Topic: In 2015, faucets are bad for bitcoin - page 30. (Read 25956 times)

Yes, you really need a lot of referrals, from my experience, thousands to make it worthwhile.

Here's a topic I found some time ago: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/who-said-you-cant-make-money-with-faucets-635185

I first started seriously getting into BTC in early 2014 when the price of BTC was much higher and adoption was similar to today. Faucets did help me understand the very basics and even after browsing posts here and reading introductory articles, it's still a useful experience to get to know and understand how to receive payments, set up your first wallet, copy and paste your BTC address, go on Blockchain.info to see your coins come into your address and watching the confirmations go up, etc.

I once did some calculations a while ago and found out that a typical faucet that is used typically (i.e. no fancy bots or anything) will earn about 10-20 cents per week. Even before I did the calculations, I knew that I wasn't going to be getting rich off faucets so after I became familiar with Bitcoin and how it works, I signed up on LocalBitcoins and made my first small BTC purchase there.


Many exchanges have minimum deposit limits and they tend to be higher for international users. Sellers on LocalBitcoins usually have minimum deposit limits too. e.g. the only seller in my country who is online right now has a limit of $50 although there is another seller who has a $20 limit but he's not online right now.


I once heard somewhere that having lots of referrals is pretty much the only way to get a nice income from a faucet site (other than being the owner of a large faucet site).

No, he isn't. He rightly think that ppl should do something for getting paid. What he missed is the fact that ppl actually generating money for faucet owners, by visiting those sites and then they get paid for doing so. Certinly I can't rule out that he's just has the same strictly elitist attitude as Mircea Popescu .

before i started my own faucet, i spoke to the owners of the most popular ones... let put it this way, one of them said its more of an experiment and gets a kick out of it, he isn't getting rich.  My own faucet is helping me cover my hosting fees at present to be honest, which is great but I still got to rely on my day job.

I started bitcoin learning with faucet money, pumping that back into CEX and then experimenting with loosing it with GHS and exchanging.. then made some bad transfers and lost money... luckily i lost small money which really came from the faucets, so i didnt care too much

Are you crazy ?

Actually in most cases ppl not getting paid for "doing nothing sitting in your home". They are watching big bunch of adds every time they go to a faucet site, therefore generating revenue for the faucet owner.

Well, you can make money with faucets, by running faucet websites, or by advertising them and collect referral commission, if you have an interested audience and big enough you can make good money from faucets.

And kill the ponzi's and dicegames, more time and btc are lost there than on any faucet. Kill Candy Crush, Farm games  and all other time wasting shit as well in 2015, they do not even give pennies but cost you.

I think if anything is bad, for bitcoin or just for being bad in general Faucets should not be your first concern!

Exactly, and they would be better of to just buy some bits for a few dollars to experiment with it.

It was always like that, the first faucet made by Gavin paid 1 bitcoin per dispense, at the time that was like half a cent of a dollar.

Meh, nobody can really expect to make anything from faucets anymore. They're mainly to let new people mess around with tiny amounts of bitcoin so they can get an idea of how it works

Wrong !!! There are faucets in FIAT world as well. They are called PTC site.

Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paid_to_click

I don't even understand why we still talk about faucets in 2015. I wouldn't even use them if I would be a newbie.

I have used some faucets in my time, but they all offer less than one cents worth of Bitcoin every few hours.

I played the coin flapper game for a while too, and thought it had potential to get me some real bitcoins, but then I realised that even that would be about 30k satoshi a day, which is nothing. 
It is very cheap advertising that no one would go for if it were in fiat currency, it shouldn't be encouraged, but for different reasons to those you give..

People should be free to do whatever they want/like to do.

If people want to spend their time with faucets, so be it.

Though faucets wouldn't help you gain or even accumulate relevant money, it still is a good way on familiarizing yourself on the basic concepts of bitcoin. Having experience being paid by bitcoin is a first step of adoption. Interest may soon follow.

If interest grows, then it is very likely that the user will soon adopt the concepts and therefore use it in the future.

Yup. And having dust inputs and outputs on your wallets may cause a lot of problems, especially within the fees.

New potential users of BTC need a way to get their hands on some BTC, even if it is pennies or less.
Not only will it introduce them to learn and test out how wallets, addresses, private keys, transactions, and etc work,
but it will allow them to participate and explore BTCs potential in a safe, non-scammy, or potentially dangerous (localbitcoins meetup) way.
One of the problems with adoption is that average people have a hard time getting their hands on it easily.

Faucets, I believe, are still an important factor in adoption.
Faucets will always exist (even around 2140) until/unless Governments consider them money transmitters or gambling, IMO.

No sane person expects to get rich from faucets. They are wasting their time if they sit at the screen all day gathering dust from faucets. Faucets are not bad for bitcoin at all. New comers can get first hand experience on making small transactions and they can afford to make mistakes. It is a good starting lesson for any new bitcoin user.

Do you realize how little BTC faucets give you? It takes weeks to have any amount to spend on something. I guess it's as wasteful as walking around all day dropping pennies on the ground because most people don't have the patience to accumulate enough bitcoin to do anything with so it ends up sitting in a wallet in < $1 balances.

The gambling component of faucets often allows the BTC to go back to the faucet user and then the facets ads are viewed at the same time (which is the real business faucets are in, advertising.)