Back when fiat was my focus1, I spent a decent amount of time scrounging for "beer money." This is a technique where you use sites that offer rebates and money for watching videos or sites like Prolific that let you participate in academic studies for money to make extra cash on the side. It's not meant as a way to make a living, but as a way to bring in $50-100 extra a month for beer or whatever small things someone might want. It's not totally dissimilar from basic sat stacking -- getting a few bucks worth of rebates from Ibotta instead of getting sats from the Bitcoin Magazine app.
I'd been away from it for a bit even before getting more and more into BTC, because there's only so much time in the day. But the mindset has helped inform me as I stack those sats.
But I've realized that I've been shortsighted here. I should still be going after the beer money, because that extra ~$50 a month can be traded right away for sats. It's not part of the fiat I need for housing and other costs, and leaving it on the table is a waste.
(Not all of the beer money ecosystem pays cash -- one app gets me gift cards at my grocery store, but reducing my fiat output is also good for shifting to sats.)
So yeah, had this tool to help stack sats right in front of me, and am definitely going to start re-embracing it. So far, have just stacked a few thousand sats this way (started at the beginning of the month, and it takes some time to build a good engine for this), but my goal is to see if I can get to 100K in a month, if not in March, at least in April. If you're in a position to do this, don't overlook it as an additional source of stacking.

Footnotes

  1. It's still one of my foci to a degree, because I have not yet gotten to the point where I can live without it. But it's no longer endgame.
10 sats \ 0 replies \ @freetx 8 Mar
There some site that was equivalent to "AWS Mechanical Turk" floating around that was specific for LN, but the name escapes me.
Tbh, I'm not sure why gig workers, working for bitcoin isn't more popular.....
reply
Interesting! I treat SN as my playground to get sats for my beer money. Like literally beer. I buy Bitrefill gift cards to sustain my alcohol habit haha.
Btw, I’m surprised you don’t know faucet sites like Cointiply. Still a great source of sats even if it doesn’t pay out 5 Bitcoin per click haha
reply
Ha! Love the idea that it's still beer money for some folks, even as sats!
I do know about Cointiply -- I've had an account with them and a few other faucets since when I first looked into crypto -- but I don't think I ever used it seriously enough to get anything back from it. I'll have to take a look again.
reply
As long as you convert the Beer Money from these fiat sites like Prolific to sats, it's good. But it's better to collect Beer Sats Money directly from sites like stakwork.com and review.bitcointranscripts.com
reply
I wasn't familiar with either of those sites, and am definitely checking them out. Thanks!
reply
Stakwork is good. Bitcoin Transcripts people are paying a very horrible amount of sats, they are under the impression that people will work almost for free, because it's "for bitcoin". Like they don't intend to make money from their list of podcast transcriptions later. Anyway, it's low-paid-work but it's still paid work, they do pay. But try Stakwork first. Sometimes they have enough jobs going where you can make between 20-30K sats in a few hours.
reply
Alas, looks like Stakwork has a waiting list for signups, but I've gotten into the queue, at least.
reply