Just today, Ethereum is swinging wildy again, reaching to highs of USD 345 before retreating to the $328 range. (at the present moment). With its high fluctuations, how can we make money with Ethereum?
Ethereum has grown from a paltry price of $10 to the current $345 within a short period of time. There are several factors behind this price hike. One of the main reasons was Ethereum has been marketed to various potential corporate and government partners are a way of generating revenue through its integration of blockchain technology. Some highly publicized partnership are JPMorgan Chase, Cisco Systems, Inc, Bank of New York Mellon Corp, Microsoft, and other 30 big brands to create a partnership known as the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA).
In order to trade Ethereum, you need to know the various phases of Ethereum planned growth.
Frontier

• Frontier was the initial release of the Ethereum network pushed live in July 2015. It was a bare bone release planning to allow the more technically minded to release their own apps, allow people to mine, and get exchanges up and running.

Homestead

• Homestead was planned to be released after a month of frontier going live as a best case scenario. As of January 2016, the Homestead release is about 80% complete – but the goals have been altered somewhat as frontier took in a large part of its projected development pipeline – for example, the block reward was set to the full 5 ether.
• In its new form Homestead has become more of a patchwork of fixes to remove the risk warning attached to the Ethereum homepage. Homestead, btw, is our current phase.

Metropolis

• Metropolis is the release that opens the gates to the masses. This is where there are fully fledged and tested user interfaces for the non-technical users. Although this is now being performed by individuals – for example, the Ethereum desktop wallet. The hard fork is apparently in September 2017, this year.

Serenity

• Serenity is the last phase and has one key principle – to switch the Ethereum network from proof of work to proof of stake – essentially reducing the power consumption of the Ethereum network. When this is going to take place and under what conditions is of course anyone’s guess – although it is thought to be in the planning for the start of 2018.

So how do we make money with Ethereum?

There are several reasons you should consider buying Ethereum for long-term investments.The technology that underlies Ethereum means that it can be used for a number of other purposes that will be built off of a decentralized and autonomous system. Simply put, it potentially will be a revolutionary technology with the potential to impact a whole spectrum of industries. As the demand for the Ethereum platform and its smart contracts enabled network increases, the value of Ethereum as a cryptocurrency will continue to surge.

Stability – Ethereum had an organic growth, without massive spikes, and it seems to be stable, if not even predictable. The increasing demand and value of a certain cryptocurrency serve as an indicator of its potential. Whatever the reason is, it still increases the demand – meaning a further increase in Ethereum price.

You can choose to buy Ethereum, or if you prefer to have more liquidity, you can opt to trade in Ethereum. I personally prefer eToro as it was an intuitive interface and allows several other cryptocurrencies to be traded as well, as such Bitcoin, Ripple, Litecoin, etc.

You can sign up for an eToro account at http://bit.ly/etoro-ethereum

Bitcoin mining started out with simple CPU and GPU mining that can be done on high-powered home computers before the introduction of ASIC miners overwhelmed the industry resulting in only specialized hardware being capable of any worthwhile mining. The Ethereum blockchain, however, is far more resistant to ASIC miners which result in most of the processing being done on rigs mounted with GPUs.

If you have a high-powered system for gaming then your computer is more than capable of mining Ether at a respectable rate. You can choose to mine Ethereum solo but you’ll probably get better results by contributing your resources to a pool. Personally, I have never mined any myself but I have a good read on Nanopool and they’re easy to use. Thanks to their great help page.

In my opinion, Ether could be at a high price but still not profitable to mine because your electricity costs are so high, or visa Versa. You also have to account for the difficulty increase associated with a price spike.

In any case, we should be seeing Ethereum go up, up and up! Don't wait too long!

(Source)

Note: I'm sharing this as I've been deep-diving into cryptocurrency and blockchain as my own self-learning and perhaps future investment? 

Bitcoin mining gets more difficult over time, and so it now takes more electricity and money to mine for the cryptocurrency than ever before.

