This continues my post from yesterday.

So, after withdrawing my first 10 millibits of Bitcoin to a software wallet on my desktop, and making sure I had back-ups of the keys, I sat back feeling satisfied and I checked my email. My identity had been verified at Coinbase, and I had been invited to take several courses on their "Earn" page. I was excited at the possibility of getting more crypto and so I started watching their training videos.

They weren't very hard. I was genuinely curious to learn more about everything I was hearing, and the quiz questions at the end of each video segment were super easy if you had been paying even the slightest bit of attention. I was slightly put off by the warning that stated I was receiving utility tokens which could only be used for their purpose and not for "speculation", but I completed all the tasks that were available to me except for referring friends. Coinbase Earn provided me with $50 worth of crypto in various tokens I had just learned about.

Tezos excited me the most, because of the systems they seem to have in place for upgrading, for baking (mining), and their desire to cater for transactions in large amounts. The Tezos network can actually mint coins to pay developers to work on upgrades, and those upgrades are automatically implemented if the Tezos 'bakers' vote and agree on it. To become a baker, you need to invest a quite large amount of Tezos up-front, but then you can benefit from transaction fees etc, based on how much you stake, not your computing power, so in a way, you can earn interest from Tezos as a built-in feature, and anyone can "delegate" a small amount to do this.

I used Coinbase's exchange, and, one by one, moved all the small amounts of crypto I had earned into Tezos on Coinbase, and from there into my Tezos wallet on my desktop. So, through training, I earned around $50 of a crypto of my choice. My Tezos is now in a wallet where I can do anything I want with it.

I realised that, especially with new currencies, it is sometimes very bad if no new coins are being produced. The system might then stand still, and sometimes no transactions can be processed. I don't know enough about the different kinds of crypto to say which tokens might be affected by this more than others, but the consequence is: many of these currencies need to find new and exciting ways to distribute tokens, to prevent entropy in their system while bringing in new interest. The sound of free money was ringing loudly in my ears now.

More tomorrow... Continued here.