It's been more than a year since I got into cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. I've tried almost anything you can think of to acquire some cryptos. From investing my own hard earned money to trading, cloud mining and wasting time with faucets and gambling sites. If by any chance you are wondering what is the worst way to make cryptos, just take my advice. Experience is the greatest teacher.
Cloud Mining
I lost track how many fake websites I encountered, and lost money to them, especially at the beginning of my journey. If you are just starting out, don't start with cloud mining. Even if you find a legitimate one, profits are small, and some contracts literally take years to get your initial investment back. When you buy a certain amount of hash rate it's expected that you will receive an equal amount of coins every day, right? The reality is quite different. For example, I use Hashflare and when the price of Bitcoin jumps they lower daily earnings. This means the more expensive the coin gets the fewer coins I get.
As you can see as the price of Bitcoin jumped I got fewer coins. You do get more or less the same daily amount of dollars in your mining account. But it doesn't work like trading.
Hardware Mining
Typical mining rig
Mining with your own hardware is not really for everyone, not to mention the electric bill. You can try mining with your own computer but chances are you are going to burn your CPU or do some other damage to your machine.
Trading
Trading is also a great way to lose money if you are not sure what are you doing. I saw a coin on the rise, I bought some. The next day I lost like 50% of my investment because ... well, I have no idea why. I rush to sell it all of it back to Bitcoin, three weeks later it's worth 10 times as much, and I'm wondering what the hell happened. My advice is if you are just starting to trade, buy low and just keep your coins until there is a significant jump in price to sell them. Who knows maybe one day they will be worth millions. Daily trading is also probably not a good idea.
Faucets
Faucets just suck! You don't really earn any money, you just lose time watching ads and solving captchas all day.
Gambling