Bitcoin Forum

Mostly, newbies to Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency at large participate more in Airdrops as a way of adding more coins to their bags but often times, they fall victim to scammers and fake airdrops.

I personally have not been participating that much in it because a couple of it I tried was scam or they will end up not giving me. But I noticed some of them are real and people benefit from them.

So my question is HOW CAN ONE KNOW REAL AIRDROP that will pay?

Unless the project has legitimately good backing, you really can't know for sure. Hence why the strategy used to be just doing the 'shotgun' method where you get into as much airdrops as you can and just hope for the best. Airdrops has been pretty shitty for a while now though, projects has moved to airdropping tokens to their platform users and not social media spammers.

I have three points to make.

1. If newbies are participating more in airdrops, that means they are starting it wrong. You said they're falling victims to scammers and fakes. What do you expect? They're newbies.

2. Coming from a newbie, your question is probably the wrong question to ask. Perhaps the questions coming from a newbie should be: "What is Bitcoin?", "How does it work?", "What are its revolutionary features?", "Why is it superior to the rest of the altcoins?", "How come it became this successful?", and more probing questions as follow ups.

3. As new as you are, you have already noticed that newbies are the ones participating in airdrops. That's right. An interesting question, however, is that, why are veterans and old-timers and OGs not the ones highly populating airdrops? Is it because they have already found out more or less that participating in airdrops are not only a waste of time but also inviting unnecessary risks?

Let's clarify something first, the definition of an airdrop:
An airdrop is when a new project gives anyone its own coins for free. In other words all they are going to ask of you is your address and absolutely nothing else.

To answer your question now, you don't need to do much here. Just get their wallet, install it in a sandbox, generate an address and receive the free coins.

But for the past couple of years they are using the term "airdrop" wrong. When you have to sign up, give your Email address, post about the shitcoin on multiple platforms (advertise), do other kinds of work, ... then it no longer is an "airdrop" it is a job.
In which case you should not be paid in that coin anymore but instead you should ask to be paid in real money which is either fiat or bitcoin. To answer your question again, if they refused then it means it is not a good airdrop job.

There are two problems affecting airdrops hunting, one is how to identify the good projects and two is will they ever pay? Airdrop hunting depends on luck because even if you find out which one looks reliable you won't know if they will pay or not

Real paid airdrops is usually have the specific condition to receive just like have some amount of tokens of the wallet, or have several transaction with the wallet so only the qualified wallet could win the airdrops.
Bad airdrops or scam airdrops is usually are effortless about making the airdrops event, they will just collect our information from filling google forms or something like that.

Airdrops supposed to be free, but some people will demand for VIP fee, they are scammers. You will pay them but they will never give you any airdrop coins. The coin is free, you should never pay anything, only scammers will request you to pay.

Avoid given out your email and personal information. If you want to give out your email, then open new email strictly only for airdrops. Be careful of the email messages, phishing links can be sent to you that can contain malware link or phishing link that will demand you to enter your seed phrase and all the coins that have ever been sent to the addresses the seed phrase control will be stolen.

Do not reveal your seed phrase and/or private key to anyone or anything, and never click on phishing emails.

I'd rather try to get into as many of them if possible to save time trying to think which one is good and which one is bad. Of course, using your main wallet would be a suicide. Use a fake address or if the airdrop require some transactions then just prepare some funds for that. You might lose some money doing that, but it's still better than losing all of your money.

Or just don't focus on them at all.

The real ones are those that don't require you to do any free online marketing for you to receive their worthless coins. Do some research online and you'll discover that the airdrop that have given the most profit are those that rewarded their early adopters or those using their platforms. We have the defi exchanges airdropping their governance tokens and others airdropping coins for holding a specific token etc.

I haven't heard of those that required you to tweets, retweet etc been much of a success and benefiting the participants. Coinmarketcap has some airdrop ongoing every weekday and the tasks are just too much then when the tokens gets distributed, you get just few dollars. This are the airdrop that are a waste of time.

