoin Lending
• HYIPs / Coin doublers
• Bitcoin forks

If you want a detailed explanation about all the methods out there keep on reading. Here’s what I’ll cover:

Watch our detailed video guide here

1. How Can I Earn Bitcoins Online for Free?

People tend to think that because Bitcoin is a new form of currency, there is some magical way you can earn Bitcoins or make money from it easily. I’m sorry to burst the bubble, but Bitcoin is just like any other currency out there.

Just like there’s no easy, risk free way to make a quick buck there’s no magical way to earn Bitcoin.

While cryptocurrencies in general may hold some new possibilities for generating income the basics are the same – you’ll need to invest time, or money in order to make money.

I’m going to cover 12 different ways you can earn Bitcoins in this post. Each method I’ll cover will be graded according to the following factors:

How much effort does it take to use this method?

How much money can be made through this method?

How risky is this method?

All of the methods I’ll go over are things I’ve actually tested myself, so rest assured I’m talking from experience.

2. Shopping rewards

Effort – Low

Income – Medium

Risk – Low

You can earn free Bitcoin when doing your regular shopping online. Using shopping reward companies you need to download an extension to your browser, use it as a checkout on various brands and earn up to 30% cashback on your purchases. This is a great way to earn Bitcoins while shopping for stuff you were gonna buy anyway. 

Lolli is a US shopping rewards company that gives users 30% cashback in Bitcoin rewards when they shop online at over 1,000+ top merchants, including Nike, Booking.com, Macy’s, Staples and more.

CoinCorner is a UK company that also supports well-known brands like Booking.com, O2, Europecar and Vodafone and also lets you earn Bitcoin rewards on cashbacks.

3. Interest-bearing accounts

Effort – Low

Income – Medium

Risk – Medium

If you already own cryptocurrency, you can deposit it in an interest-bearing account and gain interest on it. There are several companies that supply this type of service, the most popular ones being YouHodler and Nexo.

Most companies that supply Bitcoin loans also allow customers to lend out their Bitcoins for interest. If, for example, you don’t need cash, you can still deposit your Bitcoins and receive annual interest on your deposit. This means your Bitcoins can generate additional income for you, instead of just lying around in your Bitcoin wallet. To learn more on how to earn interest on your crypto, visit this page.

4. Staking

Effort – Low

Income – Medium

Risk – High

Certain cryptocurrencies allow you to lock up a portion of your holdings in order to participate with transaction validation on their network. This is known as staking and it’s the energy-efficient alternative to cryptocurrency mining. The more coins you stake the higher your chances of being chosen as a validator and earning rewards. You can read our full guide on ‘What is Staking‘ to learn more about it.

Some popular cryptocurrencies that allow staking today are Tezos, Cardano and Ethereum. 

5. Micro earnings – Faucets, PTC, Micro jobs

Effort – High

Income – Low

Risk – Low

One of the cheapest, easiest but also most time consuming ways to actually earn Bitcoin is through micro earnings. This means that you’ll basically be doing small tasks and earning fractions of a coin for the time you spend.

Some of the more well-known micro earnings sites are Bitcoin faucets – sites which you repeatedly visit every few minutes in order to claim a very small amount of coins.

Faucets are actually a subcategory of PTC websites, PTC meaning “Pay to Click”. PTC websites will usually have you click on an ad or on a button on the site in order to make money from ad sales. In return you’ll get a small amount of coins.

How small?

From my calculations, if you work non stop at clicking buttons you’ll average anywhere between 5-40 cents an hour. Not sure that’s worth your time or even the electricity for running your computer.

6. Owning a faucet

Effort – Medium to high

Income – Low to medium

Risk – Medium

While participating as a faucet user might not earn you a lot of money, owning your own faucet is a whole different story. Today, you can build a cryptocurrency faucet relatively easily and earn money from selling ads on your site.

At 99Bitcoins I ran my own faucet for almost 3 years until I decided to focus on other things. Depending on the advertisers you’re using and the amount of traffic you have you can make up to $1000/month running a faucet.

However, running a faucet requires a reasonable amount of time and effort. You’ll need to set up your own website, manage users, prevent fraud and also bring some initial capital to fund the faucet when starting out. Here’s my beginner’s guide to running a faucet.

7. Running a signature campaign

Effort – Medium

Income – Low

Risk – Low

Somewhere around mid-2014, BitcoinTalk, a leading Bitcoin forum,  started running signature campaigns. Simply put, you could use your BitcoinTalk signature to advertise a product and get paid for every post you write. The complete list of campaigns can be seen on the forum itself.

