(U.S. Guam) - Am I the only one who does this? I purposely scour roadways and parking lots for lost change. Then I deposit it into my checking account and invest it into cryptocurrency.
As a hard-coin hunter, I can’t believe how many coins I find casually scanning the curbsides and byways of my neighborhood. Between quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies, I pocketed $0.69 the week before last and $0.75 this past week. And I look forward to finding more this week.
From my 69-cent week, I tossed a 1957 nickel into my coin collection because online coin connoisseurs say it’s probably worth more than face value.
The change-hunting habit grew on me gradually as I began discovering odd coins while working out during the worst throes of COVID in 2020, when society was on lockdown and people were passing their time in new ways.
I turned to running, walking, and calisthenics to destress, lose weight, and feel better. Gradually I added stretching to my routines. That allowed me to hang on to my runner’s high as I loosened up with a good toe touch or thigh hug and gave me more time to walk between poses and scavenge for more treasure.
That’s right. Occasionally, during all this outdoor activity, I’d stumble upon a dropped penny, nickel, dime, or quarter. And I still do. I get paid to run. Yes! Almost every time I go for a jog, followed by a relaxing walk-and-stretch, I find coins along roadsides, alleyways, courts, and car parks.
And having picked up the habit, my radar is always sweeping. I might even collect a coin while crossing the pavement from my car to my next appointment or on my way to the garbage dumpster. I’m sure I’m not the only one to spot the specie, but I’m not ashamed to stoop down and claim it. When it comes to clutching a newfound coin, I’ll even stop in my tracks and downright admire it in public.
But what does this windfallen meter money really have to do with your arbitraging and day trading, much less your trickling crypto faucet? Before you brush me off, think of found change as the bonus you earn for the time you’ll spend anyway. Then bank it and buy more crypto.
When I think of watching AMP rise from $0.04 to $0.07 or ANKR spike from $0.07 to $0.11 and I’ve got these and other penny cryptocurrencies in my portfolio, I know how quickly my spare change can add up. And I pat myself on the back for making good choices.
Furthermore, we can never really know when a crypto token worth only hundredths of a cent will break the penny barrier. But when it does, we can be glad we bought tens of millions of any such coin with just a hundred dollars or more, even if we spread these investments over time.
The idea that a hundred dollars’ worth of a sub-penny asset can suddenly turn to hundreds of thousands of dollars in value keeps me scooping up that change and reinvesting it. Plus, it’s fun, and sometimes I find strange or rare coins worth holding onto.
Stepping out for a grocery run? Scan the parking lot on your way in and out of the supermarket. Got time to kill while waiting for your kid to finish practice? Hop out for a light stretch and peer between the car slots while you’re at it. Out to dinner at that fancy hotel? Look left, right, and straight ahead when leaving the parking garage. Then keep gathering your small change until you’re ready to take it to the bank. Why not deposit it into checking or savings and use it to buy more crypto coins?
I minted mine for $10 worth of CTSI recently. After several months of saving an $8.75 hoard of cashed-out change and roadway profit in a glass pickle jar, I counted my loot and hauled it to the credit union around the corner. My coins ranged from the beautiful and shimmering to nearly unrecognizable defacements.
Never minding the condition of any given coin, the teller tallied the shiny, besmirched, and tarnished “silver” change two by two and rolled the corroded and iridescent pennies in paper. Later, when I realized Coinbase Pro required nothing less than a $10.00 purchase from my checking account, I gladly invested the additional $1.25. It all added up to nothing more than a small dollar transaction—but I sure had a blast on the ride to the exchange!
A week later a spare-time visit to my teller also proved provident. I asked to buy any dollar coins or half dollars that might be on hand. Not only did he have a whole slew of “golden dollars,” but three 1979 Susan B. Anthony’s, a 1972 Eisenhower, and seven Kennedy half dollars—one with a bicentennial stamp. I bought all the JFK 50-cent pieces, the Eisenhower Apollo 11 buck, the three SBA’s, plus a resplendent Sacajawea and a spiffy William Henry Harrison from among the goldens.
