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.