Bitcoin Forum

What do you think? I know there isn't strictly speaking, a right or wrong answer for this question since it's really a matter of opinion, but it's still something to think about. Back in the early days, faucets gave out whole bitcoins per day. Now that the price of Bitcoin has skyrocketed, nobody would argue in retrospect that these faucets weren't worth using.

In one of their exchanges (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r8iwt/satoshi_and_hal_finney_discuss_the_value_of/), Satoshi and Hal Finney discussed the maximum upper limit for the price of a single Bitcoin. Finney believed it was $10 million USD (or more specifically, the purchasing power of $10 million in 2009 US dollars):


Now, this is assuming that Bitcoin replaces the fiat currency of every single country in the world. I've also seen estimates of $1 million USD per Bitcoin if it manages to replace the fiat of a single large country or group of countries (e.g. the Eurozone), or $300,000 if it manages to attain a status equal to that of gold or silver.

So if you do the maths, a faucet like Freebitco.in pays out 300-400 satoshis per hour depending on the exchange rate. Most faucets pay a bit less than this, and some faucets might pay a bit more. But using the figure of 300 satoshis or 0.00000300 BTC, one gets the following calculation:

1 BTC = $10,000,000
10,000,000*0.00000300 = $30

So those 300 satoshis would be worth $30.

Or $30.00/hr

If you manage to complete 10 faucets an hour, then you would be making the equivalent of $300 per hour. Or roughly the equivalent of a team of surgeons or a single Fortune 500 CEO. If someone believes that Bitcoin will replace fiat, then it's hard to deny that getting the equivalent of a full-time job (or better yet, 10 full-time jobs) for doing essentially nothing isn't a good deal.

What do you think?

You'd still be better off getting a job and buying bitcoins with fiat in the same amount of time, unless you are somewhere in the world you literally earn 1c an hour

This is good advice. You're banking on bitcoin becoming worth a ridiculous amount which will probably never happen so you'd still be waisting your time. Find alternative ways to earn bitcoins or money then buy coins with the money you earned.

Still no.
If bitcoin will one day be worth 10 million, you will definitely regret why you have spent your precious time on getting 300 satoshi an hour on a faucet instead of getting 60000 satoshi a post in PD sig campaign.

I think theyre just a good way for complete beginners to get involved, see what bitcoin is about, pickup some satoshis, get access to the blockchain and to read it - who knows what their future worth is, but if youre a bored student then claiming a few satoshi in your worst class might not be the worst idea in the world even.

Faucet's dust will never be worth 30$/h simply because bitcoin value won't reach 10 millions.
I believe in bitcoins, but that price is too unrealistic in my opinion, but I hope I'm wrong :)

I think to have bitcoin would be good in whatever way you get it, but you may get bitcoins much faster by working or other methods. I mean, it's not like facuets takes all of your time either -  it's just a really slow method. you are selling your time for say 0.0001 BTC per day, which would be about 0.003 BTC per month. In a year you would get 0.036 BTC from a faucet. Given that bitcoin price would be at $1 million, this would be a lot of money- but I think the bitcoin price will go to 10.000$ or 100.000$, not 1 million.

 

The future bitcoin price doesn't really matter here.
If you can get ~0.01 btc an hour for working in McDonalds or you can get ~0.0001 an hour from faucet sites, no matter how high the bitcoin price will be, you will always be better off with working in McDonalds.

It's a bit ironic for you to say that considering that you don't have a PD sig.

OP seems to have a PD sig already.

That is incorrect. It should be equal to the total monetary base of the world, assuming it replaces all other currencies.


I agree.

Faucets are a waste of time. You are much better off buying $100 worth today than clicking on faucets for a year.

Are you sure about that? Hal Finney is a pretty well-known person. He even has his own Wikipedia article. Although his specialty is in cryptography and computer science rather than economics.

Even smart people make mistakes.

Think about it. Your wealth includes your house and car (assuming you own them). There are no dollars (or euros or yen) sitting in an account anywhere that represent the values of those assets.

