Making the Faucet sustainable....

[Gavin Andresen]

I'm thinking of replacing the Bitcoin Faucet's reCAPTCHA with an AdsCaptcha -- instead of solving a CAPTCHA to help scan books, people visiting the site would be shown advertising which would help refill the Faucet with bitcoins.

My goal isn't to make money from freebitcoins.appspot.com, my goal is to make it sustainable without relying on donations.  According to the AdsCaptcha folks, they expect advertisers pay anywhere from 1 to 20 US cents per CAPTCHA solution, depending on web traffic, how well the website fits their product, etc.  The Faucet is currently giving out 0.05 bitcoins per visitor, which is 2 cents at current prices.

I would also like to gradually relax some of the anti-cheating measures I have in place that occasionally make it frustrating for non-cheating new users who "look like" people who are constantly re-visiting the Faucet (using proxies and new bitcoin addresses) to try to get more than their fair share.

One danger is that I implement AdsCaptcha, donations to the faucet stop, I find the revenue from AdsCaptcha is less than 0.01 BTC per visitor so that whole thing is even less sustainable than the current "somebody steps up and donates more when the balance gets low enough" model.

What do you all think?

[BioMike]

My Bitcoin Advertisement site should be helpful for you. Hopefully I can get it up soon.

[Mike Hearn]

AdsCaptcha looks very brute forceable.

How about this - you could require ownership of an account where the price is higher than the amount of BitCoins that are vended. Here's what I mean ... check out this pricelist:

http://www.accountheadquarters.com/social-networking-accounts.html

So a Facebook account costs approximately 10 (dollar) cents. Gmail accounts are even better:

http://bulk-gmail-accounts.blogspot.com/2010/12/buy-fresh-gmail-accounts-at-cheap-rates.html

That's 25 cents a pop. Hotmails and Yahoos also have a price but it's lower.

Facebook and Google fight spammy signups and terminate accounts that appear to be bulk created, which is why these things have a cost. You can easily prove somebody owns a particular account by sending them a mail, or by using Facebook Connect. If you see accounts that are abusing the system you can ban them like you would ban IP addresses (or /24s).

If the issue isn't really cheating but just lack of donations why not approach people who have giant reserves of coins, like ArtForz? The most important thing for BitCoin at the moment is surely to get coins moving around the economy. Maybe you could provide a meter stating how many coins the faucet has and this would encourage donations when it ran low - also if there was an email system for signups.

If there are really no such donors then I guess AdsCaptcha could work purely as a way to raise funds. It's not likely to be very secure though.

[davout]

Put a javascript miner on the faucet page

[fabianhjr]

Put a javascript miner on the faucet page

LOL I can imagine the puzzling faces of visitors: whenever I visit this site my computers starts FLYING! OMG there is a jet in there! D:

Kidding aside, the ads aren't that bad. Maybe you can have it as a last resort if you run under 50 BTC?
BTW I had been donating some coins.

[davout]

I was only half-joking about the JS miner,
even though the hash speed would be pretty laughable the numbers could make up for it,

Could be a nice way to monetize popular content.

[JohnDoe]

Why do you think donations will decrease if you start using AdsCaptcha? I'm sure your regular donators won't care and will come to the rescue if the pot gets low again.

Also you could just make the faucet give out the same amount that you get per ad. The point of the faucet was just to let new people experience a transaction anyway, right?

[davux]

Also you could just make the faucet give out the same amount that you get per ad. The point of the faucet was just to let new people experience a transaction anyway, right?

Sounds good. This way you could even get rid completely of the cheating measures: if some people click on several ads so that they get more coins, great, the advertisers will be happy, the visitor too, and it won't cost you a penny.

Some people might be annoyed by the ad system, though, so it might be a good idea to keep both systems. Something like: "Click the ad below to get 0.xxx BTC per click. If you don't see the ad [think AdBlock] or if you'd rather not click on it, you can still get 0.05 BTC the regular way by solving the captcha."

[ribuck]

Maybe you could provide a meter stating how many coins the faucet has ...

There's already a meter, under the logo. Currently there's 361 BTC available.

