For the last couple of days I’ve been playing with a few of these BitCoin “faucet” sites.
What is a BitCoin faucet site you might ask? Well … its a retched hive of scum and villainy!
Ok, Star Wars quotes aside, they are sites where you go and perform various tasks for a small amount of “free” BitCoin … some hand out free BTC hourly, some every day and some if you click through a buch of ads… kind of like a faucet for money to trickle in! Sounds decent enough, right? Well …. not exactly.
There is no such thing as free money (or BitCoin as the case may be).
Word of warning: There are a lot of scammers on the internet, the sites I have listed in this blog article may lead you into areas of the internet where spyware, adware, viruses, phishing attempts and the like may exist. Browse at your own risk! (I do not recommend you visit any of these faucet sites anyway. Read the rest of this article to find out why.)
Lets look at the payout on one of these faucet sites. http://freebitco.in/ is one of the more popular faucet sites I have seen. You can get free BitCoins every hour on a random number generator that spits out a number between 1 and 10,000. This often pays out a minuscule amount of coin (near 0.00000400 BTC) but has a chance at a larger amount if you roll a number higher than 9885. At 10000 you actually would get about 0.4BTC which isn’t bad at all, but at 1:10000 odds for each roll, it’s not very likely that you’ll ever see it.
Why is this so bad?
Ok, I admit it’s not terrible, but it is a large waste of time in my opinion simply because of what BitCoins are actually worth in real money. As stated, most of these site payout very small amounts. In fact, they usually give you BTC in the form of uBTC, which is 100000th of an actual BitCoin. Some of these sites even give you smaller amounts
BitCoin denominations:
There are 3 main sub-denominations of a BTC.
mBTC = 0.001 BTC or 1000mBTC = 1 BTC
uBTC = 0.000001 BTC or 1000000 uBTC = 1 BTC
Satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC or 100000000 Satoshi = 1 BTC
As you can see, these are very very small fractions of a BitCoin … and that’s what these sites are actually giving you. Payouts in uBTC or Satoshi.
On another site (bitvisitor.com) they have some of the highest payouts for watching advertising that I’ve seen (usually 0.5 – 1.6 uBTC). I have been able to amass about 30uBTC browsing off and on with this site (they let you cash in at 100 uBTC).
Ok, so what’s 100 uBTC actually worth?
Right now, 1 BTC = $495 CAD … great! … wait a minute… so the 100uBTC I spent a couple hours viewing ads for is only worth $0.0495 CAD … that’s 5 cents! I spent hours doing this for a “free” 5 pennies! This is the issue … you’re wasting your time for an amount of BTC that’s worth a fraction of a penny.
And, here’s another catch….
The sites that actually give you a tangible amount (and i’m still talking pennies worth in the real world) usually won’t let you “cash in” and take it to your own wallet until you have a sizeable amount of coin. They collect the money from advertisers then set the cash out bar so high, that you would never reach it and be able to take home your coin from the site. You usually get bored and never visit the site again after collecting a small amount. In the mean time, they get to hold on to it and use it for their own purposes… eventually even closing your account and taking it for their own as unclaimed. (Sounds vaguely like a modified superman 3 scam).
Actually, there is some money to be made…
There are conditions though… You must either own a botnet and be able to program several rolls on several computers/IPs at once, or have a large network of friends who have nothing better to do than make you money (and not much for themselves). That’s right, I’m talking about the pyramid type scheme called referrals. Most of these sites “double” the rewards on referrals … but unless you can take advantage (and that’s what these “faucet” listing sites do to draw you in), then it’s not worth it. Unless you can get lots and lots of people using your referral code, you’ll never see so much as a full 1 BTC.
Final Answer
My recommendation, stay away from these sites … they’re simply not worth it at all.
