Newbie question regarding the usage of Bitcoin address on multiple faucets

[ethantaylor]

@Machine Funk,

Because some other members seem to think being tracked can result in privacy issues:

Actually, you can use an address multiple times without real danger. But, people easily could track your bitcoin movement if you use your bitcoin address many times.

Agree, the privacy reasons are more relevant for traders rather than faucet users.

The reason behind not recommending the single address for faucets is the "dust transactions" (a very small BTC payments). So after some time your BTC address would contain a lot of small transactions and when you decide to move them you will be surprised with a very high transaction fee. (this was issue in the past when most faucets were sending the payments directly to your wallet ... but using micropayment platforms like faucethub will minimize it).

You can safely use single address for faucethub (as the hub will unite your small rewards and send them to you in bigger chunks) ... still not optimal but better.

[pooya87]

@pooya87,

Thank you. Regarding the high fee issue, my understanding might not be very accurate because I'm still quite new to this field, but faucet caches such as ePay.info or Faucethub.io have solved the high fee issue, haven't they?

The fee is determined by the network not by users. what these services do is that they pay their users in bulk and after they reach a certain amount. and that makes the transaction a little smaller (in size byte-wise) than sending it one by one. so they pay a little less fee in total.

the problem for you as a receiver still stands. you still are going to have many Unspent Transaction Outputs (payments you received) and when spending them you will end up with a big transaction size and be forced to pay a higher fee if you wanted a fast confirmation.

Could you please help checking if my understanding below is correct?

If I want to use a faucet which asks me to register on Faucethub.io and to link a Bitcoin address, the steps I will have to do are:
1. Get a Bitcoin address from Blockchain.info.
2. Use that address to register on Faucethub.io.
3. Submit that address to that faucet.
4. Forget about the address thing and keep using the same address on that faucet forever.

yes, not a good idea because you are wasting your time on a faucet but correct

Because some other members seem to think being tracked can result in privacy issues:

doesn't matter what others say, do YOU care if someone sees your address is receiving payments from faucets?

[Myfe]

Welcome to our world! Which bitcoin faucets did you join?

I finally joined my first Bitcoin faucet. Now I'm ready to join my second Bitcoin faucet in order to increase my total income from Bitcon faucets.

My first Bitcoin faucet asked me for my Bitcoin address in order to remember me as well as to pay me (when I can cash out) so I submitted a Bitcoin address which Blockchain.info generated for me.

Now the second Bitcoin faucet I'm ready to join asks me to register on Faucethub.io first and link a Bitcoin address. And when I'm trying to register on Faucethub.io, Faucethub.io asks me for a Bitcoin address, too.

I'm confused. Should I use the Bitcoin address I got from Blockchain.info to register on Faucethub.io?

[ethantaylor]

@pooya87,

Since those faucet caches pay their users in bulk and make transaction smaller, why does I spend bulk income result in big transaction? Aren't both processing bulk Bitcoin?

And thank you for reviewing my steps.


@Myfe,

Thank you! My very first faucet is DailyFreeBits.com. But I found it is doubtful because it is not letting me cash out. And its owner is also a Bitcointalk.org member. I had given that website up. I'm going to try FaucetBoy.xyz, MoonBit.co.in, and ChronoX.co.in.

UPDATE on April 10: The owner of DailyFreeBits.com had resolved the issue and I had received my payment successfully.

[pooya87]

@pooya87,

Since those faucet caches pay their users in bulk and make transaction smaller, why does I spend bulk income result in big transaction? Aren't both processing bulk Bitcoin?

And thank you for reviewing my steps.

it is like this (examples taken from last block mined):
https://blockchain.info/tx/4f569395fbf4938044976fc239cece243d74e0f56105d91d0bf524e721b9f93b?show_adv=true
this is similar to a payment to multiple users/addresses/keys that those services do (bulk payment)
as you can see it is spending one output (one the left) and makes 24 new ones (pays 24 people). the size here is 971 bytes.
now if you want to pay each of these one by one you have to create 24 transactions each of them with about 225 bytes size (since you create 2 new outputs anyways like this) which would be nearly 5400 bytes in total (24*225)

however what happens to you is something like this:
https://blockchain.info/tx/2df28acff8fba40e01bb950b1720d5716e94611219796e6dc577f538c999abcc?show_adv=true
you see all those outputs on the left, these are transactions that you receive as payment.
and as you can see the size of this transasctions with 14 outputs to spend is 2142 bytes. this is because you need to sign each of those outputs with the private key (the wallet does that in the background) and the signature created is taking up space. and the more outputs you have to spend the more the final size would be.

