Bitcoin Faucets: A Get Rich Quick Scheme?
By on The Capital
A faucet is basically the monocled-top-hat-wearing-tux-rocking name of a tap. Faucet, tap, same thing but different name, kind of like having twins (where you probably love one more than the other). At the end of the day, a faucet is a device that controls the flow of liquid or gas from a pipe or container.
So a Bitcoin faucet is a device (in this case a website(s)) that controls the flow of bitcoin to its users. It transfers free bitcoin to its users. Yeah, free bitcoins. You just sign up, watch advertisements, perform surveys, fill captchas, even press a very obvious ‘Roll’ button and et voila, you, the lucky user has now received some sweet sweet Bitcoin. Ka-ching from a faucet.
Now, why are these faucets so kind in giving away free bitcoin? Well, they know that to make any money on their platform, you have to be a dedicated user with a decent referral count. That gives them access to your and/or referrals’ data (basically what most websites do) which they can sell later to ad groups like Facebook and Google to give you targeted ads. Hell, many of the sites themselves run on ads and affiliate links. Additionally, while earning BTC might be easy, for withdrawing it to your wallet, you need a certain amount of Satoshi, and if you thought withdrawal was free, think again. There are fees. They are a business, not a non-profit organization. A business who call themselves faucets.
One of the first search ‘faucets’ was developed by a developer (duh) of the Bitcoin Foundation, Gavin Andresen. Launched in 2010, Gavin’s website gave away 5 BTC for every visitor who solved some captcha problems. Not some next-level crypto algorithm or some IQ busting question but a tried and trusted captcha. At that time 5 BTC was worth about 0.08 USD, but today 5 BTC is worth well over 45000 USD. All of that for solving a captcha. Why ‘think and grow rich’ when you can ‘type without thinking and grow rich’ eh?
However, it’s not that easy to grow rich now. Due to the extremely high value of Bitcoin and its much larger scale adoption, giving 5 BTC to every person who can read and type or can guess out which pictures have crosswalks, that’s just not feasible. Thus, most ‘faucets’ nowadays give rewards in what is known as Satoshis.
But what is a Satoshi?
A Satoshi is the smallest unit a BTC can be divided into. Named eponymously after the founder of the cryptocurrency, Satoshi Nakamoto, 1 Satoshi is equal to 100 millionth of a bitcoin.
In other words, 0.00000001 BTC is 1 satoshi.
People are usually happy with 1 followed by 8 zero’s. A 1 preceded by 8 zero’s is unfortunately not so fancy. And that’s why Bitcoin faucets are not a ‘type without thinking and grow rich’ scheme anymore. One of the most famous faucets, freebitco.in widely touts that you can ‘win up to 200 dollars an hour’. All you have to do is press a button. But the keyword here is ‘Up to’. You need to be extremely lucky to win such an amount because for the majority of the time you are going to win about 20 satoshis. That is approximately 0.002 USD.
At that rate, you would need months of dedicated effort to see any significant change to your BTC wallet. So sadly, this ‘faucet’ is not some never-ending tap of liquid gold ( digital gold in this case) and thus it’s not some get-rich-quick scheme.
But most get-rich-quick schemes are scams anyway right?
Originally published at http://thefirstsapien.blogspot.com on June 5, 2020.
