Are faucets profitable and worth it?

26/10/2020 | Categories: Bitcoin Guides | Published by: csmiami | Last updated: 01/04/2022

Most likely, this debate has been going on since the first faucet site was created: Are faucets profitable? The short answer, in October 2020 is “NO”. The long answer; is “NOOOOOOOOOOO”.

Jokes aside, no, faucets definitely are not profitable in 2020…. BUT (yeah, there is always something) there is no universal truth about this. What do we mean by that? Well, like many bitcoin newcomers, we joined this world to earn money and at that time, faucets seemed like the fastest options to us. At the time, the BTC price was somewhere around 600USD, and well, you could earn some satoshis for doing nothing, but they were mostly “dust”. Fast forward a year and a half, and see how the BTC price skyrockets; and those “dust” satoshis are now worth something. Are we contradicting ourselves with this short trip back the memory lane? We hope not. Back when BTC was at 600USD, 0,001 USD was something around 150 satoshis; now, it’s somewhere closer to 5 satoshis. Is another bull run like the one in 2018 possible? Definitely; but the closer 1 satoshi gets to 1 cent, the less you are going to earn, and the less profitable it will be.

There is another factor to weigh in when considering profitability, but that is completely dependent on each users’ personal situation. A person from a country that has some very devalued fiat currency (due to over-inflation) and, if say we manage to earn 2 USD/day, we may not think that amount is worth our time and effort (being us from a country with a stable fiat currency), but for a person from any country with a crashed economy, 2 USD could be the means to live for a whole week (this may be an over-exaggeration, but we think the point is made clear).

Now that the profitability has been explained, in a very simplified way, we can get to analyze some of the most common faucet types and go through some examples and exceptions. We can add PTC (pay to click) sites to the faucet list, because the time waste is pretty much the same, if not more. The list goes as follows:

Websites that pay for “playing” a game
Websites that pay you for watching ads
Websites that pay you for using the site
Websites that pay you to solve captchas

Getting paid for playing a game

Yes, you read right. There are some faucets that pay you to play a game on their site, but don’t expect any triple-A game or even your average indie game. These sites usually operate on browser games that are not very smooth, to say the least. 2 easy examples we can think of (and we don’t mean to make them a free promotion) would be LWOS 3D Chicken Island and Crypto Mining Game. These two are some very different games, and they are definitely not your average indie game.

On the first one, you are literally a chicken, and your aim is to get as many balls as possible. Each ball has a different color, and the values and spawn rate vary according to each color. There are different scenarios/maps, and each one has some custom rules or objectives. There are also some bonus hours and matches. And we forgot to say; everything is made out of pixels, as you can see in the screenshot. To prevent satoshis from getting stuck in inactive accounts, the balances of inactive accounts are removed, so this game requires quite some dedication. We will admit that for some entertaining games every now and then, it’s rather fun. But the low-quality graphics and the poor performance make it quite hard to enjoy in the long term, and the amount of satoshis you can earn on every game is pretty small. Not only that; but there are also some restrictions in place to prevent people from playing 24/7 and abusing the system.

The second example, Crypto Mining Game, is quite different from the chicken island in many ways. In this game, you are a “miner” that explores a map in turns. Each move consumes energy, you can earn different cryptocurrencies while exploring, and there are some more mechanics behind this game. For example, you can unlock certain boosts to your production, restore energy, gain experience and level up, etc. Compared to LWOS, you earn less of the coins you have chosen, but you earn them in a passive way. Say, you do a task and “mine” LTC for an hour. You don’t have to do anything else during that hour because the game will be “mining” for you, but the amount you will be getting is so low, you have to spend a lot of time in order to level up the production capacity up to a point in which it’s actually profitable to use the site.

There is a reason we have chosen these two examples in particular: they are the same kind of faucet, but work in such a different way you may think they are not even related. One lets you play “for free”, the other one makes you watch and browse MANY ads and pop-ups, one pays in satoshis, the other one in fractions of satoshis or some other “established” coins, one is active (you move the chicken and collect the coins) whereas the other is more passive (you get the “miner” running and can leave it there producing). Both of them require a ridiculous amount of time if you want to see any “dust”, and thus, they are a complete waste of time for any country that has a stable economy.

