Updated 21st November 2021
With the rise of both Bitcoin and blockchain over the past decade, everyone and their mother has turned to the internet to satisfy their curiosity. Google searches confirm this trend has increased since 2017.
People are still wary of misinformation, especially when it’s to do with their finances, so to fight crypto’s detractors and schills, the smart enthusiast turns to a forum. Many of these forums’ content has thus become pretty valuable and where there’s value, there’s money to be made. So that’s exactly what the more entrepreneurial enthusiasts have been doing, creating their own micro-economies in the process.
The rise of Bitcointalk
Bitcointalk has been around since pretty much the beginning of bitcoin (late 2009). It was the first and most popular forum. So, if there’s anywhere one’s knowledge is going to be useful – not to mention lucrative – it’ll be here.
There are a few ways to earn, but bounty campaigns are the way to go. These are usually marketing challenges that ICOs offer anyone willing to accept and is often a cost effective way for a coin to promote their ICO outside of an agency.
Offering their coin in exchange for promoting it, you, the bounty hunter, will get paid once the ICO is successful. So yes, there are risks. Choose your project carefully and make sure it’s an Ethereum one, as most ICOs are ERC20.
Start by visiting the bounties section of the forum. You then need to figure out which active bounties are legitimate and actually likely to pay out. First, look at the original poster of the bounty to see if they’ve got good feedback from other forum members and/or have run successful bounties in the past.
You also want to look at the feasibility of the ICO; ask yourself if the ICO is a good idea? Does it have a lot of competition? Is the team any good? Get this right and you’ll be handsomely rewarded. Get it wrong and you’ll be wasting your time.
There are a number of avenues to go down when promoting a bounty and ICOs set aside tokens for paying bounty hunters.

You could create content on your own site or in a space like Medium or Steemit (if you are doing this on your own site there could be further money to be made from monetising traffic). You could post about the ICO on any Twitter, Facebook or Telegram channels you own and Reddit’s another option. If you speak another language fluently there’s good money in translating a project’s whitepaper or promotional content, but the most popular, and probably the most lucrative, option is “signature” advertising.
Earn Free Crypto From Signature Advertising
Signature advertising involves advertising in your Bitcointalk account signature space. That’s the text at the very top of every post you make in a forum; here's an example of a signature campaign Cloudet ran recently.
When you join a bounty, there will be a code that you can copy and paste into your signature and, every time you make a post on Bitcointalk, there’s a little bit of crypto that you’ll earn. The catch is that you must have a decent ranking within Bitcointalk to make decent money and many bounty programs won’t pay you a penny if you’re a newbie.
If you have a high ranking, however, your reward will be several multiples that of a new account. So basically, if earning bounty money on Bitcointalk through signature advertising feels like your thing, aim to up your ranking first.
This is a long game; your rank amounts to being a valued member of the community, so It involves regular posting, commenting and responding with high quality comments. If you spam the forum with useless posts and comments, you’ll be banned quickly.
There are eight ranks in total but don’t let that discourage you - the Bitcointalk hierarchy is explained here. Yes, this can take time. But if you’re an enthusiastic and engaged contributor, then this could be the best way to earn crypto as you’ll essentially be getting money for activity you’d be happy to do for free. So if you’d like to go further down the ranking rabbit hole check out these two videos. And if you’re interested in Bitcointalk and earning free crypto, click here.
Cryptotalk - The new kid in the block
Cryptotalk is similar to Bitcointalk, the big difference is that for every post made, the user receives 1,000 Satoshis. Their basic rules are that your post must be in-line with the subject matter discussed, not spam, should be at least 100 characters and you can only make 30 posts a day. Here is a link to the guidelines.
It’s one step closer to free money than Bitcointalk and you can start earning immediately without anything particularly interesting to say. In contrast, if you do have something powerful to add, you won’t be recognised for your superior knowledge. Experts are paid just as little as a newbie who barely knows what they’re on about.
As you might expect the quality of Cryptotalk’s content is therefore much lower than Bitcointalk’s; it’s all filler. The exchange YoBit is footing the bill so create an account on there and your Satoshis go straight into your Yobit balance where you can exchange them for other coins or cash out.
Whilst they’re not making it obvious, this whole opportunity is an attempt by YoBit to on-board new customers. It should be a comfy win-win but tread carefully, YoBit doesn't have the cleanest reputation among exchanges.
You’re free to make your own mind between which of these options for earning free crypto appeals most to you:
- Earn crypto by building a strong forum reputation and posting content on Bitcointalk
- Make small but super easy crypto posting on Cryptotalk.
Grow Your Stack at Cloudbet
The Cloudbet blog is focused on sharing ways to grow your stack. Bitcoin faucets are a real opportunity to accumulate crypto, albeit requiring your time and attention in return. Once you get a foot on the first rung, you can really boost your portfolio by moving from accumulation to speculation, and depositing your coins at Cloudbet. You an even use a credit or debit card to get started:
- Bet on all major sports from NBA to the EPL
- Bet on esports like CS:GO, LoL and Dota; in-play with live streams
- Play in the Cloudbet Casino; All slots are available in free play mode
- Join our roll-call of biggest casino winners of all time