The Free Crypto Myth & Faucets

• What is a Bitcoin Faucet？

• What is Bitcoin Faucet History？

• How do bitcoin faucets function？

• Bitcoin faucets' risk vs. reward

If you commute into a city or a large town, you're undoubtedly used to getting samples of new things like soft drinks, shampoo, or energy bars. It's a low-cost and successful alternative to online or TV marketing for a new product, placing it in the hands of an enormous number of people for free in the hopes that they will like it and buy it later.

When Bitcoin first came out in 2009, it faced an enormous uphill battle in terms of adoption.

It wasn't simply new; it was also unlike any other kind of money, with no identifiable company or individual behind it and no marketing budget.

There were no cryptocurrency exchanges back then, so the only way to get bitcoin was to transfer money to a miner who was ready to sell some of the coins they had acquired as a reward.

This was OK if you were willing to take the risk of transmitting money to a stranger, but it was evident that Bitcoin wanted a more straightforward incentive scheme to expand its user base.

As a result, it's no surprise that efforts to spread the word included putting bitcoin straight into the hands (virtually) of potential users, much like an energy bar at a railway station; this is how the bitcoin faucet was formed.

The Bitcoin Faucet's Inception

In 2010, a Bitcoin developer named Gavin Andresen came up with the notion of developing a bitcoin faucet to do exactly that. This was a system for meant distributing reasonable amounts of BTC to anyone who was willing to claim it.

To prevent spam or bots, the faucet took the shape of a typical webpage with a captcha. Visitors who successfully completed the captcha received 5 BTC. Yes, you read that correctly: over $250,000 in today's money for pressing a button.

With the light of hindsight, it is ludicrous, but bitcoin was valued less than a $1 at the time, and it was fighting to acquire traction.

In retrospect, participating in the first bitcoin faucet seems like a no-brainer, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. That first bitcoin faucet dispensed nearly 20,000 BTC during its lifetime - worth over $1 billion and counting - and in retrospect, it seems like a no-brainer, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Would you click on a random link today that promised you a mysterious currency you'd never heard of and couldn't actually do anything with？

Of course, because Bitcoin is already well-established and in high demand, no one will give away 5 BTC for the simple act of clicking a button, but the good news is that you can still make money using bitcoin faucets.

You need to understand how they work, the objectives behind the faucet, and what you must do in return.

How do faucets function？

By financing a cryptocurrency wallet with BTC and connecting it to a simple script that runs on their website, any website owner may now create a bitcoin faucet.

Faucets are simple to install, and there are even Wordpress plugins that make the method even easier. The wallet is set up to pay out Satoshis at predetermined times, and a minimum withdrawal threshold may be established as well.

For example, you could only be able to claim money from a faucet once every 24 hours, and you might only be able to withdraw your coins once you've earned 1,000 satoshis (0.00001 BTC).

Most faucets need you to create an account using an email address and a password before requiring you to accomplish chores in exchange for free money. Watching films, clicking on adverts, taking quizzes, rolling dice, and solving puzzles are examples of these chores.

Some of these jobs may seems to be enjoyable at first, but they can rapidly become tedious, especially in an atmosphere where you are constantly blasted with banner ads and other forms of advertising.

To prevent people from creating multiple accounts, each bitcoin faucet will set a limit on how much you can claim per account, and also by IP address.

There's nothing stopping you from signing up for a variety of faucets and working your way through them, claiming money from each as you go.

While time-consuming, this method can provide a strategy for accumulating a small quantity of cryptocurrency. Some others take it a step farther and employ bots.

Bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency that can be claimed this way; faucets exist for many of the most prominent cryptocurrencies on the market. However, given its value and track record of outperforming most other cryptocurrencies, you might conclude that bitcoin is the ideal faucet to use.

In comparison to other faucets, a good bitcoin faucet will have a large number of users (which indicates that the site is trustworthy) and rewards that are higher than the market average. It should also offer cheap withdrawal costs and allow you to withdraw your bitcoins at any moment.

Cryptocurrency is not free.

Even if the amounts that may be gained using bitcoin faucets are now insignificant, you might argue that they are still worthwhile to use. After all, much like with Andresen's faucet in 2010, holding on to the Satoshis you receive today could turn out to be a very rewarding play in a few years. As a result,'stacking sats' has become a popular and sensible bitcoin concept.

While it's true that bitcoin could be worth a lot more in the future than it is now, the most exponential growth happened when it was first discovered.

Thus, no matter how long you hodl, a few dollars' worth of bitcoin acquired from faucets today is unlikely to make you wealthy, but 4x in a year does show that there is some upside.

Take a look at this faucet payout plan in USD from early 2020 as a reality check.

· Withdrawal minimum: 2.48 USD

· Transaction fees are as low as 0.066 USD.

· 1 USD = 588 hours since 0.0017 USD is dispensed per hour.

· To reach cash out thresholds, a faucet user would have to accumulate BTC for 73 working days.

Clearly, that is a lot of labor for such a modest gain, though you must account for the 400 percent growth in BTC price in 2020.

If you understand the effort/reward relationship, you shouldn't be put off from trying faucets; they're a good way to get BTC for free and familiarize yourself with how a bitcoin wallet works, especially because they're integrated with your faucet account.

Faucets are also gamified, which adds a fun factor, and when paired with some of the other options in our Earn Crypto section, can add up to a little sum that you can use to expand further using other methods such as trading or gambling.

Those “free” money you receive every time you connect with a faucet, on the other hand, come at a cost: your time, attention, and data.

The operators of bitcoin faucets aren't doing it out of the kindness of their hearts; they're doing it for profit. Typically, this is because they profit from marketers by forcing you to watch commercials or provide personal information for marketing purposes.

In some circumstances, users are encouraged to use their free bitcoin to wager on casino games in order to win a sum that may be withdrawn. Given that the bitcoin was provided for free, you may not see a problem with this, but the goal is to get into the habit of playing games so that you eventually deposit your own bitcoin. Free spins at a conventional online casino are proxied by the faucet cash.

You might conclude that this is incompatible with Bitcoin and everything it represents: financial liberty and the chance to transact in relative anonymity.

Most sites that give free bitcoin through faucets do not specify how or with whom your information is shared. After assessing the evidence, you may decide that faucets aren't worth the trade-offs, or you may reduce the problem by utilizing an email dedicated to this function.

However, not all faucets are created equal, and you may discover some that are more equitable in terms of what they require of you and how they compensate you. Examine each site for its own merits before deciding whether the faucet in issue is worth your time and data.

Advantages of Using

• On a regular basis, you can claim free BTC.

• There is no requirement that you already have cryptocurrency.

• There isn't much technical knowledge required.

• To maximize revenue, many faucets might be used.

The following are some of the demerits of using bitcoin faucets:

• Dispense just little amounts of BTC at a time (typically a few cents).

• Many faucets have a minimum withdrawal barrier, which means you won't be able to withdraw your coins until you've earned enough.

• Require your data to be shared with third parties.

If you like the notion of earning free cryptocurrency but aren't convinced by the concept of faucets, as we'll show you in our next guide, there are lots of other options.