Quote from: nutildah on March 13, 2019, 05:56:08 AM

Quote from: BTCMILLIONAIRE on March 13, 2019, 05:17:33 AM

Quote from: Dogboy714 on March 13, 2019, 05:00:00 AM

But why? How is it being used?

To learn how to use it. And to establish reputation for the future. Both of which imply a chance for passive income down the road.

There's really no such thing as "passive income." There's legitimate income and then there's income from scams, like MLMs and Ponzis. With investing and lending you still need to exercise extreme diligence in order to make a profit, so I wouldn't call those "passive" either.

Hey, nutildah, them is fighting words.

hahahaha

What I would like to say is that "passive income" is something that many folks aspire to. Of course, there is some relativity to how passive is the income, which as you describe, even some passive income sources are going to require a certain amount of work through calculations, monitoring, rebalancing and/or other activities causing them from being less than purely passive.

At the same time, let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and let's use bitcoin accumulation as an example. Let's say that you have a lifestyle that you believe requires around $36k per year of income to support yourself comfortably, so in that case you would need to have $900k in assets to reasonably generate that kind of income (that is attempting to apply traditional value appreciation assumptions to bitcoin and assuming a withdrawal rate of 4% per year 1% per quarter will not deplete capital, and largely just be digging into asset appreciation). At today's BTC prices, that would be establishing a stash of about 233 BTC.

In other words, if your income goal is $36k per year, then 233BTC should help you to largely and mostly achieve passive income status, and the only work that you would need to do is accounting for your withdrawal of about 1% per quarter and any other accounting or security precautions of moving around assets precautions that you believe would be prudent for your own piece of mind.. and/or perhaps changes in your perceptions of the security parameters of your assets.

Of course, if you want to live in higher luxury or if you believe that you need a bit more of a value cushion in order to ensure your about $36k per year of withdrawal rate (aka passive income), then you could either acquire more bitcoin or wait for the BTC price to go up to a sufficient value before you begin to employ your withdrawal plan of 1% per quarter - passive income plan.

I understand that a lot of peeps here seem to believe that they need more than $36k per year, yet there are also people who definitely understand that they can live on a lot less too, such as $18k per year, and $36k would be a kind of doubling cushion.. nonetheless, because bitcoin has tended to be quite volatile, just to be a lot more comfortable there may be some justification to double your accumulation, or at least calculate your accumulation goal based on worse case BTC price scenarios... such as halfing the BTC price.. from today's price... or something like that.

Of course, another error that guys in this thread seemed to have made in late 2017 was calculating their retirement and level of richness based on exponentially increasing BTC prices rather than based on correction prices, such as where we are today, and perhaps even using half of todays prices for safety measures.. just to be more prudent in NOT retiring too soon and expecting to live comfortably with the BTC level that you had then accumulated.

Quote from: nutildah on March 13, 2019, 05:56:08 AM

The whole point of using Lightning is that its faster and cheaper than on-chain transactions. If you set your channel fee too high people will bypass it and you will make less income than you did by setting a low fee. If the cost of doing a lightning transaction supersedes that of an on-chain transaction, people will simply revert to transacting on-chain.

I agree with you about the lighting network NOT being a good way to aim towards passive income, at least in the short term, and likely you would need to have way more BTC than what I had mentioned as the 233BTC based on a $3k per month ($36k per year) income from just expected continued BTC appreciation in the coming years of at least 4% per year.

Quote from: nutildah on March 13, 2019, 05:56:08 AM

Also, its not overly simple to set up and maintain your own lightning node (though it is a lot easier today than it used to be). Maintaining a consistent internet connection, having to pay for that and the electricity of running your computer also need to be factored into the overall cost.

Kind of reminds me of some folks who planned to get rich by BTC mining, when in the end, they would have done a lot better just buying coins with the amount of money they spent to mine bitcoin. Though mining did pay off handsomely for some folks, too, and I certainly appreciate miners, and some miners actually feel more comfortable because they are engaging on a higher level with their investment, as compared with some smuck like me who only HODLs coins and spouts off on the interwebs on a regular basis without really engaging on a personal level with the BTC technicals.