It's important to consider that it would be quite hard to have the balls to hold until a Bitcoin is worth 1M$. This would take many years; will you truly be able to hold when it's worth 100x of what it's worth now at 60000$? And if you can't, at that price the current faucet output would still give quite less than the minimum wage.

Unless the exchange rate shot up to the millions within a day of you participating in the faucet, the answer is a very clear, "No."


If you're talking about the fiscal value of the time and effort, then it really isn't a matter of opinion.  The math is plain and simple, and it is clear that there are very few (if any) situations where faucets make any fiscal sense to participate in at all.

Now, if you take some odd pleasure from participating in faucets, then opinion comes into play, since only you can determine how much that pleasure is worth to you.


That was in the VERY early days when dust sized transactions with no fees would be quickly and easily confirmed.  Also during that time, it was much more difficult to acquire bitcoins in any other way (none of localbitcoins, bitstamp, btc-e, coinbase, bitsimple, etc existed).  Therefore your only three real choices were to either figure out how to mine the bitcoins, figure out how to participate in bitcoin-otc, or try a faucet.

Even then, if you had the technical know-how to participate in any of the available methods of mining or purchasing bitcoins, then those faucets that were giving away 1+ bitcoins still weren't worth it fiscally.


I think you are forgetting to compare your faucet option to the available alternatives.

3000 satoshis per hour is about $0.018 per hour or $0.43 per day if you could keep it up 24 hours a day continuously without interruption.

If you spent those same 24 hours a day collecting recyclable trash from the parks, roads, and neighborhoods  and sold it all to a recycling center, you'd earn more than $0.43 per day (heck you'd probably discover more than $0.43 per day in actual loose change on the ground in many areas).

You could then use that money that you acquired from your activities (and I'll bet you can find an activity somewhere that will pay more than $0.43 per day) to purchase bitcoins directly.  This would result in acquiring MORE THAN 3000 satoshis per day.  So the time you are wasting on faucets is costing you future profitability.

Imagine you could manage to find a way to earn $1 per day if you just didn't waste all your time on faucets.  Next imagine that the bitcoin exchange rate eventually reaches your predicted 10,000,000 per bitcoin.

This means that spending time on faucets is costing you $397.67 per hour.

Do you really get enough pleasure out of the faucet process to justify paying $397.67 per hour out of your own future pocket, just so you can participate?

Thats right sadly, faucets are waste of time

Hitting the faucet takes less than a second.  Sure, I can only go to freebitco.in once an hour, but I've spent a total of 2 mouse clicks of time in that hour.  How many faucets are there?  I really don't know the answer to that question, so I'm hoping someone can give a number.  Is there only 1?  Are there 10?  100?  Let's just say there are 10.  Now, I'm making 3000 Satoshi for about 10 seconds of my time per hour.

I'm pretty sure I can spare 10 seconds an hour... heck, I could even do that while wandering around collecting cans after I finished my shift at McDonalds :P.

Still better to spend time elsewhere to earn and buy coin directly.

Yeah, not worth holding faucet btc in hope it keeps going up for the next 30 years...

Usually in the time it takes me to get through most the faucets, I could have earned a few bucks on mturk already. Even a simple receipt hit for 5 cents can be done in 30 seconds, vs a faucet which maybe what? .001?

I don't think you can complete the whole process (going to freebitco.in, login your account, enter the captcha) in just a second.
It probably takes you like 10-20 seconds for just 1 site.

While there are dozens of faucets out there, most of them pays just a fraction of 100 satoshi per claim.

You would probably be scolded by the McDonalds manager for stop working 5 minutes every hour. :)

No as you'd make more selling services!

i think there is no more faucet if we reach that

I think OP meant that if we use faucet now, will we be wasting our time, not in the future.
I don't think it is really profitable even if it really reach that high. Even a simple low paying signature campaign can pay far more than that. It isn't possible for BTC to reach that value. In order for that to happen, we have to first stop Money laundering and Terrorist Financing. That is necessary since large adoption is required for that to happen. Government cannot allow BTC to become a legal tender because you can launder money and use it for terrorist financing. We must also convince people that BTC is more convenient than cold hard cash which cannot happen as you need a internet connection. People also think that BTC have security flaws, thus avoiding them.

