November 2023 LPUD

November 2023 LPUD | Ecency

It's Leo Power Up Day already !

I've done my bit and powered up 150 LEO 😀

Image by efes from Pixabay

LPUD is also a great opportunity to post about whatever HIVE/LEO/Crypto related topic that is bugging me at the time that I need to get off my chest. Right now, it's how hard it seems to be to turn fiat into HIVE. Here goes....

On-Ramp from Fiat to HIVE to LEO

It's getting increasingly hard to find a decent on-ramp from Fiat to HIVE (and thus onward to LEO). At least, it is here in the UK ! I'm looking for something straightforward without too many steps and ideally without the hassle of going through KYC.

The problem I have with KYC is partly ideological, because it denies privacy when it comes to spending my own money in ways I want. But mostly just because it's a huge hassle and means yet more organisations have images of documents which could be used to steal my identity if they get hacked or lose them.

I miss the speed and simplicity of Blocktrades, but I get why they stopped offering the service, the bureaucracy and risk was just too much for them.

I think the last time I bought HIVE through Transak it was just a case of using a debit card - bank transfer was possible but with full KYC. When I tried a minute ago, it wanted full KYC even with a card, and I'm sure the fees had crept upwards as well. Not to the crazy level that Binance wanted, however. I haven't re-tried Binance, but I know the UK government is trying really hard to close down centralised exchanges, and I'm not sure I'd be able to buy there even if I wanted to.

So at the moment, it looks like the next step is to explore the Simpleswap.io option available within PeakD - they say they take fiat by card, as well as payment by crypto. But right now I don't have any crypto I want to transfer, it's all coins and tokens that I'm stacking. So I'm seeing three possibilities;

Try paying by debit card through Simpleswap; I expect there's a 50% chance that my own bank will block the transaction, as they are getting increasingly tough on crypto purchases.
Onboard some fiat to Coinbase (who my bank seems to be okay with so far), then use it to buy LTC to convert to HIVE via Simpleswap.
Get the spare PC mining Monero and use that to buy HIVE through Simpleswap. It's a high spec but slightly old CPU, so the calculators show it won't be profitable in relation to the electricity used, but it should break even which is all I need.

How I'm Earning LEO

As a related topic if it's hard to get more HIVE with fiat it makes it hard to buy LEO with SWAP.HIVE. So I've looked at how I'm earning LEO right now, and how it could be improved.

While I'm sure there are other ways that I don't know about (or need time to learn about that I don't have right now), the ways I'm earning LEO at present are;

I've got 416 HP delegated to @leo.voter which earns about 0.9 LEO a day.
I've also got 3000 LEO delegated to @meowcurator, with earnings that are a bit variable but seem to average at about 0.35 LEO per day.
Most of my posting is in creative writing communities, so LEO rewards are pretty minimal. I should probably do something about that !

Calculating the GBP value of the delegations, at the prices right now the HP delegation is about £128 and the LEO delegation is about £141. So it is definitely more cost-effective to increase my HP delegation. But I'll stick to my plan of keeping the LEO delegated up until I've got enough stacked to have a noticeable vote value.

In the last 6 months, my earnings from all sources (except direct purchases) have averaged 57 LEO a month. So as a rough calculation, to earn 150 LEO a month I'd need to increase my daily earnings by 3.1 LEO.

The most cost-effective method would be by increasing my HP delegation from 416 to about 1850. Being realistic, that would probably hurt my HP curation earnings a bit more than I'd like, but at some point I might do the maths just to see what it would look like.....