I'm happy to report Part 2 of this series of articles had ten times the circulation and readership of Part 1. I'm not sure why but that was wholly more encouraging. It also highlights quite adequately how this making money on the internet thing is quite a hit and miss game.
Readers reassured by the honesty in Part 2 might yet wonder (a little like the writer in truth) where it's all leading. Team Gitcoin sent me an e-mail today wishing me a Happy New Year which was very nice and, for the programmers among you, Gitcoin has a strong community and appears to reward the work its programmers put in. The Ethereum-based token GTC has been quite low in recent months but, on closer inspection, I realise that this is not out of sync with ETH or even BTC. Let me discuss crypto investment for a moment.
Yes, BTC or Bitcoin - the leading cryptocurrency - remains pretty close to the lowest point it has reached since its price collapse from a high in November 2021. 2022 was pretty much a downer for crypto. Now looks a much better time to invest in the right tokens. Bitcoin's price has been very stable from mid-November onwards, weathering even FTX's bankruptcy as well as any cryptocurrency might. So can we expect an upturn in crypto's fortunes generally or has the world, perhaps, moved on from the heyday of 2021 and its Bored Ape-buying billionaires?
It's interesting that both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) currently stand at about one-third of their peak price values while the promise of decentralised economics, finance and computing remains. Some DeFi projects have crashed and burned - most explosively the FTX/Alameda empire of Sam Bankman-Fried - but others remain working still. There may be a threat from some extremely clever AI hanging out there yet but BTC appears unbroken and even projects such as FARM and AMPL (both tokens have enjoyed associations with Publish0x) continue to... well, survive the crypto collapse of late 2021 and all 2022 as well as any token might (down to a fifth or more of their peak value, you couldn't really say they've weathered the storm).
Bitcoin Price Chart (BTC) from 1 Jan 2022 to 7 Jan 2023
There appears to be a certain spark of interest returning to the crypto-sphere. This is not investment advice, of course (this article is about football) but crypto does offer many different and interesting ways for internet users to make money and at a very low level (the dollars and cents of the business) there are many things you can do to earn small amounts of tokens. Write articles like this, watch videos, trade NFTs, use your computer RAM or rent out your hard-drive space... these are just a handful of examples of the many ways you can begin to build a little pot of crypto.
My first steps with cryptocurrency came through a friend's introduction to Coinbase. My initial investment was just $2. From there you can start doing things - trading currencies and learning a lot of crypto's rather-weird-and-never-totally-easy-to-get-your-head-round standards and protocols. And putting in some work with a community or two to get those cents coming in for further investment. This is all a rather slow process but it does have a snowball effect as your funds and knowledge increase.
I would be loathe to suggest anyone investing a large sum in cryptocurrency right now but the crypto ecosystem remains quite an accessible one with much potential for making money on the internet slowly and steadily. Which is a nice point at which to leave Part 3 of this series.
