Faucets, the Initial Mass Crypto Distribution Method
By reading some of the comments on my previous post, I realized enough of them came from people who haven't caught the golden years of faucets in the crypto space. There was a time when they were the main method of mass-distributing crypto, because for sure not many people had the technical abilities or the desire to become miners in the early days of bitcoin and its forks.
Better Crypto Distribution Methods Than Faucets
In the meantime, even though faucets themselves evolved from the "complete a captcha and click a button" simple model, better distribution mechanisms were invented.
We now have:
- staking rewards (instead of using a mining equipment)
- social media with a crypto-rewarding component (author and curation rewards)
- idle games (and not only idle ones)
- defi rewards, dividend payments, etc.
- airdrops
- etc.
They can all be considered better and more polished methods of distributing crypto rewards than faucets were (and are, to some extent). In many cases, they are safer too.
Faucets for Proof-of-Work (POW) Blockchains
I still believe faucets are a decent distribution method, maybe even the best for POW chains (bitcoin, litecoin, etc.). Of course, there are alternatives in this case too, but with wrapped tokens on other chains, not native ones. That isn't necessarily bad, because most of them should be pretty safe, but... they are not on the Bitcoin network. And we have seen how willing are many issuers of tokens on other networks to freeze, hold, or roll back transactions when they are "asked" to. But I guess this still beats a situation when you run into a scummy faucet owner, lol. And you will, if you start using them.
But looking back in history, there was a time when faucets were very powerful for distributing bitcoin and later, its forks.
First Faucets
The first faucet was created in 2010 by Gavin Andresen, the successor of Satoshi Nakamoto in building Bitcoin ("chief developer"), it was called "The Bitcoin Faucet" and gave 5 Bitcoin at every captcha completion+click. Nakamoto praised him for building it, and said he would have built it himself if no one did. It was closed after about 2 years. Source
What would you do for 5 Bitcoin today? More than a captcha filling and a click, I suppose. :-)
After The Bitcoin Faucet, 3 other major faucets followed, two of them still running to this day:
Cointiply is too heavy for my preference and I stopped using it years ago. But if you like all sorts of extra options that have been added to faucets over time, give it a try. You might like it.
I still use Freebitco.in daily. But I hate filling in captchas, and probably if I hadn't been premium there and not required to fill in the captcha I would have given up on it too. I include it in the category "idle games". I have a browser window opened with the idle games I play, and I open this there as well. What's one more click among the others?
How to earn with Faucets?
My friend @achim03 is very knowledgeable in this domain as he used to own more than one faucet script and faucet tops. And yet he doesn't anymore, he thinks there are better options now. He wrote about this a few times, and I dare make a classification of what he said was worth it in this space:
- owning a faucet
- promoting a faucet top / referrals
- user (generally not worth it)
And yet, why do I still use freebitco.in as a user?
- I am premium since it was introduced (no captcha, free spins daily, etc.)
- it only takes 1-2 seconds, when I do my other idle games
- I like bitcoin, and it's part of bitcoin's history
Is it worth it to start as a new user these days? As I said, there are probably better ways to earn online now. You are using one of them now, Hive (What Is Hive?). But if you want to turn back the clock and see crypto history still working, try them out. Unfortunately, not with the same rewards as back then... And if you venture into other faucets, beware that the rate of rug pulls is/was pretty high, with owners generally anonymous.
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The aspect of games is what I have not tried yet but I’m getting into it very soon
My schedule won’t allow me for now
Idle games don't take up much time, but they might need some time until you first understand each of them. Then, it's mostly auto-play. A few clicks a day.
But you seem focused on commenting, and that can be better for the content creation side of things on Hive.
Really, what you want to be in the faucet game is an affiliate marketer. Creating and maintaining profitability through your own faucet site is difficult, and being a user sucks. I became an affiliate for Freebitco.in, and by some miracle an avid gambler signed up using my link, made me 0.011 BTC then stopped. The results are encouraging, but as an amateur, I don't really know how to expand my referral network to get more gamblers under my wing. Got any tips?
Well, in the crypto space, freebitco.in is already well-established and most people familiar with faucets know it or have used it at some point. Newer people may not be familiar with it. Maybe targeting gamblers instead of faucet claimers would work? Many years ago, I did promote some faucets too, with poor results, the best of them when I promoted a page with my selected faucets, and later, on my own website, non-crypto related. But generally, I didn't have great results as an affiliate with faucets.
