This is my first post, so thought I would introduce myself a little

I have always been fascinated by new technologies, and I think I even tried mining bitcoin when it was worth nothing.  But that computer was recycled long ago , and even if there had been any left over bitcoin on there, my idiot teenage self would have traded it all for a little beer money.  Now I'm older, married with kids, and I discovered there was so many new coins, advancements and exciting upcoming projects, I've jumped back into learning, and I thought I would share how my first month went and how I fell into the crypto rabbit hole. 

Fair warning, all the links below are referral links.  If you don't feel like clicking on them, feel free to google. 

Now as a married dad of two girls, I have no money.  You need money to make money. This would be a problem. How to make free money...

First and Foremost, I opened up a bit panda account.  

They were running a free share between 5 and 200 euros giveaway, and I also got some of their own token, BEST.  I really liked the lay out, but found out the charges are insane.  After a bit of googling, I found everyone was recommending coinbase as a newbie friendly site ( even if the charges are not that much better ).  I LOVED that I could learn about new tokens, and get samples in them up to almost $50 worth of coin. I did ALL the courses, and got some nice coin.  

Then I found cake defi .

I thought the annual interest rate was insane. How can anything pay more than 100% apr, and have the earned interest paid out each day?  I popped my money in, got the bonus, then took all my money out, and left the bonus accruing.  And it is doing what it said on the tin. I was getting compounded interest every day. You can actually do that with crypto?!  That started me looking into even more coins, and I came across ADA.  I loved the idea behind Cardano, and pumped money into it.  Then I got a little greedy, and found panther swap with their 1000+% .  This is where I ran into the dreaded gas fees for the first time. I popped the money in, it earned, then I had to compound. However it was charging me FAR more than the money had earned.   Expensive lesson learned ( not really, as it was all the free money, but still this had set me back )

Maybe I could try my hand at mining. I mean my computer is getting on in years, but I paid top money for it when it was new and I was single, and a 1070 is still nothing to sneeze at.  Nicehash was the easiest to set up, and had free withdrawals to coin base. So I let that run in the background whenever I was on the computer.  Hmm, I also have unlimited internet, so can also let Honeygain run for a little more cash.  

While this was going on, I discovered that coinsmart was also doing a learn and earn program.  Jumped on there, and I'm earning roughly $8 a week on there. If you are sending any money out of there, change it to stella first, otherwise the fees are even more exaggerated.  Now I had a bit more cash to play around with, I still wanted to find more coins to compound, but preferably without huge gas fees. 

That is when I ran into Binance and their entire coin eco system.  I was stung once or twice by the minimum movement amounts, but all in all it was a step up from coin base.  Now what to invest my small, free starter fund into?  I already had Cardano, and was a little dazzled by the huge choice of coins and tokens.  I found a lot of people recommending Vechain, so I got a bit of that, but that was only paying 1% ( ONLY 1%, that's still more than banks pay ). I buckled down and looked for coins that had the potential to make me money. 

After a lot of clicking and reading reddit and whitepapers, I settled on Glitchy to earn some BNB, bonfire and safemoon to accrue token number in the hope they become worth something , 808 I got free and was earning 0.1% a day, iHodl ( free $10 ) was staked and earning daily. But all of these were coins I either picked up for free, or for super cheap. I need to do something with the ADA I was holding. No money is just going to sit with me without working anymore. Tried staking it with exodus wallet, but after numerous fails, I noticed I was getting charged ADA for each failed staking attempt. Where else can I get it to work?  

Then I discovered on reddit someone mentioning autofarm.network.( the only non referal link)  An auto compounding and farming network? Without the hideous gas fees to compound?  and they had an USDT/ADA pool earning 47% APR ?  Hmm, alright, sounds too good to be true. Lets test it out with a small amount to see the actual fees. Ok, small cost to deposit, I can live with that. Chose to stake WEX wault because It had a high APR , and wasn't too sure about pools. Let it run for a week, and holy crap it was earning 0.6% A DAY. No charges to wipe out the gains. Yes please, I will be putting all my ADA in and what ever else I can find.

And that has brought me up to date. The autofarm is earning 1% a day in tokens which I still find insane. I mean the price fluctuates pretty wildly day to day, but viewed over the month, the euro value has gone up more than ALL the interest I have EVER had from the banks in 30 odd years of using them, with a fraction of the capitol. 

Safemoon and bonfire are steadily increasing in number and I'm hoping they end up being worth something, glitchy is paying pennies of BNB each week, enough for the odd fees I need to claim more cheap coins, and I have a bewildering array of free or near free coins from various airdrops or giveaways. 

Honeygain and nice hash are working, but it takes so long to get to their payout levels. Just over a month and I will get my first 20 euro worth of bitcoin out of nicehash, and it will still take awhile to get the 20euro out of honeygain.

My next post I will cover my discoveries about faucets and free crypto sites, and which ones I actually managed to get any money out of.  I will also call out all the bad sites I found ( and can still remember ) and how they make it impossible to get paid. 

Even if my post helps just one person, I'll be happy.  Until next time.