You, Me, and BTC Your Liberty & Bitcoin Podcast
There are plenty of people out there, especially Bitcoin newbs and many younger people, who will do absolutely anything to get their Bitcoin fix. They will spend hours refreshing the Bitcoin faucets and solving CAPTCHAs just because they can get tiny doses of 'free' money. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this, in fact, I used to do it myself. If you honestly have nothing better to do, sure, why not spend your time collecting Satoshis? They will add up over time.
But I recently came across a better way to earn some free BTC, and it usually comes in the form of mBTCs instead of Satoshis. I know it is important to be wary of people offering free money. If I came across a post like this, I would probably already be closing the tab and checking my Facebook for the 73rd time today, but I encourage you to read on.
McxNOW is a relatively new Bitcoin exchange that also deals with several alternative cryptocurrencies. I discovered this exchange because of my need to trade Primecoin (XMP) for BTC. Just a little over a week ago, they announced that they would be paying interest on all deposits to the exchange. As far as I know, no other exchange currently offers anything like this.
The interest comes from the exchange fees that McxNOW accumulates. Every six hours, they take 25% of the fees and divide it equally among the deposits. By equally, I do not mean that every account earns the same interest, I mean that every coin earns the same interest. For instance, if you had 10 BTC in your account, and there were 100 BTC in the entire exchange, you would receive 10% of the total interest, or 2.5% of the total fees, every 6 hours.
For a time, the estimated annual percentage rate was as high as 6000% or more. However, that number has since declined to just a few percent, and I expect that it will continue to decline. As soon as the interest was announced, my relatively small deposit was earning about 0.0003 BTC every 6 hours. Now I am earning about 0.0001 BTC. More and more people will hear about the available interest and will transfer large portions of their assets into the exchange, which will divide up the interest even more.
On the other hand, there is an opportunity to earn significantly more interest anytime the exchange is busy, because they will collect more fees. I once earned 0.002 BTC for one 6 hour period. Also keep in mind that McxNOW is still an online, 3rd party service, which presents some legitimate security concerns, and therefore, any extremely large holdings will likely remain in offline storage and won't completely deplete the interest earned on small McxNOW deposits.
This reminds us that, although my title says otherwise, this interest is not entirely risk-free. McxNOW could possibly crash, be hacked, or go rogue anytime. Of course, I think this is very unlikely, but we need to remember that it is possible, just as with any other online service. What I meant in my title is that this is not any kind of market investment. When you invest in the stock market, you've got a significant chance of taking losses, but with McxNOW, you can only gain interest. It is not quite like a bond either because your BTC remains under your control (as long as McxNOW remains legitimate), and you can withdraw it anytime.
If you want to take in a bit of money for doing little or nothing, now is your chance. There will always be some security concerns to consider, but as far as I can tell, McxNOW offers a good opportunity. You won't get rich quick (unless you're already rich, and you can deposit thousands of BTC), but it is a chance to earn a bit more with minimal effort. Good luck!
Please let me know what you think of something like this. Is it worth it? Are there better opportunities out there?