[Myfe]

@ethantaylor, if you're trying out faucets, check out FreeBitco.in (see my signature if you want a referral link).

I serve as their Forum Community Manager, and I can say that they are the highest paying bitcoin faucet out there. They're paying 4% APR interest on all deposits (one you have a balance of 30,000) and it pays daily. You can even deposit your bitcoin holdings from elsewhere to this site to get the interest.

Beyond that, this is one of the oldest and well known bitcoin companies around...they're a pillar in the community.

Good luck to you!

@Myfe,

Thank you! My very first faucet is DailyFreeBits.com. But I found it is doubtful because it is not letting me cash out. And its owner is also a Bitcointalk.org member whose reputation is being controversial. I had given that website up. I'm going to try FaucetBoy.xyz, MoonBit.co.in, and ChronoX.co.in.

[ethantaylor]

@pooya87,

Thank you for giving useful examples. You mentioned that my situation is like this one. But why will I be having so many outputs at the left side like that one? Can't ePay.info, FaucetHub.io, etc eliminate that issue?


@Myfe,

Thank you for the offer. I actually had checked FreeBitco.in, and I know that FreeBitco.in have received many positive reviews. But I haven't decided to earn Bitcoin in the lottery way. Not sure how others feel, but to me, lottery is more like a opportunistic way of earning money. I prefer a more down-to-earth way. But I fully respect others' choices, as long as they are legitimate and legal.

[pooya87]

@pooya87,

Thank you for giving useful examples. You mentioned that my situation is like this one. But why will I be having so many outputs at the left side like that one? Can't ePay.info, FaucetHub.io, etc eliminate that issue?

because you are using a faucet or group of them, and each pay what, 50 to 500 satoshi? how much will you earn per hour, per day,... and how long are you willing to wait around to accumulate it in your account on those sites and trust them with your bitcoin that they won't run away before you cash out to your bitcoin address that you control?

in practice that would be somewhere around when you reach 0.001BTC (after about 1000 claims). and when you cash that out to your bitcoin address that is one new output.

and yes you can eliminate that issue by trusting those websites that they won't run away with your satoshis, and keep your coins there until you reach some bigger amount.

[ethantaylor]

@pooya87,

Thank you for giving useful examples. You mentioned that my situation is like this one. But why will I be having so many outputs at the left side like that one? Can't ePay.info, FaucetHub.io, etc eliminate that issue?

because you are using a faucet or group of them, and each pay what, 50 to 500 satoshi? how much will you earn per hour, per day,... and how long are you willing to wait around to accumulate it in your account on those sites and trust them with your bitcoin that they won't run away before you cash out to your bitcoin address that you control?

in practice that would be somewhere around when you reach 0.001BTC (after about 1000 claims). and when you cash that out to your bitcoin address that is one new output.

and yes you can eliminate that issue by trusting those websites that they won't run away with your satoshis, and keep your coins there until you reach some bigger amount.

My first and currently the only faucet I'm using lets me cash out once my balance reaches 700 satashis, and the destination of the cashing out is ePay.info.

If I understand it correctly, I will still have to withdraw those satashis from ePay.info to my Bitcoin wallet (Blockchain.info) in order to spend them.

Let's say if I accumulate 100,000 satashis on ePay.info and then withdraw them to my Bitcoin wallet, would the situation you mentioned still happen to me?

[Myfe]

@Myfe,

Thank you for the offer. I actually had checked FreeBitco.in, and I know that FreeBitco.in have received many positive reviews. But I haven't decided to earn Bitcoin in the lottery way. Not sure how others feel, but to me, lottery is more like a opportunistic way of earning money. I prefer a more down-to-earth way. But I fully respect others' choices, as long as they are legitimate and legal.

Hi Ethan, can you share more detail about what you mean? All faucets that I'm aware of offer a free roll per specific time frame, which gives one the opportunity to earn more or less bitcoin. Is this the lottery you speak of?

Thanks!

[pooya87]

~
My first and currently the only faucet I'm using lets me cash out once my balance reaches 700 satashis, and the destination of the cashing out is ePay.info.