Websites that pay you to watch ads

The concept behind this is rather simple: someone (a company or an individual) pays the platform an amount for it to show their link X times. The platform creates an ad an “earner” can click and see; if they do it and solve a captcha (usually), they get paid a number of satoshis. The main reason these kinds of websites are a waste of time is the number of satoshis you might be able to earn each day. The last time we checked BTCclicks, they were paying something close to 7 satoshis for watching a 10 second ad. Of course, the longer the ad, the more you get paid. Also, last time we checked that same site, we could barely get more than 12 ads on a single day, so that would make us… 84 satoshi richer after staying 24 hours checking the site regularly. The minimum withdrawal threshold was close to 20.000 satoshis; so doing the math…. It would take 238 days for you to earn 20.000 satoshis, which at the current price are worth a fortune of 2,4USD. After almost a year of daily logins. Of course, you could always pay a “premium” service, which would get you referrals, more ads, and more satoshi per seen ad. We are aware we are currently talking about a single serving of the hundreds there could be out there on the internet, but we don’t think rates vary too much, and at least we know that this site pays; which is another reason for saying that faucets are not worth the time: you are going in blind, you don’t know if you are going to get paid, or if the site is going to disappear overnight.

Websites that pay you for using their site

These ones are very closely related to the ones that pay for watching ads, but they offer “free” bitcoin (or an altcoin), and are usually full of ads. Spoiler alert: they don’t work if you use any kind of ad blocking software. There are many sites of this kind out there, many work, and many are simply scams. The Moon faucet group (MoonBTC, MoonDoge, etc) is something that comes to our mind as a site that has been active for a really long time, does indeed pay, but is flooded with ads and pays a ridiculous amount each time you click the “get free coins” button. Each faucet has different rules, so there’s no real standard out there as to how you can use a faucet (and besides, you shouldn’t because you are wasting your time). Time has also shown us scam sites that were not flooded with spam, and they mostly followed the same structure: you had some kind of “building” for free and it produced satoshis. You could then withdraw those satoshis or re-invest them. Some let you withdraw when you reached the minimum threshold, but those were very few, and most asked for a deposit in order to “unlock” the account or withdrawal features. Those are of course scams. There is one exception tough, one site we would really (and sometimes still do) recommend, but let’s go see the last kind of time-wasting faucet system.

Websites that pay you to solve captchas

Completely Automated Public Turing to tell Computers and Humans Apart. That’s what captcha stands for. It’s a means to prevent bots from using certain sites, but of course, like every software, it can be bypassed. We are not really techy guys, so we don’t really know the magic behind the screen, but our basic understanding of the matter is that a site pays users to solve captchas, store all the results, and later on sell them to bot armies so that they can access to those “forbidden” sites. Of course, if you decide to join one of these sites, you will of course be paid to solve the captchas, but after an 8 hour “shift”, you will have almost the same amount of money you started the day with.

If you still want to go ahead and lose your time, be our guest, join any of these kinds of faucet sites, but there is of course one exception; one site that has managed to survive for more than 7 years, and has reinvented itself many times (no, they are not paying us to write this about them).

The exception

As already mentioned a couple of times, there is actually a faucet site we would recommend, however, it stopped being “only” a faucet a long time ago and is some kind of faucet-casino-bookie-lottery. We guess it’s pretty obvious by now, but we are talking about Freebitco.in. This website was born many years ago as a bitcoin faucet, and during its 7 years has been adding new features constantly. They first added a Hi-Lo dice game, to then add some reward point system, lottery, etc. There are many things that can be said about this site; both good and bad, but they are really doing something the right way when they have already given 2 Lambos to different lottery winners. Just crazy. Besides, their referral system is pretty ambitious, and lets you earn generous amounts for every operation your referees make on-site (free roll, dice rolls, interests earned, etc). we could go into more in-depth writing about this website alone, explaining what every single tab is for, but that was not the point of this article. Besides, ONLY using Freebitco.in as a faucet site is a waste of time too.

Go to Freebitco.in now Go to Freebitco.in now

So after going through this article, we really hope you have learned something today; it’s usually a pity to see so many newbies come into Bitcoin just to make a quick buck, and end up either scammed or burnt out because they are wasting their time on some “easy/free money”