In 99% of the time, you will just be wasting your time participating in airdrops. Those days when "airdrops" were actually airdrops, are long gone. Check out pooya87's answer above for the reasons why.

NFT is the newest hype. Airdrops that could give you some NFTs could maybe be worth your time. One day, they might be worth something. Again, it depends on the requirements to receive them. Never perform KYC or share your private keys/seeds to receive an airdrop. Those are scams that will result in you losing your money. Even worse, your personal data could be stolen, sold, and abused.

Things that are good aren't usually given for free. Apply the same logic to airdrops.   

There's no way to verify that, you could consider airdrop is kind of giveaway which is there's no guarantee you'll got the reward. Just participate as much as you can since it's not hard and low effort to register an airdrop, it's a matter of time consuming.

To participate airdrop all you need is provide your address, if they ask money then it's 100% scam. It's worth to mention some airdrop will ask your KYC, you can consider does your identity are worth for couple bucks? If I were you I won't do that.

I would not recommend anyone to clear or pass KYC for an airdrop valued just $5 or $10. You identify is more valuable tahn that small amount. There are good airdrops that do not ask for KYC but most of the time they are based on a draw now a days. It is better to avoid them at this time as there are too many scams happening and when you do not have a guarantee that you will win.

For me a good airdrop is the one that dont distribute much, but have already tradable altcoin, have a working project and airdrops is aimed to introduce users with a project.

Bad airdrop is the one who aims just to increase projects user data base, asks to pass KYC, promise unreal token value, asks to do 100+ tasks to do (subscribe, like, join, invite, share and etc), has a competition base(first X user get something).

For me airdrop is like a demo of a project, a sample. Get our altcoin for free, use it, try what we offer, make your opinion. When new food product is promoted in a store, no one ask you first to call your friends and tell about it, do 10 pushups, leave your personal data to get updates, and only than taste new yogurt.

To be honest, there are hardly any airdrops that are really worthwhile these days. Most of them are simply garbage. That was different a few years ago. The really good airdrops today you get rather unannounced on platforms on which you are active for a long time. One example is the Uniswap airdrop. Everyone who has made a trade on Uniswap before has received tokens via airdrop. This airdrop had a value of almost $2000 at the time of the distribution, so it was distributed to people who did something they didn't know they would get for a big reward as an airdrop at some point in the future.

Airdrop are free coins and I consider Airdrop to be lucky coins. with a (10:1) note due to the fact that Real Airdrop are very rarely known to the public.
I want to tell a story based on experience.
I still remember when I first traded on DEX (Uniswap) in June 2020, I incurred gas costs which were disproportionate to the selling value of the coins but I did it anyway. long story short, someone quoted about UNI airdrop then I tried every wallet used at that time. well, unexpected surprise that my Wallet qualified and earned around 1200 UNI at that time because I used 3 different Wallet while trading there.

Recently I also got a surprise Airdrop from AQUA coin. AQUA coin is using the Stellar blockchain, the requirements are quite simple if you have traded using a Stellar Address before the beginning of 2021 then you are eligible to claim the airdrop. but the prize is not as big as the UNI airdrop  :)
You can see in my previous thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5366293.msg58210205#msg58210205), who know Your might get lucky.

Nowadays most airdrop have become scam so we having a hard time to deal with this if you are fond of joining anything that pops up. Now to answer your question, you can definitely identify them just by observing how the team handle the project. Check out for some community, maybe they just using bots or add members that's why their community is big. Does they have any real partnership with some good ones or not. Also check the quality of their website and some platform, if its just like a simple one that can be bought for $30 then likely you are dealing with a scam one.

My answer is simple - I ignore everything what is called airdrop. It's just waste of time. Maybe I have not enough experience with airdrops, but I think it's too difficult find valuable airdrop when there is so many scams. And even if it's not scam, it's likely that you'll get almost zero value tokens in the end. So, these things isn't worth your time IMO.
And @pooya87 said very well. Most of airdrops isn't airdrops actually nowadays. It's just bounty called in different words.