As an amateur coin freak, I was over the moon! And it inspired me to take another look at my own little collection where I discovered more value yet. A quick Internet scan revealed my plastic encasement of uncirculated 1964 90% silver U.S. coins to be worth $50 or $60. Plus, I figured out that two loose early 1960s dimes, a 1948 quarter, and a 1967 JFK half dollar in my reserve are also silver.
Whether we’re collecting metal mites or crypto coins, it’s all about finding value in the way we spend our time. We expand our thinking as we learn about mints and markets. We realize a chip’s worth, we hold and appreciate it, we trade it, and we find plenty of ways to get paid along the way.
We’ve all eagerly read articles, downloaded ads, watched videos, joined contests, welcomed air drops, and educated ourselves about blockchain tender. It’s a tradeoff of time for slices of crypto, worth tiny little subfractions of a penny per visit. But we also know that consistent collecting, saving, and investing can mount up quickly.
Many of you on Publisher0x are active on the writing and teaching end of this learning and earning. Some of you have even locked in your crypto stashes into liquidity pools for yield farming and staking.
Why? Because it’s simply so exciting! Piling up Satoshis, Gwei, and shares of ATOM, DAI, ALGO, TRON, DOGE, AMPL, or iFARM while PoS-ing and stacking our knowledge about decentralized finance makes us feel like pioneers on a frontier money movement that truly works for “we, the people.”
After all, let’s face it, watching coins accrue at percentages that are embarrassingly higher than brick-and-mortar bank returns gives us more than a little thrill.
And, maybe just maybe, through our relentless crypto foraging, we’ve amassed digital currencies in some misremembered wallet holding a hidden cache of value that will surprise and delight the senses whenever it suddenly occurs to us whatever appreciating coins we may have left behind. The beauty of most blockchain doubloons is that they often gain worth even when they’ve slipped our minds.
Yet the conspicuous exchanges and mis-becloaked corners of the cryptoverse are hardly the only spaces maintaining stores of value with the flexibility to act as means of exchange or units of account. The material world, too, is always brimming with new utility and desirability and refreshed considerations and assessments.
Think of the coins that gather under the upholstery. There they lie unbeknownst to us till someone whips out the vacuum and starts peering below the seat cushions. And once you realize there’s scalable crypto credit to be earned from the mintage you notice along the foot-mats and loveseats of the physical world, it’s hard to stop scoping them out. This is where the realm of lost coins has found me. And reinvesting it into cryptocurrency is fast becoming my pastime.
Like many of you, I, too, just love the idea of a liberated global macroeconomy increasingly controlled by the people – an international money system less dependent on central banks and fiat.
That’s why I purchase, stake, and hodl digital tokens however I cryptologically can. It’s also why I’m now preparing to do my first lending and yield farming as I learn more about the likes of Harvest Finance, Aave, Uniswap, SushiSwap, SwapZone, and other exchanges.
But I also realize my entire life has depended on saving and trading the value of banknotes and credit that originate from the central banking system. Tares and wheat grow side by side. We take the good with the bad and aim for the best.
The world is rapidly embracing DeFi, blockchain, and cryptocurrency alongside a legacy system built on hard coins, paper debt, and centralized institutions. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. And it is up to each of us to leverage the value in both.
I relish reading Publish0x articles and contributing to its authors as I delve into the intergalactic universe of FinTech, DeFi, cryptocurrency, NFTs, smart contracts, CEXs, and DEXs. And it’s fun to earn a little AMPL and iFARM along the way as I think through how to invest it.
In making heads or tails of my opinions, none of it is investment advice. I’m not qualified to give it. But if you don’t mind earning a little spare change in your spare time, I encourage you to keep an eye out for misplaced and unredeemed coins on the asphalts and pavements lining your neck of the material plane.
Whether you give it to your grandkids or toss it in an ashtray; whether it contributes to your pension or better-than-inflation interest-bearing accounts; whether it rounds out your coin collection or buys you profitable crypto returns, I wish you many coins to come!
What if I told you that you could increase your cryptocurrency earnings completely offline while enjoying the great outdoors? What would it be worth to you? This post is for all my fellow faucet profiteers looking for more efficient ways of lining their pockets and purses with electric tokens without wasting any time. This is not investment advice. And I am not being paid by anyone to endorse organizations, products, or currencies.
