4 Apps to Stack Bitcoin
4 Apps to Stack Bitcoin
ShakePay, Fountain, Slice, and sMiles
I am constantly looking for new ways to increase the amount of bitcoin I have. My goal is to go to sleep with more bitcoin than what I woke up with. There are a number of applications on my phone that facilitate getting ahold of more satoshis. In this post, I’ll say a few things about each of these apps and supplement the discussion with how I’d recommend you contextualize earning small amounts of bitcoin.
Fold App (USA) & ShakePay (Canada)
Two essential apps for your phone is Fold if you’re in the USA and ShakePay in Canada. If you’re not from either of these places, then feel free to skip to the next section, or take note of the strategy and see if you find another app like this in your area (United Kingdom, Europe, African Continent, Latin America). I like building my awareness of bitcoin apps in the world, so please leave me a comment if you know of an app that I don’t!
The defining feature of both of these applications is their virtual visa debit card. It is essentially a fiat checking account attached to the app wherein purchases made from this card earns cash back in BTC.
ShakePay
Since I am Canadian, this is the app that I am best prepared to speak about. With ShakePay, there are three ways to earn bitcoin on a daily basis.
You can shake your phone once per day and earn bitcoin, starting with 50 satoshis. Every consecutive day that you shake your phone earns you progressively more BTC up to a limit of 1000 satoshis (0.00001000 ₿).
You can earn 2% cashback on purchases (up to $5,000 worth of purchases), then 1% on all purchases thereafter.
You can form a “shakesquad” with 4 of your friends. Anytime any one of you uses their card, everyone in the shakesquad gets 42 satoshis each.
So check out the screenshot below.
I’ve received more than 0.02 ₿ from shaking my phone.
I’ve received 0.001 ₿ from cashback from purchases
I’ve received 0.00021042 ₿ from me and my shakesquad spending
Emotionally, it is really satisfying to use ShakePay to stack sats.
Fold App
The Fold App is like ShakePay but for Americans. Fold has gamified spending in a slightly different way. Every time you spend through your Fold Card (which is also a physical card), you get the ability to earn between 1% - 1.5% cashback, or spin a wheel to earn from a variety of rewards. Honestly, I just recommend going and checking out their site to learn more about their product. I haven’t personally used it, but I know it comes highly recommended from other bitcoiners.
If you’re spending money anyway, you may as well earn cashback in bitcoin.
Fountain Podcasting
I probably listen to 5 podcasts per week. So I was thrilled when I learned about FountainApp. It is a bitcoin based podcasting application. You can earn satoshis for every minute you listen to podcasts through the app, up to an hour worth of listening.
So based on the above screenshot, I will earn 60 sats for listening to a podcast for an hour. I’ve seen that “satoshis per minute” number be as low as 1 sats/minute and as high as 100 sats/minute. There are other ways to earn within the app as well. Fountain allows you to “clip” moments from the podcasts you’re listening to, and share them for others to view. If someone appreciates the clip that you’ve created, they can “boost” it by sending the post (and therefore you), some satoshis.
Slice
I’ve been using the Brave Browser since it launched around 2017/2018. Since then, it’s been blocking regular ads and serving me ads from its own integrated ad network, and rewarding me with BAT for paying attention to the ads. Slice takes the same idea, but rewards me with Bitcoin instead. The tradeoff is that I have to reenable regular advertisements throughout my browsing experience.
Since I’d rather have BTC than BAT, I’ve enabled Slice and have been seeing regular advertisements while I’m on YouTube or other websites that serve me ads. For every ad that I watch, I get a few satoshis.
I’ve been using Slice for about two months now, and I’ve made about $1.83 worth of bitcoin. Nothing worth really shouting about, but more on that later.
sMiles
The last app that I’d like to cover is sMiles. Its a health-oriented application that rewards the user for their movement. Based on the amount of steps that the user takes in a day, the user can get rewarded with Bitcoin. The major downside to this application is that you need to turn on location services, health services, and notification services in order for you to earn on steps. This is a privacy tradeoff that many people (including myself) are not willing to make.
Depending on how you feel about the privacy policy of sMiles, you can earn sats on your steps. Cool idea, but maybe something worth seeing how the company develops first.
Small Rewards — Delayed Gratification
The elephant in the room on this post is that the “rewards” I’ve posted are quite small. After all said in done, ShakePay accounts for 99% of my total rewards with the other apps only amounting to about $10.00 worth of Bitcoin. In fiat terms, this is not enough effort to change from your favourite podcasting app or browser. The way I like to think about the sats that I am stacking is each satoshi = $1.00. Right now, each satoshi = $0.0002809757. So yes, I am actually anticipating a 3,559.02x increase in the price of bitcoin…. but NOT anytime soon.
The way I think about this is in terms of appreciate and depreciation. I think bitcoin will go up in usage and thus value, but I also think that the USD will continue on its exponential decline in value. Psychologically, it pleases me to know that while using Fountain for example, I am getting $1 for each minute of podcasts that I listen to. Maybe I am just deluding myself, but I also sleep well at night knowing I’ve accomplished my goal of having more BTC that what I started my day with.
Thanks for reading, stay humble and stack sats,
Keegan