As economies across the world become uncertain and unstable, diversifying into crypto is appealing to more and more people. It ticks many boxes for a world where employment is often uncertain and automation threatens to take the place of workers. We're hearing more and more stories of people replacing their wages through crypto earnings.
With my husband and myself not getting any younger, but retirement goalposts moving further away each year, I decided I really need to pull my finger out and attempt to learn more about how earning and investing with crypto can work.
With the help of some of my fellow Australian Hivers I joined some groups and started asking questions. The biggest thing I learnt was that Hive already offers a broad range of opportunities to do the very things I began learning about. At that point I realised why it is often said that this platform is a gateway to cryptocurrency.
Day trading is a bit beyond me at this point. I have met someone who does it and he did try to explain it somewhat, but I've got a long way to go before I can wrap my head around it or gain the confidence for it. So I've been looking into the other opportunities available.
One of the biggest buzzwords currently going around is staking. Many people are sharing which coins offer the option to earn via staking and, of course, I immediately recognised that term. On Hive we can stake or power up Hive to lock it in as Hive Power (HP) which I gather earns around 2.5% purely from inflation (which is currently more than you'd likely get from fiat money in a bank account). So it will passively earn, even if we you nothing with it. Yet we also have an added bonus in that we can use our HP to upvote and reward content which will give us a curation return. The percentage return on this varies, depending on how you vote, but I've seen estimates of around 8%.
What affects your vote, or curation returns is when you vote and your Vote Power (VP) at the time of that vote. Currently a vote given in the first 24hrs of the content being published will return half of that reward to the curator upon payout of that content. Later votes will get less return, unless the post has yet to receive a vote. Each vote uses VP and as that power drops the reward you can give drops, which means your returns will also decline. So is worthwhile keeping an eye on your VP levels, above 80% is usually recommended to keep it recharging at an optimal level.
Our stable coin, Hive Backed Dollars (HBD), can also be staked in the form of savings. While we are only locking it up for three days using this method, it currently has the best return in interest at 20%, which you can claim monthly. This is similar to having money in a bank savings account, so it's likely familiar to all of us.
The next interesting term I came across was yield farming. Someone was saying that his wife had replaced her income with crypto earnings and when I asked how, his response was ""yield farming for the win." Naturally I looked it up and essentially it's locking away or lending your coins for a return. Staking is one method of doing this and when renting was mentioned I realised that we also have this available for Hive. With the option to delegate we can lend our HP out, either for free, or to projects wanting to "rent" it for a return. We actually have quite a few of these projects and it's merely up to us to choose which ones we wish to lend/delegate to. Most are committed to rewarding a wide range of posts, but they each have different policies which you may want to look at before choosing which ones to support.
The ones that are probably the most open about what they are doing are 
I realise that returns from delegating are still not as good as putting HBD into savings, so why not just convert it all to HBD and put it in savings? After all, it's even quicker to get it back from savings than from HP. Well, there are drawbacks and benefits to both.
Payouts from staking, curation and rental delegations receive returns daily. They accumulate as HP for inflation and curation, immediately increasing your investment to gain further interest. The rental returns will be liquid, so you can choose to use it like it's an income or power it up to increase investment. With HBD savings you can only claim once a month and if you decide to take it out then interest will stop being calculated on that amount the moment you request it back and it will be tied up for the next three days without earning.
Also, any Hive in savings as HBD is not being used within the Hive eco-system, so it will do nothing to help support the Hive blogging community. While it may seem like the gains from being involved in the blogging community are purely charitable, it's more complex than that. People who choose to invest in that side of things want to see it succeed, so they tend to preference supporting others who are also contributing to that eco-system by keeping powered up and actively voting. So your returns will also come back via your blogging and interactions. Even the best content creators will eventually lose support if they give nothing back to the eco-system that's been supporting them. Those who need to use Hive earnings to support themselves outside of Hive do the best when they have that give and take in good balance.
NFTs are the next big thing and, yes, we can even have a slice of that pie without leaving the Hive blockchain. I'm pretty sure there are a few options available, I know that Hive Punks were very popular on their release, but the ones I've rather taken to have been the Splinterlands ones. I don't really get the appeal of NFTs for the most part; I guess it's something like investing in art and if the picture doesn't appeal to you then it has no value to you personally. However, with Splinterlands being a Play to Earn game, each NFT/card has a use within that game, so I see more value in that than if it was just a pretty, collectible card. I also know that a limited amount of them will be minted, so once minting stops, they will only go up in value as demand increases, which I see as a good investment that I'm unlikely to lose out on long term. Then just like with Hive, I can also practise some yield farming by renting out my Splinterlands cards for a return if I'm not using them myself.
Something that a lot of crypto gurus recommend is not putting all your eggs into one basket and diversifying. Okay, I realise I'm actually currently not doing this by sticking to the Hive blockchain, but talk of things like gas fees on coins like Ethereum make me a bit nervous about just jumping into other cryptocurrencies. Then having gone through the experience of seeing first hand an exchange using people's funds to help take over a blockchain, as happened in the Steem take over, also makes me a bit nervous about getting an account on an exchange. Having said that, there is no getting away from the fact that ETH is a very popular coin and blockchain that's been doing a lot. So it's hard to not want to look at picking some up. I realised that I can still play around with trying other coins from my comfort zone, though, with Hive Engine, or Tribaldex, which seems to be becoming the more popular front-end for this exchange.
Hive Engine originally started out as a place to create and buy tokens for communities which are connected to the Hive blockchain. It's come an incredibly long way since then, however, and now you can invest in swap versions of some of the other well known coins which can then be sent to corresponding wallet addresses, if you choose to, or just converted back to Hive. Off the top of my head BTC, LTC and ETH swap are all available.
I'm not sure what my next steps will be from here, but I feel like it might be ones to take me from my Hive comfort zone, unless anyone can tell me about some more opportunities I might be missing here. 馃槈
@iodacasamia