I’ve been using an altcoin exchange called FreiExchange for a while in order to trade some obscure altcoins that can’t be found elsewhere. This is my review of them:

Founded in 2016 by a Norwegian dude, the website looks like something straight out of the late 90s but is surprisingly functional and responsive – using modern technologies like Flexbox. The color scheme is a pleasant dark grey with hints of red, green, and blue and is a welcome change from the usual corporate look of other exchanges as well as being easy on the eyes.

The name of the exchange comes from an old cryptocurrency called Freicoin. Released in 2012, Freicoin was unique among cryptocurrencies in that it discouraged hoarding and encouraged spending by causing a portion of one’s coins to slowly disappear over time. It was an interesting economic experiment that failed to attract significant investment for obvious reasons and is relatively unknown today. FreiExchange is the main exchange to buy and trade Freicoin, although the exchange features over 100 other pairs including popular coins like Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Monero.

Registering an account is a simple process that takes less than a minute. There are no KYC requirements which given that there are no fiat currencies being traded, is really the way things should be. Additionally, FreiExchange supports and encourages its users to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) to add an extra layer of security to their accounts. Both deposits and withdrawals were generally fast and easy, although sometimes they can take several hours due to the need for additional network verification:

Given that many of the coins on FreiExchange aren’t super popular, lack of liquidity and volume can be a real issue however. 24-hour trading volumes for most pairs tend to be quite low (<0.05 BTC) and spreads between buy and sell orders can also be a bit high at times.

FreiExchange also doesn’t support trading in units smaller than one satoshi. This can be an issue for coins with high supplies or low prices. FreiXLite is a sister exchange of FreiExchange that uses Litecoin instead of Bitcoin which helps mitigate the sub-satoshi issue but a quick look at their markets shows that their trading volume is very, very low.

A unique aspect of FreiExchange is its lack of trading or deposit fees. Instead, the exchange makes money solely through withdrawal fees. Bitcoin withdrawals also come with a 0.0006 BTC processing fee (about $35) and the minimum withdrawal limit of 0.0025 BTC is quite high (almost $150) so I wouldn’t recommend withdrawing Bitcoin too often unless the high costs don’t bother you. Fortunately, withdrawal fees and limits for other coins are far more reasonable.

Another unique aspect of FreiExchange is the option to invest in FreiXShares (FXS) as a way of making some passive income on the side. According to their official description, these aren’t securities and don’t represent ownership of the exchange. Instead, they entitle you to a cut of the profits of the exchange taken from users’ fees. Just out of fun, I decided to purchase 0.1 FXS (worth about $8.60) and sure enough, about $0.10 to $0.15 worth of dust spread across Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Namecoin as well as a handful of coins with names like MotaCoin and Riecoin started appearing in my account every Sunday. FreiXShares can be traded on FreiExchange just like any altcoin but they aren’t a cryptocurrency and don’t have their own blockchain. Therefore, if FreiExchange goes kaput then any FXS tokens would cease to exist.

All in all, I’m pleased with FreiExchange. It’s not perfect but it does fulfill a unique role in the cryptocurrency space. According to their website, there are no listing fees for a coin to be added to the exchange and many of the coins featured would otherwise have no other place to trade, making it a much-needed sanctuary for older and less visible coins.

Passive income is one of my interests so putting some money into a proof-of-stake (PoS) cryptocurrency like Peercoin (PPC) and setting up a full node by letting the wallet run on my computer to collect staking rewards seemed like a very interesting idea.

According to the official website, the ROI on staking Peercoin is 1% per year so in order to make $1 a day by staking peercoins, I would need to make $365 worth of peercoins a year. Since the annual ROI is 1%, I would need an initial investment of $36,500. That works out to about 91,250 PPC at current prices which would also make my address the 59th richest PPC address on the blockchain.

And that’s not including the fact that like nearly all cryptocurrencies, the price of PPC is very volatile – e.g. it was trading at $0.60 per coin just two months ago. Because of this, small price shifts up or down can make the rewards from staking seem pretty irrelevant.

So there goes that idea…

Now, if I wanted to make e.g. $10 a day instead of $1 then I would multiply my initial investment of $36,500 by 10. If a coin had an annual ROI of 2% or 3% instead of 1%, then I would divide my initial investment of $36,500 by 2 or 3, respectively.

From this little mental exercise, it seems apparent that the equation to find out how much of a cryptocurrency (in $x) needed to make $y worth of it per day assuming an annual ROI of z% is x = (36,500y)/z. Neither market cap nor price per coin factor into this equation.

Here is a table that shows several PoS coins, their approximate average annual staking reward rate, and the amount of money that would need to be invested in order to make about $1 a day rounded to the nearest dollar (note that some of these coins might have other requirements for staking such as a minimum balance and coin age):