The rise of ether, another cryptocurrency, and the appreciation of bitcoin could help maintain the profitability of bitcoin mining, despite increasing costs and difficulty.
It's getting more difficult to mine bitcoins, but that doesn't mean miners are packing up their servers en masse and seeking greener pastures.

The number of bitcoins available for mining has decreased from 50 BTC per bitcoin "block" when the cryptocurrency first came onto the scene to 12.5 BTC per block, according to Autonomous NEXT, a financial technology analytics service. It is set to decrease to 6 BTC on June 19 2020, according to bitcoinblockhalf.com, a bitcoin countdown site.

Bitcoin mining is the process by which bitcoin "blocks" are unlocked. Miners are rewarded with blocks when they successfully solve complex algorithmic math problems using computer software. In order to control the supply of bitcoin, its underpinning technology was designed so that those math problems would get more difficult.
In the early days of the technology, people with a few computers were able to mine hundreds of coins in three to four days. That's not what the landscape looks like today, according to Sebastian Quinn-Watson, a consultant with Blockchain Global, a bitcoin mining firm.

"Today, about 1,700 bitcoins are generated a day," he said. "Basically, we are all fighting over one coin every 10 minutes."

"Since mining has become so much more difficult, it requires more electricity, and as a result, more money," Quinn-Watson said. His firm halted expansion of its Chinese bitcoin mining facilities eight months ago.

But Quinn-Watson thinks two factors could make up for a spike in cost and difficulty and sustain bitcoin miners moving forward.

"Ironically, the rise of ether is one trend that could help bitcoin miners," he said.

Ether, the bitcoin rival, which is powered by Ethereum blockchain, is up over 2,000% since last year. Up until June, the cryptocurrency was on track to surpass bitcoin as the world's largest cryptocurrency by market cap, according to Coindesk, but its share of the market has since pulled back.

"Many miners without the wherewithal to compete may completely shift over to mining ether tokens," Quinn-Watson said."Less participants means better economies of scale for firms that stay in."

Miners could also benefit from future appreciation in bitcoin's price, according to Quinn-Watson. If bitcoin's appreciation were to outpace the rise in the cost of mining, then the profitability of the business would be unaffected.
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To be sure, bitcoin is up about 250% since last year, but it has recently experienced extreme swings in its price. Some miners have attributed this volatility to an ongoing civil war between crypto-power brokers over the future structure of the cryptocurrency.
This, however, doesn't bother Quinn-Watson. He told Business Insider volatility is exciting.
"It will make the system stronger and drive more growth," he said. "So we welcome the uncertainty and see this as necessary aftershock of the Cambrian explosion that is Blockchain."

IrHence, I started to explore avenues where I could possible mine some cryptocoins. I then chanced upon Minergate.

MinerGate is your gateway to mining CryptoCurrencies easily, quickly and with no hassle - you don't need to be an expert programmer - MinerGate will guide you through the process. Mining is an important part of any cryptocurrency’s ecosystem, it allows the maintenance of the network and it’s also a good way to use your computer to make money, but not everyone gets along with a command line terminal and not everyone can afford a powerful graphics card, so today we’re going to show you how to mine Ethereum and other Cryptocurrencies – the easy way!

No “Matrix” terminals, no complicated commands and parameters to set! All you need is a computer and an internet connection, MinerGate will do the rest for you, even if you don’t have a GPU!

MinerGate is a GUI miner (GUI just means it looks pretty) with its own incorporated multipool, and even though it’s an extremely intuitive tool, MinerGate’s cutting edge smart algorithm is always working in the background to make sure you’re getting the most out of your hardware.

MinerGate’s Variable Difficulty algorithm, allows small portions of the Ethereum Blocks to be sent to miners according to their equipment and effective hashrate, making Ethereum mining possible in any computer with a simple click of a mouse!

You might want try Minergate. It's free and while it won't promise you a fortune, at least you can convert your spare smartphone and laptop processing power to good use! 

Or if you prefer to trade either Bitcoin or Ethereum, you might want to do so via an Etoro account instead.