A great thing about Bitcoin is its unparalleled convenience. Need to buy something from that online shop without putting your credit card details at risk? Do you want to pay for stuff anonymously, without people tracing your transactions back to you? Then use Bitcoin.

But bitcoins don’t come cheap- a single bitcoin today costs anywhere from $8000 to $9000. In the excitement of buying Bitcoins, you can easily lose a lot of money if you’re not careful. The question is- is there any way for you to get more bitcoins without shelling out money for them?

Mining

Mining is the old-fashioned method of earning Bitcoins. There used to be a time, several years ago, when you can mine for bitcoins by yourself, using your own machine. But since Bitcoin was designed to get exponentially harder to mine as time goes by, solo mining has basically turned into a useless and unproductive venture. Your best bet for bitcoin mining is to join an online mining pool, wherein a group of people pool their time and resources to mine bitcoins. The work is spread over a multitude of machines, every successful mining results into a reward of Bitcoins, which is then divided and distributed to all the people who belong to the pool.

But mining is very resource-intensive on computers; the expected output you’ll get from mining might not be enough to make up for the electricity costs that you’ll incur.

Accepting bitcoin as a mode of payment.

You can earn bitcoins as payment for goods and services. If you have a store (it doesn’t matter if it’s an online shop or a brick-and-mortar one), you can easily put up a system wherein your customers can pay you with bitcoins.

First you need a bitcoin wallet. There are a lot of bitcoin wallet providers out there, make sure to choose one with a proven track record like bitcoinwallet.com or blockchain.info. Once you have your wallet set-up and ready, you can print out your Bitcoin address as a QR code, and put this up near a counter. Customers need to have a bitcoin app installed on their smartphones for them to be able to use the QR code. First, they’ll scan the code, specify the amount they want to pay you, and then the app converts the amount into bitcoins and sends it over to your bitcoin wallet through the code.

Earn bitcoin by completing tasks on online workplaces.

There are a lot of websites out there that reward people with bitcoins in exchange for completing small tasks. For example, some websites lets people earn bitcoins just by visiting specified websites. Though you won’t earn much from these sites, these tasks can be quite a productive way to spend much of your free time.