Coin	Ticker	annual staking rate	investment needed to make $1 a day
PRIZM	PZM	120%	$304
Lindacoin	LINDA	70%	$521
Philosopher Stones	PHS	50%	$730
Bulwark	BWK	43%	$849
Phore	PHR	37%	$986
ChessCoin	CHESS	32%	$1,141
ION	ION	25.15%	$1,451
HoboNickels	HBN	25%	$1,460
Stakenet	XSN	20%	$1,825
Decred	DCR	13%	$2,808
Blocknet	BLOCK	12.9%	$2,829
Cashcoin	CASH	10%	$3,650
Neblio	NEBL	8%	$4,563
Qtum	QTUM	7%	$5,214
CloakCoin	CLOAK	6%	$6,083
Emercoin	EMC	6%	$6,083
PIVX	PIVX	6%	$6,083
CacheCoin	CACH	5%	$7,300
GalaxyCoin	GLX	5%	$7,300
Gold Pressed Latinum	GPL	5%	$7,300
Grain	GRA	5%	$7,300
Komodo	KMD	5%	$7,300
KuCoin Token	KCS	5%	$7,300
MintCoin	MINT	5%	$7,300
ReddCoin	RDD	5%	$7,300
Yacoin	YAC	5%	$7,300
YbCoin	YBC	5%	$7,300
YobitVirtualCoin	YOVI	5%	$7,300
Navcoin	NAV	4%	$9,125
Neo	NEO	4%	$9,125
Particl	PART	4%	$9,125
Deutsche eMark	DEM	3.8%	$9,605
Nexus	NXS	3%	$12,167
Electra	ECA	2.5%	$14,600
Waves	WAVES	2.1%	$17,381
Gridcoin	GRC	1.5%	$24,333
Stratis	STRAT	1.5%	$24,333
AndroidsTokens	ADT	1.2%	$30,417
BlackCoin	BLK	1%	$36,500
CinnamonCoin	CIN	1%	$36,500
IncaKoin	NKA	1%	$36,500
Peercoin	PPC	1%	$36,500
Colossuscoin	COL	0.5%	$73,000
ChessCoin 0.32%	CHESS	0.32%	$114,063
Nxt	NXT	0.3%	$121,667

Back in the mid 2010s, there was a coin called HyperStake that promised extremely high staking rewards of up to 750% per year. As long as the price of each coin remained the same, an initial investment of less than $50 would have yielded a $1 daily return!

Of course, the high inflation rate meant that the price had to fall – HyperStake (now rebranded as Element) is down 99.8% from its all-time high. To prevent this outcome, most PoS coins like ReddCoin, Navcoin, Emercoin, and Neo have less extreme returns of about 4 to 10% per year. However, the prices of many of these coins have fallen by over a third during the past couple of months which goes to show how easy it is for potential returns from staking to be completely overshadowed by price volatility.

If you know of any coins with good potential for staking then feel free to share them in the comments.

Just-Dice.com is a cryptocurrency gambling site, or more specifically a dice site that has been running continuously since June 2013. That’s almost an eternity in the cryptocurrency space so you can feel safe knowing that they’re unlikely to run off with your coins. On Just-Dice.com, players can make bets on dice rolls and the site makes money by giving the house a slight edge of 1%. While gambling is very unlikely to provide a consistent profit in the long term, investing in the site’s bankroll for others to bet against means that the odds will be in your favor.

Originally, Just-Dice.com used bitcoins but due to concerns about government regulation, the site owner dooglus switched to an altcoin called Clams (CLAM). The initial distribution of Clams was quite interesting – a snapshot was taken of the Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin blockchains on May 12, 2014 and all addresses containing non-dust amounts of BTC, LTC, or DOGE at that point in time were given 4.60545574 CLAM for free. The intention was to make the distribution of the coin as fair as possible. If you held coins during the snapshot, you can claim them directly from Just-Dice.com. Just type /dig in the chat and it will give you the directions. Clams can also be bought and sold for BTC on YoBit and FreiExchange.

If you decide to invest in the site’s bankroll, some weeks will be more profitable than others because big wins will reduce the site’s profitability and big losses will increase it. Larger investments will tend to produce greater profits and the appreciation or depreciation of the price of the Clams cryptocurrency itself will also affect your profit in dollar terms.

As of July 2, 2024, 1 CLAM is worth about $0.20. I have almost 60 CLAM invested in Just-Dice.com worth about $12 in total. In order to give you a good idea of what you can earn, I have decided to share a table of my earnings over the past 12 months (click to expand):

As you can see, I was able to turn 55 CLAM into almost 60 CLAM in 12 months. This represents an annual return of about 9%. Just-Dice.com will also stake your coins for you since Clams is a proof-of-stake (PoS) cryptocurrency similar to other PoS coins like Peercoin and Nxt. In order to pay its expenses and make some money for itself however, the site also charges a 10% commission on investment and staking profits when profits are divested or at the end of each week – whichever happens sooner.

I hope this post has been helpful to anyone interested in investing in cryptocurrency gambling sites to make some passive income on the side. If you have also invested in Just-Dice.com or a similar site and wish to share your own experience, feel free to post it in the comments.

Bitcoin is great but there are concerns about its environmental impact. Even if you don’t care about the environment, traditional proof-of-work mining consumes a lot of energy that could be directed towards other uses. Therefore, I’ve decided to add a Peercoin (PPC) donation option to my blog. Peercoin is a newer cryptocurrency than Bitcoin that uses both proof-of-work to distribute the initial coins as well as an innovative consensus mechanism called proof-of-stake that requires far less energy to maintain because it doesn’t rely on power-hungry mining equipment to secure the blockchain.

On their official website, you can find more information about Peercoin, news and updates, discussion boards, wallet downloads, and links to exchanges that trade Peercoin.

If you are interested in helping support my work then feel free to donate some peercoins to the following address:

PALEXrBdE9eyEKZEJPBoEJwT3gUaK5NGEo

A regularly updated list of all donation methods accepted by this site can be found here.

From now on, you can donate gridcoins to help support this website!

Gridcoin (GRC) is a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency similar to Peercoin that rewards volunteer computing performed on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) network. If you’re interested in the idea of contributing to distributed computing projects that solve scientific problems such as protein folding (Rosetta@home) and climate modeling (climateprediction.net) as well as long-standing mathematical conjectures (PrimeGrid) while making some extra beer money on the side then check out their official website where you can find more information, download a wallet, and start staking and “crunching” (Gridcoin’s equivalent of mining) new coins.

If you hold Gridcoin and are interested in supporting my work then feel free to donate some to:

SALEXcgv1EHfKn7rUBnHn5s4ig1EhqwRrX

A regularly updated list of all donation methods accepted by this site can be found here.