I missed the golden days of faucets, but I have been using freebitco.in for a few years at least. Like you, it's the only one I still use. I keep a higher balance than I probably should just so I can avoid doing captchas.
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Isn't that a premium benefit? That's what I remember... Maybe it's offered to people who have higher balances too, it makes sense. It's not like if you hold 0.01 BTC in there or whatever you are likely to bot it for a fraction of that.
It used to be if you held above 300,000 sat then you didn't have to do the captchas. I remember asking about that on the bitcointalk forum. They might have changed it to having to use premium now, I don't know. I traded a few BTC for enough FUN for the lowest level of premium a year ago, so I meet both requirements.
Ok, then I guess we both meet both criteria. I will probably meet both all the time because I want to have at least the minimum amount required at any time to have the interest going too.
To be fair I still use some of them myself. They are a great way to get some tokens for new projects etc. The biggest plus is when you can get enough referrals in as it creates a rather decent passive income. I'm glad I went hard in on Freebitco.in when it was first released that things paying out crazy!
So, you caught some of the golden days of faucets. Nice!
Being there when freebitco.in was launched probably worked out great over time. It took me a while to join it, even if I saw it promoted everywhere. So yeah, I missed the first BIG wave.
To be fair, I did build a good amount of refs in different faucets with a top I promoted back in the day, but unfortunately, most of them turned out to be inactive or soon became inactive.
Dang, I wonder if any of those people kept their bitcoin until now.
Thank you for sharing this faucet and bitcoin history. I didn't know a lot about these. If you don't mind me asking, how much does the freebitcoin give?
I think it depends on the tier of the country and maybe whether you are premium or not for the lowest earning amount. It makes sense, because they need to cover costs through advertising.
Anyway, many many zeros after the decimal point, lol. Unless you are very lucky (I was a few times, but never the top reward). And as a premium, you earn a decent amount of sats through the daily free spins. Plus, they have decent rewards (compared to minimum hourly ones) attached to their emails, and they send at least one daily.
That's interesting. They have more than just the one faucet; you can earn in other ways as well. I have been doing rollercoin, which can be a faucet depending on how you look at it, but I don't know if it's worth haha.
I don't know. Considering the minimal amount of time spent (in my case), the expected growing price of bitcoin, and the extra interest, every little bit counts.
By the way, just like on INLEO, the ad revenue is in USD, and you get fewer sats in bull markets and more in bear markets.
Gotcha, thanks.
It's kind of crazy to see how things moved from faucets. I like the idle games aspect. A small upfront investment and you earn. However, that earning does drop over time though because the tokens tend to drop in price.
Yes, that's a game economy issue most idle games haven't figured out yet. Asking people to pay more often probably reduces the pool of players who can handle it, even if it makes the economy more sustainable.
The faucet time was the wild west of crypto. It was great for a time and I enjoyed running my faucets and coming up with ideas how to increase my income from them. I remember there was a time when I claimed 3000 satoshis every hour from one faucet. I actually still claim from one faucet or two mainly because I have a lot of referrals there.
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I liked your stories about the time you ran your faucets. It's a piece of crypto history. And to me, in some cases, it still is. Just like Web 1 still coexists with Web 2 and Web 3. One just has to be careful and realize that in most cases, at the user level, without active referrals, there are far more rewarding options nowadays.
Just like that there are many ways to use crypto to profit from crypto but one should get knowledge about all these things first otherwise one will only do loss in this industry.
That is true. And maybe equally important to learning is researching, planning, and being disciplined, which many lack in the crypto space.
Do people still make use of faucet in this our contemporary age. In fact I used to wonder what's the difference between faucet and airdrop back then
Airdrops were invented much later than faucets. Airdrops are made directly into the beneficiary account, while faucet earnings remain with the faucet until you withdraw them.
The difference is airdrops follow a schedule and generally end at some point, while faucets can be used at any time. In most cases, airdrops are much more valuable than what you can earn through faucets, unless you have many active referrals in a faucet.
Faucet is still good. The issue is just that they were not able to regulate it then when it comes out
I will stick with Hive @gadrian. Thanks for the update on "Faucets, the Initial Mass Crypto Distribution Method" Have a great week! Barb !BBH !CTP #ctp
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