A bitcoin faucet is a website where a user receives a small amount of bitcoin for a simple action. It can be watching an advertisement, solving a captcha, or completing a simple online game. These are specialized advertising sites that are free to use, but sometimes require a simple registration procedure. Most often, it is enough to enter an email address and a bitcoin wallet address to register.
The idea and purpose of bitcoin faucets
The idea of bitcoin faucets was first proposed in 2010 by the American software developer Gavin Andresen as a tool for promoting bitcoin to the general public. Since then, the main purpose of creating bitcoin faucets has changed: faucet owners now use them to make money by placing ads. However, they still serve an informational and advertising function.
What you really want is for people to naturally receive bitcoins as part of their salary or for any other activity so that they can use and spend them. It’s much better if the bitcoin economy is an autonomous process,” says Gavin Andresen, a leading software developer and creator of the first bitcoin faucet.
How do bitcoin faucets work?
Here’s how bitcoin faucets work:
- The crane owner places advertisements on the site in the form of videos or banners. He then promotes the faucet by posting links on forums, websites, and blogs;
- People visit the bitcoin faucet and perform certain actions (go to advertisers’ websites, enter a captcha, watch a video, etc.);
- Upon completion of the required action, the user is paid a small amount of satoshi (the smallest unit of bitcoin, equivalent to 1/100th of a millionth of BTC). After accumulating a certain minimum amount, the user can withdraw it to his or her bitcoin wallet.
The amount of reward paid for performing the required action varies from crane to crane and depends on
- complexity of the action: the more complex the activity, the higher the reward;
- frequency of the action: the more often you can repeat the action, the lower the reward.
Contrary to first impressions, creating your own bitcoin faucet is not an easy task. It requires IT skills and the payment of the costs of promoting the faucet and paying users. The competition is also quite high in this business.
If you want to try to make some money as a bitcoin faucet user, just follow these simple steps:
- Register on the crane’s website. You don’t need to enter any personal data, as most websites ask for your email address (if they ask you to enter personal data, it is a warning sign);
- Enter your bitcoin wallet address;
- Complete an action for a reward: enter a captcha, watch a video, or click on a banner;
- Receive the satoshi. To credit coins to your account, click the Get button (or Get Reward, Reward, etc.);
- Repeat the action after the timeout;
- Once you have a certain amount of cryptocurrency in your account, you can withdraw it to your external cryptocurrency wallet.
Security
The risks of using bitcoin faucets are quite low. In the worst case, the user will lose only the money earned but not the money withdrawn. In this case, the investment was time.
Some fraudulent websites require deposits under the pretext of paying a withdrawal fee. At the same time, they claim that the money will be returned along with the withdrawn satoshi. The website owner blocks the user after making a deposit, and the user does not receive the earned coins or loses the deposited amount.