With a signature campaign you get paid according to your membership level on BitcoinTalk. Usually, anyone with a status less than ‘full member’ won’t get paid that much, if at all.

To become a full member, you’ll need at least 120 posts under your belt. There are also limitations on posts; such as length, original content, and more. Sometimes, there’s also a minimum post requirement per week.

From my experience you can make up to $5 an hour depending on how much you write and your membership level. This, of course, does not include the number of posts you need to write in order to earn the required membership level on BitcoinTalk.

8. Become a crypto trader

Effort – Medium to high

Income – High

Risk – High

One of the fastest, easiest but also riskiest ways you can make money with Bitcoin is by trading it. Basically you’re trying to buy Bitcoin when the price is low and sell it when the price rises.

However, trading Bitcoin successfully is not a matter of luck or guesswork. Profitable traders spend a substantial amount of time learning how to trade and how to overcome the many risks involved with trading. Successful traders know they might lose money in the short term but they look at it as an investment in their education, since they are aiming for the long term.

If you want to become a trader make sure you have the time and capital to invest in good trading education.

9. Bitcoin affiliate programs

Effort – High

Income – Medium to high

Risk – Low to medium

Perhaps one of the most overlooked ways to make money with Bitcoin is through promoting various affiliate programs. Affiliates are people who promote a certain business for free but receive a commission if they manage to bring in paying customers.

Many Bitcoin exchanges, products and services have an affiliate program in which you can sign up for. You then get your own unique affiliate link in order to promote that product or service.

Of course there are many ways you can promote your affiliate link – you can share it on Facebook, run ad campaigns on different websites or even set up your own information site and promote your links within the content.

This is actually how 99Bitcoins got started, and I’ve even published a book about it called “My Dirty Little Bitcoin Secrets” which you can download for free. If you want to know more about this method make sure to download the book and read it from start to finish – only then will you understand the amount of work needed in order to become a successful affiliate marketer.

Also, here’s a list of highly profitable Bitcoin affiliate programs which I have already field tested myself.

10. Gambling in Bitcoin casinos

Effort – Low

Income – Medium to high

Risk – Extremely high

A very obvious way of trying to increase your crypto wealth would be to gamble on it using one of the various Bitcoin casinos out there. Of course there’s not much to elaborate on this method but if you do decide to risk your money and try your luck, please make sure the casino you’re using is provably fair.

A trustworthy Bitcoin casino will know that their “house edge” is enough to make a profit and therefore will want to prove to their players that they are not manipulating any results. They do this through a mathematical algorithm involving cryptography.

Bottom line, a provably fair casino will show you how to check that the results of the game you play are completely random. You can find a list of provably fair Bitcoin casinos on our site as well.

11. Write about Bitcoin

Effort – Medium

Income – Medium

Risk – Low

If you’re into cryptocurrencies and have a knack for words you might want to consider becoming a crypto journalist or article writer.

As the crypto industry evolves, more and more news and information websites are popping up. In many cases these sites are in need of writers as they are publishing dozens of articles each week.

Since good writers are hard to find, if you can submit quality work you may be able to earn a nice revenue stream by writing about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies from the comfort of your own home.

The best ways to find work as a writer would be to look for the “jobs” section in your favorite crypto publications. You can also email specific sites you’d like to write for, or you can create a writer profile on Upwork – an international freelance marketplace.

It’s best if you have some sample articles on hand before applying for a writing job as many publications would request previous work before hiring you.

12. Sell a related product or service

Effort – Varies

Income – Varies

Risk – Varies

If you’re not good with words perhaps there’s a different service you can offer. The BitcoinTalk services thread offers a wide variety of services you can provide in exchange for Bitcoin. Some of these include developing a website, marketing an online product or even becoming an Escrow agent for Bitcoin transactions.

13. Mine Bitcoin

Effort – Medium to high

Income – Medium to high

Risk – High

Many people that start out with Bitcoin are instantly drawn to the concept of Bitcoin mining. I mean, creating magical Internet money from your home computer? What could be better?

The fact is, that today Bitcoin mining has become more of a profession than a hobby. It requires extremely expensive mining equipment, high electricity costs, hardware configuration knowledge and physical space to actually store your miners.

Mining altcoins (e.g. Ethereum mining) is cheaper than what you’d need in order to mine Bitcoin. But this only means that the hardware will cost less. The other hassles of electricity costs, configurations, maintenance and so on are basically the same.

Sometimes you’ll encounter a website or mobile app that tells you they will mine coins for you. Most of these services are pretty much useless and will usually consume your device’s computing power and battery just to give you a few cents in return.

