There are lots of ways to earn cryptocurrencies. I got involved by at first buying around $40 worth of Bitcoin (all of which I lost in a scam shortly thereafter), but then I quickly found ways to earn cryptocurrencies and pretty much everything I have now originated that way. You do not have to buy anything to get started, though you will need to have patience.

1. People have already mentione bounties and signature campaigns. You can check those out. Just make sure you really believe in the project before you promote it, because it's your reputation.
2. Network, network, network. Get to know people, ask questions, learn. Ultimately your relationships will be your biggest asset.
3. If you have a skill, you might be able to earn by offering your services. A lot of coin projects need help and are happy to pay out in their coin.
4. Set up an account on Steemit.com and start earning there by posting and commenting and upvoting. Once you accumulate some SP, if you'd rather earn more passively you can make some pretty good returns delegating your SP on through minnowbooster.net.
5. Once you have some earnings, invest in some good POS (proof of stake) coins and earn by simply leaving your wallets open. DMD Diamond and SMART Cash are some good options. With the latter, you don't even have to leave your wallet open, just don't make any withdrawals for a month to earn a monthly "staking" bonus. With DMD Diamond, you do have to leave your wallet open, but those wallets are some of the best I have ever worked with, and the staking rewards are currently worth around $9.00 per instance.
6. Whatever coins you do invest in, get involved in their communities.
7. If one of your coin's price starts going up really fast, takes some out as profits. Convert all the way back to cash, then hold onto it and if you wait, you often can buy back the coin at a lower price. If the coin never drops back down, you at least have some profits you can use to buy other coins with.

Steemit.com is a great place to earn cryptocurrency. You earn STEEM and SBD, both of which can be traded for Bitcoin. It's a blogging/social networking site, and you earn based on who upvotes your work. Once you learn the ropes you will find that there are other ways of earning on that platform if composing blog posts isn't your thing. If you join Steemit, please keep in mind that the Steemit community does not like spammers either, and you'll get penalized for that sort of thing. So post good content and go read and upvote other people's good content, get to know people, network, and you will become aware of all sorts of possibilities.

That's not true, unless people are failing to report their cryptocurrency earnings and profits. In the US, you are obligated to report profits from trading cryptocurrencies as well as report as income any time you got paid for something in cryptos. The US government at this time is taking a wait and see attitude towards cryptocurrencies--they are studying it to determine how to best regulate it later on.

The banks aren't going away just because of cryptocurrencies. They will over time adapt to the innovations in the cryptocurrency industry and incorporate them into their own systems. That process is already underway. Check out NEM. There are already a number of companies using its private block chain. There is even a token called LoyalCoin running on the NEM blockchain which seeks to consolidate all the various customer loyalty programs. Banks are already putting resources into researching the whole blockchain technology.

In the mean time, as long as you want to buy or sell Bitcoin on Coinbase... you will need a conventional bank account.

First of all, it's not accurate to say the poor in the world do not have access to the Internet. Cellular phone penetration in some of the poorest nations is very high. Right now more people own cell phones than computers. And since cell phones are small and portable, their owners can access the Internet wherever they are.

For a project that is very focused on reaching the unbanked of the world, check out the DNotes thread. DNotes is about to launch its upgraded version so the price will likely jump in about a month or so. You might also look up SMART Cash, which is a community lead project and currency.

My rough ideas:

DNotes: Taking you safely into the financial world of tomorrow (or the future)
DNotes: Safely navigate the financial transitions coming your way
DNotes: Where you get to be your own bank with full support
DNotes: We go the distance to do what's best... so you can too

I'm not too sure about tag lines

This is fantastic news! They are saying what I've been saying for years (OK, months), though with much more in depth analysis of the technical aspects.

That is not a good sign. That was the site that was going to list Devcoin but which was struggling to download the block chain, right?

I'm glad my replacement helped. Do you need me to also replace/upload receiver 27? If so, what would be the replacement file? I probably don't even have 27 on my Github account. I used to host these files on my own site, but that site is no longer active.

I too was kind of sad to see the cloudmining operation shut down, and I must have made my ROI because I stopped getting payments. But if a lot of participants were simply instant selling their earnings, then it was a good idea to shut it down, because it was set up for price support among other things.

Just out of curiosity, how are you able to tell what people are doing with the DMD that they earned through cloudmining?

I replaced it today about an hour ago. Let me know if that helps

I agree that you need to do your own homework on the coins you want to invest in. You also need to know your investment goals. Do you want to buy a coin cheap now and then sell it all for much higher in two years so that you can go on vacation or buy a house? Or, do you want to find a way to earn a passive income?

If you're looking to buy low and hold and then sell high, then you want to find a very good coin that hasn't yet been discovered and buy it now.

If you're looking for a passive or residual income, you can look for the decent proof of stake coins.

