Julien Follow Apr 7
· 7 min read
How not to get rich in 2 months I have been reading Medium articles for a while now, with a main focus on passive income and side hustle.
There is plenty of content about passive income, and most of them are giving quite good results, so I am writing this to mitigate a little bit what has been said before, and to show you that it is not as easy as “sit quietly and earn 100$/month”.
The journey began 2 months ago when a friend of mine and I decided to jump into passive income.
A little disclaimer here, we are both tech guys, both with a full time job and a family, so the main idea was to spend as little time as we could to make side money.Plus, we own 3 raspberry pi and 1 jetson nano, this is important to keep in mind for the next parts.
Today I’m writing this article to tell you what actions, what mistakes we made, and how much money we made in two months.
Let’s begin :
Rent your internet connection (EarnApp, Honneygain) You may have heard on other posts on Medium about those two simple apps that allow you to make money passively by renting your unused internet connection.That’s the first action we took, and it worked pretty well at the beginning (about 15$/month for each with Earnapp and 10$/month with Honeygain).
After a month, Earnapp decided to cut the profit by half, making it 25cents by Gb (in France), promessing that the traffic will increase and that the income will remain the same as before.Well I don’t know about the other users, but for us it just cut the profit by half… No news about the increase in traffic yet.
Anyway this is still a simple way to make a few bucks easily as the installation is super easy.
Caution :
It’s a really good passive income if you already have a Raspberry Pi or a computer running 24/7.If you don’t have anything running on a 24/7 basis already, it might take a while before making your ROI with a raspberry.
As all of our raspberry / jetson nano are already used for other projects, they already run 24/7.
By the way, if you want to try those app, here is our referral code:
Earnapp: https://earnapp.com/i/ruq7z3z
Honeygain: https://r.honeygain.me/J8905D1290
That’s the only referral link you will find in this article.
Rent your CPU usage (LoadTeam) If you can rent your internet connection, then you can for sure rent other stuff that you don’t completely use.
That’s the case with CPU usage, so we tried LoadTeam.
We made 1 dollar/month, mainly because the app is only installed on our main PCs and not on raspberry (It’s not directly compatible, and anyway the CPU power of a raspberry is too low to make any profit).
We did not keep the app, the profit is too low to keep it on our main PCs and use the CPU continuously.
Crypto intraday trading bot : Best mistake we made In my daily job, my task is to automatise stuff, so when I heard how profitable trading bots are (on Youtube), you can imagine how happy I was.
We went out of the “passive income process” here, as the motive to create this bot was mainly to use some libraries that we cannot usually use at work, and to use those on a world that we did not really know about : Crypto Currencies.
But we still hoped to make some money out of that.
The main idea was the following:
-The bot is activated by Telegram, and it then uses Technical Analysis to decide whether it buys or sells crypto.
-We used Binance for the simplicity of their API and low fees
My research was mainly on the bot in itself, and not on the strategy, in order to create a V1 that was able to trade automatically without a strong strategy.So I missed some critical information about the use of technical analysis, but I’ll get back to that later.
At first, we tested our simple strategy, before putting a single penny on the market.And the results were… Amazing.
From our tests on 14 days (That’s the limit of data Binance allows you to pull if you want the price at every second), we were doing 2 to 3% of profit per day , amazing right ?
Well on the paper, yes, because when we decided to launch the bot on real money, we lost 4% of our capital in 6 hours .
We decided to shut down the bot, and to try to understand what happened.
I’m not going to go into much details here, but the main problem was that using technical analysis to predict if the price of the crypto currency will go up or down in the next minute cannot work (+ don’t forget to add fees in your calculation, even with a winning trade you can lose money if the profit is not high enough — I still don’t understand how I missed that point).It is only useful if you combine it with Fundamental Analysis and if you go for long term holding.On a short term basis, you are pretty much gambling, which is not what we want here.
Still, the experiment was fun to do, and learning how to create a Telegram bot in python was worth the 4% loss.
I eventually played a little on Binance (without the bot) and was lucky enough to get a 15% profit, so no arm on this.
Hi.com : “When it’s too good to be true, then it’s simply not true” On our journey into crypto, I heard about Hi.com with people saying that it was free money, without doing nothing.
So we tried, and at first it worked well, we got our 1 token/day for 2 or 3 days, invited few friends on the app, everything went well.
But what people are not telling you in their article about Hi.com is that you can’t redeem your daily token infinitely, after 7 days you need to invite someone else otherwise you are locked.
I don’t know if the project in itself is a complete scam or if it’s legit with a scam referral program (yes, I consider it as a scam when everyone is telling you that it’s free money when you need to invite a new person every week to get that money) but we stopped using the app.We will see in one year when the tokens are released if we make 1 or 2$ out of that (great, isn’t it ?).
Create a crypto money: BTK is the new BTC ? This one was not a project to make money, just to understand deeper how smart contracts work.
However, we still put the token on a launchpad, you never know what could happen (don’t buy it, of course) .
Crypto Farming: Don’t let your investments sleep -Disclaimer, the following is not a financial advice.-
The bot did not work as expected, but it still gave us the opportunity to learn a lot more about the crypto world.And what we found amazed us, so we kept researching, and found a few crypto projects that we believe in.
We decided to invest all the money we made with the previous actions in those projects (80% on projects we believe in and 20% in stablecoin).
As with stock options, you can get a rentability with your crypto.By stacking them, putting them into a liquidity pool, or some other techniques.
So that’s what we did, and we found some great deals with up to 120% APY (quite risky on that one though).
Coinbase learn & earn: Easy little money There is a cool functionality on coinbase that allows you to understand the purpose and the way some crypto work, and to get paid for that.
Of course the rewards are not that much, but I still made 15$ in one month, transferred it to Binance and placed it on Binance earn to get more money.
Writing on Medium As this is my first article, I have no idea what to expect on that one.
But again, it’s a fun thing to do to explain every step you went through on a project.
Conclusion So, how much did we make in 2 months ?
I won’t keep the suspense for too long, we are currently at 130$ of pure profit , divide that by four (my friend and I for two month), and you get a little 32.5$/month .
It’s not much, but it’s honest work as some would say.
In fact the main profit is not really the money we made, but all the skills that we learnt — From creating a Telegram bot, to all the knowledge we got of the crypto world (and there is still so much more to learn), and the fact that you can rent about anything that you are not using completely in your home (internet connection, cpu and gpu usage, etc..) the journey was educative and really fun to do.
Although I knew all those things existed by reading some articles, It’s still better to try it by yourself and to see the real results.
We are still searching for other ways to make money (really) passively, so if you have any idea, feel free to tell us in the comment and we will be happy to try it.
If you want any detail, please feel free to ask in the comment, we will be happy to develop some parts of the article..