If I understand it correctly, I will still have to withdraw those satashis from ePay.info to my Bitcoin wallet (Blockchain.info) in order to spend them.

Let's say if I accumulate 100,000 satashis on ePay.info and then withdraw them to my Bitcoin wallet, would the situation you mentioned still happen to me?

yes.
lets say you wanted to buy a $10 game from steam store. $10 is equal to 0.008196BTC with today's price.
you go to your wallet and in there you have multiple transactions each 100,000 satoshi (0.001BTC). to pay for the game you need to spend 9 of those:

Code:

in                                  out
100000 tx                          819600 tx (steam payment)
100000 tx                          80400 tx (your change)
100000 tx
100000 tx
100000 tx
100000 tx
100000 tx
100000 tx
100000 tx

that is approximately about 1400 bytes (rough estimate) and with a 220 s/b you'll end up paying about 300,000 satoshi in fee.

[ethantaylor]

@Myfe,

If I remember correctly, I have to participate in lottery or lucky roll in order to earn satashis at FreeBitco.in. I haven't made up my mind to earn Bitcoin in that way.

I'm currently using a faucet, and the way of earning at there is: I simply login every hour and claim satashis. That way is more preferable to me.


@pooya87,

Wow... 300,000 satoshis in fee. That's so high. What if I do not have enough satoshis to pay the fee?

And could you teach me to estimate the bytes?

[pooya87]

@pooya87,

Wow... 300,000 satoshis in fee. That's so high. What if I do not have enough satoshis to pay the fee?

And could you teach me to estimate the bytes?

that fee is the estimated amount to get a fast confirmation withing the next couple of blocks. you can pay less and delay the confirmation.
the amount of fee you pay is like a competition right now. you check some factors and based on them pay a fee. miners see all the transactions and since a block can only contain a limited number of transactions they always pick the ones paying highest amounts.
which is why paying higher fee means a faster confirmation.

with that said, you can still pay less and get a confirmation within reasonable time. look at this page: https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions these are all the transactions waiting to be confirmed right now. if that number is around 2000 to 5000, you can even pay a very small fee (even zero!) and have your transaction confirmed in a couple of hours (not recommended though).
and if you see a large number like 10000+ that means a low fee tx won't be confirmed anytime soon.

as to know the estimated size in bytes, you don't really need to think about it as an end user. good wallets do that for you without you noticing.
for example Electrum (and i think blockchain.info is the same although i don't use or recommend it) does the size estimation and gives a very good fee suggestion. and the most you need to do is set a fee per byte and wallet does the rest.

but if you are interested to learn more of the technical side you can read this:
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1195/how-to-calculate-transaction-size-before-sending

[ethantaylor]

that fee is the estimated amount to get a fast confirmation withing the next couple of blocks. you can pay less and delay the confirmation.
the amount of fee you pay is like a competition right now. you check some factors and based on them pay a fee. miners see all the transactions and since a block can only contain a limited number of transactions they always pick the ones paying highest amounts.
which is why paying higher fee means a faster confirmation.

with that said, you can still pay less and get a confirmation within reasonable time. look at this page: https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions these are all the transactions waiting to be confirmed right now. if that number is around 2000 to 5000, you can even pay a very small fee (even zero!) and have your transaction confirmed in a couple of hours (not recommended though).
and if you see a large number like 10000+ that means a low fee tx won't be confirmed anytime soon.

as to know the estimated size in bytes, you don't really need to think about it as an end user. good wallets do that for you without you noticing.
for example Electrum (and i think blockchain.info is the same although i don't use or recommend it) does the size estimation and gives a very good fee suggestion. and the most you need to do is set a fee per byte and wallet does the rest.

but if you are interested to learn more of the technical side you can read this:
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1195/how-to-calculate-transaction-size-before-sending

As a beginner whose income of Bitcoin is not being much, I wouldn't mind paying less and delaying the confirmation. After all, I guess I will lose nothing by waiting for a few more hours. At the moment, I'm seeing around 1500 Unconfirmed Transactions on the website you linked. Does that number of unconfirmed transactions mean I can pay a very small fee (even zero) and have my transaction confirmed in a couple of hours?

The technical side of the estimation of the bytes looks a bit difficult to me now. So would you mind sharing how you were able to come up with 300,000 satoshis fee just by looking at the table you created (quoted below)?