The only indicator you can see for a bad airdrop if they ask certain payments before you can join or they will ask your private key, but any of that which doesn't require those things is I think a good to join but you cannot expect to get compensated since not every drops will get a value only 1% of them is a gem so if you want to spot good ones better join on multiple airdrops but also make sure you paste your correct address and not your private key.

When I joined this forum in 2016, it was actually worth doing, because for a few minutes of your time, you had around 70% chance to get $5-50 worth of coins that could be easily dumped on an exchange for Bitcoin. But this stopped to be the case when shitcoins projects became streamlined and everything got maximized to boost the profits of creators and things like airdrops or bounties and other kinds of "free/easy money" have stopped to exist.

You must follow trusted projects or trusted managers that will increase chance that you join airdrop that will actually pay you later.

The bigger issue is most of airdrop does not have good value. It can be few cents or nothing because coins or tokens you receive from airdrop are useless.

Sometimes you can get luck with airdrop from successful project or just a scam project but successfully scam investors. In general, I don't advise you to focus on airdrop. Many better things you can do than airdrop.

I stopped in all of them, when one emailed me a phishing site to their fake MEW page, because they know that I was using MEW wallet. Good thing I smelled something fishy that time, because it is obviously off-putting when you visit the site aside from the fake domain name.
If the airdrop is too good to be true, then it probably is a scam.

It's really difficult to know a project that would do fulfil their promises and getting to know a legit project too tend to be more difficult this days because more and more projects keep popping up and the few genuine projects don't really last long anymore. I think if the airdrop is completely free then I wouldn't mind risking my time for it but if eventually it turns out a scam there is nothing to lose

In a simple answer, there is no proper way to detect 100% legit airdrop. Before participating in an airdrop you have to investigate the project. How they are potential and what is their product. If there is nothing potential and no real goal then most likely you are going to waste time there. Just keep in mind nothing is free in the world, they are collecting your personal details for marketing. Nowadays joining airdrop is just a waste of time I think. The token is even not worth of gas fee. Either project legit or scam you aren't going to get anything noticeable from the current airdrop. It's better to spend your time somewhere else.

Well I hardly participate in Airdrops these days, not after I have my wallet filled with spam my coins. The airdrop I do try participating in these days is the CMC airdrop which is quite a contest. Just pray to get lucky, once you're being selected as winner, You will be airdropped.

Since ICO tokens are very popular until now I rarely participate in Airdrops. As far as I know, Airdrop is purely free so I rarely investigate projects and their uses. The most important thing is a step that is not too complicated and certainly does not harm my wallet address. Moreover, if there is an aidrop who asks to pay, I will never follow it.

Anything that has been given as free will surely have not much value, in the end, the same goes for Airdrop. Gone are the days when Airdrop pays. these days Airdrop is full of shitty coins that end up becoming worthless. No need of hoping for better payment from Airdrop at all. The best thing to do is to avoid partaking in any of them

Well, I don't blame their innocent as they are still learning and experiencing how to be disappointed.

Yeah, 0/10 or 1/100. If you got lucky to find and participate in those projects, then you got your benefits but if not, that is just a waste fo time and frustration. That you don't you don't have to expect any from them so it will still be play of you get scam.

It mostly has a good offer and high price that it looks very interesting and good to be true. It was really hard to tell if that airdrop is legit or not, but you can find it later.

My dear. 90% of the Airdrops are fake. they utilized the opportunity to grow their social media platform. mostly, they will not pay or they might select few members from the list and pay. some times they will not pay and claimed they have paid when people asked them. airdrops are waste of time and resources. try buying a token and hold on to it. it will surly pay in the long run. For me i prefer to hold on to Ethereum.

Well to think of it, even outside crypto it happens.
Those fake giveaways where you do entries in a certain site and would like you to share their page, join their discord, or follow them in Twitter. Most of those just ended up being nothing and I have never heard someone yet that they got this certain item from a giveaway by just sharing or boosting their audience.
It also happens in Youtube, now that many Youtubers are just hungry for revenue, but they don't care about their audience at all.