BITCOIN FAUCET: WHAT IS THAT?

WHAT ARE BITCOIN FAUCETS?

Bitcoin and crypto faucets are quite popular topic in the cryptocurrency-centered media. Many a thread on the main forum, BitcoinTalk, along with a number of posts on a r/Bitcoin subreddit, are dedicated to discussions of various faucets. Indeed, this type of reward system has rooted deeply in the flexible body of the Bitcoin community. However, when you are a newbie in the realm of Bitcoin, you might find it hard to find any definition of a faucet. This is why many users first try it and then form an understanding of it. Below, I’ll try to outline the main features of a Bitcoin faucet and provide a list of pros and cons of using one.

Faucet is usually visualised as a tap which is slightly turned on, enough to get some water dripping from the pipe. This popular image represents the very essence of a faucet. There is a certain ‘flow’ of coins which can be distributed among the users of a particular website or application, and every such user can get only a limited amount of coins every once in a while. Using a faucet is indeed like standing under a leaking tap where you get your drop of water every minute or so.

REWARDS

The rewards are distributed from a pot of coins which can be either the owner’s own investment or the money of advertisers they are ready to spend for their services to get noticed. It’s pretty obvious that giveaway websites will attract lots of users who are hungry for freebies, and advertisers won’t miss to use this to their advantage.

Generally, only humans can get the satoshis from a faucet (1 satoshi = 1 millionth of a Bitcoin). This is why every time one wishes to claim the bits, he or she needs to solve a CAPTCHA. There are limitations for a frequency with which one can claim a reward. It often varies from once in every 5 minutes to once in an hour. The rewards are also different; they depend on how much a website owner has coins to spend.

The average award is somewhere around 100 and up to 1000 satoshis every 5 minutes. This is about 0.000001 – 0.00001 BTC, which means a possible hourly gain can be up to 0.0002 BTC. In this case, 10 hours of using a faucet will earn you 0.002 BTC, which is, at the time of writing, $0.57 (1 BTC = $283). However, most faucets, like BitVortex, will offer something more like 0.00072 BTC per day ($0.2). As you can imagine, you cannot earn a lot with a faucet.

DIVERSITY

There is a diversity of Bitcoin faucets. Most of them require registration, which usually involves providing a BItcoin wallet address, in order to receive the payouts. You can check out the lists of faucets on Bitcoin Wiki or on aggregator sites as MakingMoneyHoney.com. These resources provide info on minimum and maximum payout, average gains, and some of the main rules.

While a majority of faucets require you to watch ads and solve a CAPTCHA from time to time, some offer entertainment. For example, there are games like Battleship (CoinXerox) and MyBitMine with faucets inside them. Among the most likely places where faucets can be found, are Bitcoin dice websites (we have covered some of them in a recent article). They reward a player with a small amount of BTC enough to try out the game while making small bets. They usually offer something like 0.00001 BTC every 5 minutes, provided that the player has a zero balance.

CONS AND PROS

Just like everything else, especially when there is money involved, faucets have their cons and pros.

 Cons:

• You cannot earn with faucets. 20 cents a day doesn’t seem like real money.
• They are time killers. The reward is so small and insignificant that the user is often tempted to kill some time to at least be able to make a few cents.
• There are too many of them, which makes it easy for a user to get stuck on some scam website with no payouts.

 Pros:

• Faucets can be a nice start for newbies. While a thousand satoshis is not enough to consider money, you can surely get a taste of how the Bitcoin payments work in general.
• They can help popularise Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. There are a lot of people who will be happy to get something for free, even if they don’t know yet what that something is exactly.
• Faucets might work well for advertisers who gain their audience in this way.

Faucets play quite an important role in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. They help newbies to get a start with their wallets and their first fractions of Bitcoin. Faucets also create a way for advertisers to get attention of cryptocurrency users. While they can be fun to try, they should never be considered as a way of earning real money.