Continuing to work and investing in bitcoins would be a lot more better than faucets in my opinion. Faucetting and hoping that bitcoin will keep raising in price is just assumption and to be fair doing things on assumption never really works out.

This is probably the best post in this that summarizes why faucets are bad.

I'd buy Bitcoins with money from a minimum-wage job as opposed to using faucets.

None of this faucet slaving stuff, it's not viable for much. Just good for literal experimentation.

If you are a newbie, a faucet might help get you introduced to bitcoins.
But otherwise, I just think they are a waste of time.

This is useless mental masturbation
Even if you believed that, faucets are a waste of time as you would be better off getting a good job and converting a fixed % of your take into btc every month

Thing is, it's not just that faucet payouts went down in fiat terms, it's that they became tied to ad revenue. Since that is so small -- and will stay so small -- return is going to be very limited. Just save up to buy a bitcoin, or half of one, and hold for the future IMO.

Take the change in your pocket and convert it to bitcoins, if you thing it will reach $10million.

People really need to realise that faucets will never be worth it. I understand the appeal of getting your first free coins but there are much easy ways as already mentioned in this thread.

But even making the assumption that the fiat conversion price might inflate 1000x fold, you would still be better off doing whatever you could to acquire the most Bitcoin per hour.  That is essentially the same as making the most fiat per hour.... and faucets pay less than trying to sell urine samples  :D

Are there any good online survey sites which would pay in Bitcoin?

What do you mean by good?

There are a few I believe but like faucets they're a complete waste of time and effort. Spend your time doing other things and you'll be better off for it. Seriously, would you really spend time filling out stuff for a few cents? I doubt it.

Survey sites are like those faucet, they don't usually pay high and the number of surveys should be quite low. They are either scams or pays very low. I haven't see any good survey sites, you can write reviews for BTC at the service section.

No, there arent any "good" survey or faucet sites. Take others advise here.

You're better off looking for change on the street and buying bitcoins with the found money. Faucets are a complete waste of time.

some people say they are waste of time, i say they are a useful waste of time as it helps understand the coins

Not really, most of them have very low payouts, they have limits of at least 0.0001. You are better to read about this and understand about everything before you start wasting your time for faucets, even a dollar equates to 10 times of your continuous fauceting for one hour. It is a better choice to know if the coin is suitable for you before deciding to participate in it.

oh the monetary value? no im talking about experimental money, its numbers isn't it! forward them onto Crypsy and mess about with the exchange, learn how it works and then try it with real money!  i made mistakes like forwarding coins to a website and loosing them due to some error.  But the value is peanuts yes! so what to be honest if i loose 10000 satoshi because of a pump dump!

It would actually be much less then $0.01 per hour using faucets today.

In the time that faucets gave out 1 BTC per day, BTC was trading at much lower levels. The amount you could earn per hour was about the same when you convert the BTC to fiat.

You cannot and should not assume that the price of BTC is going to rise when you accept payment in BTC, you need to use the current value. If you think the price will rise, then you should use fiat and/or other goods/services to buy bitcoin via an exchange or via trading.

How many new millionaires would pop outta nowhere if this happened? And how are we going to see even 1 million in our lifetimes?
I wish but my realistic big goal for the next 10 years or so is 10K. That would be pretty rad.

Good question, if im not wrong, i remember not long ago, faucets were giving 0.01 thats about 5 bucks today  :D

Yep, but not anymore. You're not gonna get faucets that pay in mBTC these days, that's the difference. It's all based on ad revenue these days.

Newbies gotta look elsewhere than faucets. (Hint hint, go get your free STR and sell them to me :))

coinlearn. They have pretty easy captcha and decent payment.


But I think the games and round still more effective. Not speaking about the marketplace.

The payment may be decent at first, but it will get to a terribly slow rate in the end. ;)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=435257.msg7804855#msg7804855

Nope, and others have already explained the reasons several times in this thread.

BTW, if bitcoin price reaches a million USD, it is very likely just because of a hyperinflation in USD.