Gavin, I don't think any donor is going to mind whether there's a reCAPTCHA or AdsCaptcha. Also, I don't think it will be long before you can change the payout to 0.005 BTC.

What's the approximate daily payout, if you don't mind me asking?

[Anonymous]

Maybe you could provide a meter stating how many coins the faucet has ...

There's already a meter, under the logo. Currently there's 361 BTC available.

Gavin, I don't think any donor is going to mind whether there's a reCAPTCHA or AdsCaptcha. Also, I don't think it will be long before you can change the payout to 0.005 BTC.

What's the approximate daily payout, if you don't mind me asking?

maybe we need to think about adding another zero to the default in the client?

[Gavin Andresen]

ribuck: The Faucet is currently giving out between 5 and 6 BTC per day (100-200 payouts per day).

BioMike: Are you creating an AdWords-like service, but bidding/paying in Bitcoin?  One reason I like AdsCaptcha is because if won't clutter up the Faucet page with ads.

[mike]: Thanks for the pointers RE: how much it costs to get google/yahoo/etc accounts; I have been tempted to give out more coins from the Faucet to people with Google accounts.


I'm going to give AdsCaptcha a try; if the ads are annoying or offensive or inappropriate or doesn't work with ad blockers I'll switch back to reCaptcha.

[FreeMoney]

I gotta say, adCaptcha sounds brilliant.

[Anonymous]

Now if only you could buy an adcaptcha for bitcoins if you are a publisher....

[FreeMoney]

Now if only you could buy an adcaptcha for bitcoins if you are a publisher....

I haven't figured out exactly how it works, the samples I'm seeing have things like "Fox sale" as what you type in, isn't that going to be very vulnerable to someone learning the small set of things that can come up? I assumed it was going to be a combo like "Dominoes 34ui4".

[BioMike]

BioMike: Are you creating an AdWords-like service, but bidding/paying in Bitcoin?  One reason I like AdsCaptcha is because if won't clutter up the Faucet page with ads.

It is based on a bidding system, payout in Bitcoin. Popularity of your site should drive the price for the ad space (in principal one ad space could make you enough, don't think that popularity should be a problem for your site). One risk is however, if only one (or nobody) wants to bid on your site. In that case the ad space is free for the advertiser, You could however set a minimum bid.

I'll be in #bitcoin-dev this evening, I'll ping you if you're interested.

[ribuck]

It is based on a bidding system, payout in Bitcoin.

It's a great idea: like Project Wonderful but for bitcoin instead of dollars. I'll certainly use it on some of my sites.

And yet, Project Wonderful does not seem to have been wildly successful for website owners. The ad prices seem to be quite low compared to what one would get from AdSense. I can't put my finger on why this is.

[Mike Hearn]

Yes, AdsCaptcha looks like a very questionable idea from a security perspective. It's really not about anti-bots at all, they just want to force you to "engage" with the ad under the cover of security.

With payouts of 5-6 bitcoins per day and 350+ coins in the bucket there's months worth of supply. Certainly there are people in the community with thousands of coins they'd be willing to donate. Perhaps this isn't going to be a big deal in the end?

[ribuck]

I donated 10 BTC yesterday, but I can't spare a lot of BTC.

I'd be delighted to donate a more substantial amount if you can add some alternative payment methods to the site. Cash in the mail, PayPal, etc.

[BioMike]

It is based on a bidding system, payout in Bitcoin.

It's a great idea: like Project Wonderful but for bitcoin instead of dollars. I'll certainly use it on some of my sites.

And yet, Project Wonderful does not seem to have been wildly successful for website owners. The ad prices seem to be quite low compared to what one would get from AdSense. I can't put my finger on why this is.

It is was made as a Bitcoin Project Wonderful (Noagendamarkets idea). Kiba has now a site running on it, and earning a few bitcoins (mainly for helping testing). Although there are a lot of "blanks" (missing functionality, graphics and info how to do things). I'm planning to release it to the Bitcoin community soon and keep continue developing it.

Many people are in to earning some bitcoins through their site, but I hope there will also be people who want to advertise (haven't heard them yet).

[gigitrix]

Damn you Biomike, you beat me to it

Well any chance you're looking for a partner, it being PHP and all