Another option is cloud mining – paying someone else to handle the mining equipment for you while sharing the profits. While this sounds ideal, most of the cloud mining sites today are just pretending to use your money for mining operations, they are in fact scams.

Furthermore, while there are a few legit sites out there, the money you’d pay them to mine Bitcoin is probably better invested just buying Bitcoin (as can be seen with my Genesis Mining analysis).

Of course I urge you to do your own market research since in the end, it’s your money.

14. Bitcoin Lending

Effort – Low

Income – Medium to high

Risk – Extremely risky

A very popular way of growing your Bitcoin wealth is through Bitcoin lending platforms. These sites connect borrowers that need crypto with crypto owners who lend their coins for an interest rate. Because these loans are ultra risky the interest rates are pretty high which initially seems like a good thing.

I mean I can make 15% a year on my coins, what’s not to love about that?

Well, if there is no actual collateral that holds the borrower liable for the loan and more often than not these loans default and lenders are left without their money. Some time ago I’ve tested out several uncollateralized loans here at 99Bitcoins, and they all eventually defaulted. That’s why I recommend to stay away from this specific method.

One site that seems to be working for a relatively long time which I haven’t tested thoroughly is xCoins. While I can’t vouch for it personally it seems to be getting decent reviews.

Recently some new players on the market started to offer Bitcoin loans which are collateralized with the borrower’s Bitcoin. These platforms also let you to earn interest on your Bitcoins or stablecoins, but due to the collateral, it is a more secured solution. Here I reviewed the best Bitcoin Loan sites.

As always, please do your own research before investing money anywhere.

15. HYIPs and coin doublers

Effort – Low

Income – Medium to high

Risk – Extremely risky

Another method I suggest you avoid is coin doublers and High Yield Investment Programs also known as HYIPs. These are sites that claim to double your coins every few days or give you unreal interest rates.

What these sites actually do is take money from new users and use that money to pay off old users. This process creates a lot of buzz around the site that seems to be legit and solvent.

On top of that, they almost always have some sort of referral program so that users can bring their friends on board.

This is how a Ponzi scheme works. This will go on for around 3-4 months until one day the website will just go offline and the money will be gone. No more payments will be made and a lot of people will get mad that they got scammed.

I have reviewed several Bitcoin investment sites in the past 3 years and have yet to find a site that I can say is safe to invest in. Any site that promises you something that is too good to be true is probably just a facade for scammers trying to steal your coins.

How can you find out if a site is a scam for yourself? Easy, use the Bitcoin scam test tool to get a fair assumption about a site’s legitimacy.

16. Claiming Bitcoin forks and airdrops

Effort – Medium

Income – Varies

Risk – High (especially for non technical users)

Starting around August 2017 Bitcoin began “forking” into other coins. In a nutshell, forking means a new “Bitcoin clone” emerges from the existing Bitcoin. Every person who held Bitcoin before the fork can now also claim the new coin as well.

The first popular fork was Bitcoin Cash, but soon after followed Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Diamond and more. The process for claiming forked coins (aka forkcoins) is standard but requires an above basic understanding of how Bitcoin works. You can view my fork claiming guide here.

Keep in mind that if you’re not sure what you’re doing when claiming a forkcoin you could end up losing your Bitcoins. So for most non technical users it would better to pass on a fork and keep your Bitcoins safe.

Other alternatives include companies that claim the coins for you and take a commission – but this could easily turn into a scam that runs away with your money.

Once you claimed a forkcoin you can sell it on an exchange for Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies assuming it has a market.

Airdrops

Airdrops are similar to forks in the sense that you “get coins out of thin air”. Airdrops are usually used to spread the word about a certain cryptocurrency. The currency is distributed freely to the public, although in some cases some conditions can apply.

For example, Byteball was distributed freely to Bitcoin users depending on the amount of Bitcoins they owned.

To conclude, forks and airdrops may be the highest value for time method you can use to make money from your Bitcoins but they can be SUPER risky. Additionally you’ll probably need to have an initial amount of Bitcoins to claim them.

I would advise you to use these methods only after ample research and a good understanding of the claiming process.

17. Conclusion

I’ve covered a lot of ways you can earn Bitcoins or make money with cryptocurrencies. In the end each method has its pros and cons, some are more risky while others take a greater amount of effort.

In order to make it easier for you to review what I’ve just covered I created a table that illustrates the different methods.

As you can see – there’s no easy, risk free way to make money with Bitcoin. The good news is that it is possible, and if you put some effort into it you can find a lot of creative ways to create new income streams.

You may still have some questions. If so, just leave them in the comment section below. And if you’ve tried out one of the methods above and want to share your experience with it I’d love to hear it as well.