I certainly have my favorite coins but I'm not going to list them here because even though I believe in them I wouldn't want you to buy them blind. However, you can look through my posts and get a pretty good idea if you're willing to take the time
 
Here are some general things to look for in a coin:
1. professionalism. Do their devs treat people in their community and inquirers with respect and courtesy?
2. community. Is there a community? You really don't want to get into a coin that doesn't have a community.
3. more than one developer, a good development team. If it's a one man show, skip it. Look for a solid team developing the coin.
4. solid plan. make sure it's realistic what they plan to accomplish. Read the intro post and white paper and ask a lot of questions, which will also help you figure out number 1.
5. incentive to hold the coin. There needs to be some very good reasons to hold the coin. For example, some coins will offer rewards to holders. Proof of Stake coins reward holding over selling.
6. supporting infrastructure to add value. There has to be more than just a coin. Anything that can support or add value to the coin.
7. market support. Nothing artificial but simply good reasons to buy the coin and support the price, such as a bounty system that pays out in the coin.

I hope others here have some good recommendations as far as what makes a good coin. Please add them here, as I'm sure that would help lots of people.

I'm not sure how to verify. Would it be OK if I just replaced?

I am so sorry about what happened to you. That really stinks. I'm glad you didn't get physically hurt.

Have you tried getting involved in Steemit? It's a social network platform that pays you to post (based on upvotes). You would have to work it and gather a following, but it's generally easier to profit there than YouTube. You can write blog posts once a day or once a week. Once you've picked up a bit of Steem Power, you can also delegate it out for pay via minnowbooster.net.

As far as I know, none of these things need verification. I think the normal way to register on Steemit is to verify with a cell phone, but you can bypass that by setting up an account with annonsteem if you're willing to pay a bit. Annonsteem is a legit service I've used multiple times. Just make sure you save all your keys on Steemit because you can't recover them if lost, which would stink if you'd accumulated a bunch of money in your account.

So, you'll be paid in STEEM and SBD. This doesn't solve the problem of how to exchange it, but you will eventually not be a minor, maybe in a few years. So, you can accumulate now and then once you're of age you can register on a trading platform and verify and all that.

I don't see why a high school student couldn't invest in cryptocurrencies. It's in high school that many people get their first job. While most high schoolers are working to save up for a new car, Xbox, CDs of their favorite bands, a high school kid could just as easily spend their pay on buying cryptocurrencies and then see what happens. It would be important that the kid understand the concept of "what you can afford to lose." But seriously, most of what a typical high schooler earns is going to be spent on what we would categorize as frivolous items. So why not the frivolous item called cryptocurrencies?

If a high school student could be guided into investing in a POS coin such as DMD Diamond, they would be able to start earning a bit of passive income, which I'm sure they would love. Suppose a high school student worked a job (and his parents are still supporting him so no real bills to pay), put all his earnings into DMD Diamond and staked them, and then sold the minted Diamonds and used those proceeds to buy the fun stuff like Xbox and CDs and so forth? That kid would grow up with a very different outlook on money than most. Hopefully he would find several good POS coins that could do that for him, and also eventually be able to get into some good fiat investments. He could potentially be set up for life before he's anywhere near retirement age.

This is very interesting, actually. Basically, DNotes is planning to eventually support tokens but be very selective of which ones it will support. This is in contrast to the NEM platform, which currently supports token creation, is open source and available for anyone to use, in support of the value of decentralization of control. There's a bit of a downside for NEM right now in that it looks like it might be the platform of choice for Maduro (of Venezuela)'s Petro, a cryptocurrency that regime is wanting to launch. There's a bit of confusion as to whether the backbone platform will be NEM or ETH, but it's likely to be NEM at this point. So now NEM has the issue of potentially being associated with what is considered by many to be a bad regime. NEM is strongly committed to the value of decentralization which means that there will be tokens launched on the NEM block chain that maybe the NEM Foundation, and certainly NEM investors, would never want to endorse. But that's the potential downside to a commitment to decentralization and freely available open source as a core value.

DNotes has a different core value, which is excellence, and DNotes is willing to sacrifice a certain amount of Decentralization in order to uphold the excellence core value.

This will be interesting for me to watch and see how it plays out, as I'm heavily invested in both, but also because I'm realizing that a number of the crypto core values aren't totally compatible with each other. Personally I think both decentralization and excellence are great core values to have. However, you can't necessarily have them both at full potential in one project. It could be that an interesting metric as far as diversification of cryptoassets goes, is to choose a number of coins that emphasize different core values, as I'm sure over time market conditions will favor different ones over the others.

Along with DNotes' commitment to excellence as a core value, is a commitment to solid leadership. Leadership, by definition, will have a certain "centralized" aspect to it. At some point someone has to own the decision and move forward.

It could also be that decentralization isn't so much a value as a tool. Anyway, thinking out loud here...

Sweet! Thank you!

With all your efforts DVC might end up on more than one exchange, which would be awesome!

Oh, I really hope we're past dumps down to ten cents! But other than that, I totally agree with you I just might sell some if the whales pump it to disproportionate heights again, because perhaps I could buy it all back much cheaper...  Trading... so not my forte!

The people who say ultimately it doesn't matter if you are a man or woman in this industry are correct. You can make it here with no prejudice because of the anonymity. For example, can anyone know just by my handle "wiser" what gender I am?

But I do find it interesting to study the differences because biologicaly and otherwise, men and women are different and bring very different skills and talents to this industry, all of which are valuable in moving the industry forward.

You sure picked a great coin! If you can be patient with it I'm sure you will be rewarded in the long run. Some of us here have been holding and accumulating DNotes for several years.