Bitcoin Miner is one of the most compelling mobile games we’ve played that pays out actual Bitcoin along the way. Unlike BTC-infused riffs on solitaire, sudoku, and other classic games, it does so in a colorful, recursive game about mining fake cryptocurrency.

It’s a slam dunk for crypto enthusiasts, even though—as with all of these games—the actual amount of Bitcoin you’ll earn for casual play comes out to pennies per hour. But as we’ve logged hours into the game, we’ve discovered strategies and techniques that can easily boost your stack of satoshis (aka 1/100,000,000 BTC)—without spending a penny to buy in-game advantages.

If you want to make the most of your Bitcoin Miner experience on iOS and Android and earn as much BTC as you can without paying for perks, here are seven tips to help you do so. Some might seem obvious once you’ve played the game, while others might come as a surprise. But they’re all worth keeping in mind while you play.

Complete the missions

When we first posted this guide, completing missions would earn you a single satoshi. There’s always a mission at the top of the screen, and they’re simple tasks—things like unlocking a new coin, tapping a certain number of power-ups, or earning a set amount of crypto by tapping the mining button.

After a recent update, however, now you'll instead earn one of the red nodes, which can be used to purchase things like in-game boosts and chests. It's now one less way to directly earn Bitcoin, but the nodes can be very useful as you're playing and help you progress faster—so it's still worth focusing on the missions as you play.

Hunt for satoshis

Even if you don’t plan on spending real cash in Bitcoin Miner, you should pop into the in-game store on a regular basis. Why? Because every four hours, a new “satoshi hunt” begins in the store. It’s simple: There are five orange satoshi icons hidden around the menus, and each one you tap earns you 3 real satoshis that you can cash out to your ZBD wallet. That’s 15 satoshis each round and potentially 90 free satoshis each day if you’re vigilant. Free Bitcoin!

Play daily

Want to stack a steady amount of sats? Play Bitcoin Miner daily. There’s a daily login reward for keeping up a streak of subsequent days, including bundles of free satoshis that you can cash out to your ZBD wallet. This one’s easy—just pop in daily to at least claim your prize, as they get better and better with each additional day.

Tap the sats

If you’re playing Bitcoin Miner, you should tap the various power-ups that appear above coins anyway, as they’ll help juice your in-game earnings. But the orange satoshi icon—the very same one you’ll see in the store—sometimes shows up above the fake crypto coins, too. Tap one of those, and you’ll bank a real satoshi to withdraw later.

Play the events

In addition to the main game, Bitcoin Miner holds a regular weekend event that sees you mining coins to build a rocket ship. Why? That’s not entirely clear—though if we had to hazard a guess, we suspect it has something to do with blasting off to the moon. In any case, these bonus weekend challenges include unlocking bounties of satoshis for hitting certain mining benchmarks, so they’re worth hitting up.

Bitcoin Miner has also launched a mid-week event on Wednesdays that finds you digging into the earth. It's another side diversion from the main experience that can not only break up the monotony a bit, but also provides a fresh avenue to stack satoshis while playing.

Sell and start over

At any point in the game, you can sell off your mining operation and get a massive earnings boost in exchange for starting over—except you’re not starting entirely from scratch. You’ll keep all of the earnings-boosting managers and coin parts you’ve unlocked, along with accumulated chests and node upgrades.

In return for starting your mine over again, you'll get a heap of GPUs (aka fake graphics cards), which can vastly boost your earnings potential. It might seem counterintuitive to repeatedly start over, but we found that we were able to rebuild back to our previous level in about 15 minutes—and then earn way more coins going forward.

It’s a worthwhile and temporary setback that’s usually worth doing if progress starts to feel slow and grindy. And there’s a Bitcoin-earning bonus: Doing so refreshes your list of missions, so if you got stuck on something that would’ve taken ages to complete, then you’ll instead have a string of really basic missions to complete after selling.

Cash out regularly

Serious players can stack hundreds of satoshis each day, but Bitcoin Miner puts a daily withdrawal limit of 500 sats on each player—so if you’re racking up big totals, then you should get in the habit of withdrawing regularly so you don’t get backed up.

t’s free to withdraw via the Lightning Network to your ZBD wallet, and then you can always move your Bitcoin from the ZBD wallet to a self-custody one afterward if you please.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.

Editor's note: This story was originally published on April 3, 2024 and last updated with new details on August 20.