Another idea of mine, that might give relatively small but relatively well secured payouts:
Lending BTC on Bitfinex.
Bitfinex is an option platform offering amongst other things to open an account and lend out BTC or USD deposits to its users who want to do leveraged trades. Even though the interest is usually lower than what traders can/do(?) earn, the interest is guaranteed and secured.
I'd like to offer to open a fund in BTC which get deposited to Bitfinex and pay out interest to its members periodically (interest on Bitfinex is credited daily).
Current numbers from lending out BTC show quite jumpy returns (in 14 days I had 1 day with 0 interest and 2 days with more than 10% APR - averaged over that timeframe I'm at ~3% APR) which are of course higher if the USD price falls (or trader think it might fall), as people borrow BTC to sell them and buy more later at cheaper prices.
As interest compounding is actually quite a nice feature of Bitfinex (since it is paid daily, I already have ~0.1% more funds to lend out and I gain interest on these as well already) I'd probably look for people who don't want daily dividends or something like this - it would anyways only create bitdust. Maybe a payment once a certain treshhold in interest has been reached? Also withdrawals are not immediate at all, on one hand you can of course only withdraw coins that are not currently actively lent (d'oh!) and also Bitfinex has all coins in offline storage and processes withdrawals on business days, so it might take a while (= up to a few days if you request a withdrawal on friday before easter for example) until a request is processed. This fund should be viewed as long term investment, not for day trading.
Potential risks mainly include Bitfinex going bankrupt (unlikely due to trading activity as they get a cut on every trade, unlikely as well due to being hacked as BTC are supposedly stored offline), MtGox going out of business suddenly and taking Bitfinex' money with them (which would not be Bitfinex' fault but still I guess they have quite some funds over there to execute the user's trades) and me scamming you willingly (
) or unwillingly (e.g. I die + destroy my phone with the GAuth key in the process and don't have a dead man's switch in place).
Your benefit over lending directly at Bitfinex is that you don't need to set up and secure an account over there, as you can participate in the whole thingie here just by submitting BTC and an address that will be used as payout address, your "alias" in reports and to sign any payout requests. Also you get nice stats/graphs done by me.
My benefit from all this would be that I gain a part of the interest generated (5% seems like a reasonable amount) and that I didn't create all my nice statistics and graphs just for myself.
If you are generally or especially interested in something like this or have found a major flaw in my idea, please feel free to let me know in this thread!
tl;dr: Interested on earning a few meager % on a relatively conservative investment? Express your interest in this thread!