Code:

in                                  out
100000 tx                          819600 tx (steam payment)
100000 tx                          80400 tx (your change)
100000 tx
100000 tx
100000 tx
100000 tx
100000 tx
100000 tx
100000 tx

[pooya87]

As a beginner whose income of Bitcoin is not being much, I wouldn't mind paying less and delaying the confirmation. After all, I guess I will lose nothing by waiting for a few more hours. At the moment, I'm seeing around 1500 Unconfirmed Transactions on the website you linked. Does that number of unconfirmed transactions mean I can pay a very small fee (even zero) and have my transaction confirmed in a couple of hours?

yes, you can pay a much lower fee that what i said in that example (220 s/b).
the suggestion currently is at 140 s/b.
you can see this site: https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ although it is a little bit off the mark sometimes.

and about zero fee, i have to say it is still possible because there are miners who are still mining transactions with 0 fees. but this may not be the case forever. it is better to pay the fees.

or at least if you wanted to try the 0 fee thing, check out what replaceable by fee is (Opt-in RBF)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1802212.0
so that you don't get stuck if you changed your mind.

The technical side of the estimation of the bytes looks a bit difficult to me now. So would you mind sharing how you were able to come up with 300,000 satoshis fee just by looking at the table you created (quoted below)?

i opened my Electrum, went to Coins tab, Selected the same number of outputs and clicked spend, then clicked the preview button to see the size
and i suggest you use your wallet to do it, it is easier and more accurate because there are many variables such as MultiSignature keys,...

but here is how it works technically if you are interested:
This is the real transaction and it breaks down to these parts. (you can see it like this too)
Version (4 Bytes)
TxIn Count (1B) since you won't have that many outputs to spend

9x{
Outpoint (36B)
Script Length (1B)
ScriptSig(~106 B)
Sequence (4B)
}

TxOut Count (1B) since you won't be having more than a couple

2x{
Value (8B)
Script Length(1B) the most common cases
Script (25) the most common cases
}

LockTime (4B)
ref: https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-reference#raw-transaction-format

total is 4 + 1 + 9x{36+1+106+4} + 1 + 2x{8+1+25} + 4 = 1401 Bytes
1401 Bytes * 220 s/b = 308,220 (the highest fee because of the big mempool in a month ago)
1401 bytes * 140 s/b = 196,250 (the current suggested fee)

[ethantaylor]

@pooya87,

Thank you very much for the link and info. I hope I would master these skills once I stay in this field long enough.

[LTU_btc]

I'm always using same bitcoin address on every faucet. I know that receiving lot of small transactions will cause huge fee when you will want to send these bitcoins. But I'm using Coinbase wallet to receive payments from faucets. When I collect decent amount of bitcoins, I just send it to my desktop wallet. Coinbase don't charge high fees like Blockchain.info or any other bitcoin wallet.

[ethantaylor]

I'm always using same bitcoin address on every faucet. I know that receiving lot of small transactions will cause huge fee when you will want to send these bitcoins. But I'm using Coinbase wallet to receive payments from faucets. When I collect decent amount of bitcoins, I just send it to my desktop wallet. Coinbase don't charge high fees like Blockchain.info or any other bitcoin wallet.

So it looks like it really is fine to use the same Bitcoin address on all faucets. Thanks.

Thank you for sharing your experience on using Coinbase.com to receive payments from faucets with us. But not all faucets use Coinbase.com, do they? Do you mean you only use faucets which use Coinbase.com?

Since Coinbase.com doesn't charge high fees like other Bitcoin wallets do, why do some people/faucets still choose to use other Bitcoin wallets?

[Myfe]

Thank you for sharing your experience on using Coinbase.com to receive payments from faucets with us. But not all faucets use Coinbase.com, do they? Do you mean you only use faucets which use Coinbase.com?

Since Coinbase.com doesn't charge high fees like other Bitcoin wallets do, why do some people/faucets still choose to use other Bitcoin wallets?

Coinbase isn't affiliated with any faucet. The only online bitcoin wallets that are affiliated with faucets (that I'm aware of) are Xapo and FreeBitco.in.

[ethantaylor]

Coinbase isn't affiliated with any faucet. The only online bitcoin wallets that are affiliated with faucets (that I'm aware of) are Xapo and FreeBitco.in.

So is it a bad approach to use Xapo with faucets? I would appreciate if you could answer that question, and you could also answer it in this thread.