Here you will learn what a bitcoin faucet is and how to exploit this idea using the top five faucets for 2018. If you are wondering how bitcoin can become real dollars, I go through different options to buy products online using bitcoin and exchange them into real hard cash straight into your bank account or a debit card.
Bitcoin Faucet
What Is a Bitcoin Faucet?
A bitcoin faucet is a reward system in which users participating in the program get small amounts of bitcoins known as Satoshi’s, which is the equivalent of cents or pennies of a full bitcoin (a hundredth of a million BTC). Users get rewarded with Satoshis for performing different tasks in a website or app, usually for filling out a captcha but most recently for playing online games.
How Much Bitcoin Can You Expect to Make?
The typical reward per action is not much. It usually takes a a long time to accumulate enough bitcoin to be worthwhile. Realistic average terms would be around $1 USD per day.
The average payout is very random depending on the faucet. Faucets usually make overly optimistic claims. Nevertheless, some of the most popular faucets have a random large payout reward for seniority, referrals commissions, and large payouts if you defeat a big boss.
How Does a Bitcoin Faucet Make Money?
Faucets make their revenue the same way Hubpages.com makes theirs, by sharing its advertisement proceedings with the users that are generating the content. Since advertisers usually pay per page impression and conversions (clicks), the faucet manager will divide the income with the user for a specific task. The ultimate goal is to keep users coming back and spending as much time as possible navigating the content to gain ad exposure.
How to Claim the Bitcoin
While you can see your balance of Satoshis, a faucet project will not release your payment until you have reached a certain minimum amount to process payment.
These will be transferred to your bitcoin wallet. From then on you need to exchange your cryptocurrency in a bitcoin exchange for hard cash or buy products online with your bitcoin. Buying products can be a lower-fee solution as you can later sell them for USD without having to pay the exchange fees.
Are Bitcoin Faucets Scams?
The revenue scheme in itself is not a scam. But since the creation of bitcoin faucets by Gavin Andresen in 2010, many fishy-looking projects have appeared out of nowhere to offer their services. Since bitcoin is not a regulated currency, transactions occur anonymously; there is nothing from stopping online faucets from never paying its users.
These types of schemes usually default at some point because they are too under-capitalized to pay all users; remember Bubblews.com? Since the advertisement exposure is not receiving quality prospects, those programs tend to stop running on bitcoin faucets.
Another risk faucets undertake are hackers that steal bitcoins by gaming the system, since bitcoin transactions are irreversible it makes it hard to protect against hackers.
Nonetheless, there are some reputable bitcoin faucets that have been in the market for a long time and have a large user base.
Top 5 Bitcoin Faucets
A recommendation before you join a certain faucet: shut down your ad blocker or once you claim your earnings you might not be paid. The whole system works based on ads, if you don’t watch them, no pay! And nobody tells you this at the beginning, only when you make a claim.
- Robot Coin
Payout: 1,000,000 satoshi plus all earnings during the game once completed.
Earn bitcoins from destroying robots. Just like a game, you get harder robots as you advance, and the final boss fight will award 1,000,000 satoshi. When the game is completed you restart from level 1, which is kind of a bummer game-wise. It is owned by Fun Coin Games who also manage Wonderland Coin and Monster Coin Game, same modus operandi for these faucets. All pay for referrals.
- Bitcoin Aliens
Average Payout: 4,300 satoshis per hour.
One of the most entertaining of faucets and decent in payout, here you won’t have to complete surveys or fill in capthchas, instead you get to kill aliens. Each kill accrues a payment, so you get paid to play. This is number one because having fun while earning money is sometimes easier that earning a lot more for pointless tasks.
Bitcoin Aliens funds its enterprise with CoinAd.com banner advertising. Sponsors are other bitcoin merchants like bitcoin casinos and altcoin ICO’s.
As of December 06 of 2017 Bitcoinaliens.com is up and running.
- Bonus Bitcoin
Average Payout: 40,000 satoshis per hour.
As mentioned, one of the problems with faucets is poor capitalization; the revenue from ads is small and they usually run out of liquidity to pay their users on time. Bonus Bitcoin eliminates this risk by grouping together many faucets together under one brand.
What’s even more special about it, is it doesn´t restrict users to a limit of time spent earning bitcoins. Faucets force you to wait some time, 10 to 15 minutes, before repeating a task; here you can complete the limit on one faucet and then move on to the next.
As of December 06 of 2017 Bonus Bitcoin is up and running, although it took around 30 seconds to load.
- Bitcoinker
As old as Bitcoin Zebra but it has changed owner several times. High payouts that get larger the more time you have spend on the site (known as seniority payments) and great referral commissions.
As of December 06 of 2017 Bitcoinker is up and running.
- Moon Bitcoin
Payout: 5,000 satoshi every 45 minutes.
Just a simple “look at ads” faucet, but one that is well known in the community with high payouts. You can claim your bitcoins at any time. A warning: I got a Trojan infection warning from my antivirus when I visited the site. Still, Moon Bitcoin is one of the most-mentioned faucets out there.
Reputable Faucets that Have Expired
Bitcoin Zebra
Average Payout: 3,000 satoshi per hour.
A very old faucet that survived for quite some time until July 2016 when it stopped posting payment updates on Twitter. Users earned by feed a zebra every few minutes. Payments were processed to Faucetbox or to your Xapo wallet. The domain bitcoinzebra.com no longer works and they became a ghost online, no news about the disappearance.
Where to Use Your Earned Bitcoins?
There is always the option of exchanging your bitcoins to a hard currency like USD or EUR, but there are mining fees involved as well as taxes to be paid if you are in the US. You will need a wallet and an exchange service.
A bitcoin wallet is a software you can download to your computer or phone, its your own personal bank. You can also use cloud stored wallets, and some of the main services that will be reviewed include one.
An exchange is a website were you can exchange your bitcoins for currency, you enter your wallet's key to the exchange to connect it to the service, send bitcoins and receive USD.
A better way of spending your bitcoins is buy online purchases, or other services like sports betting or bitcoin casinos.