A good portion of those who first time meet with cryptocurrency very often have a distorted image of what cryptocurrency is and how it works.  The idea being spread around the internet is mostly reduced to some kind of magic digital money, which can be reached by doing some simple tasks.

One of such task is probably the most famous way of earning free crypto, and we call it faucet. For those who do not know, faucet is site which rewards the user with a small amount of coins in exchange for the user's visit to the page. To get reward user need to solve captcha, click on anti-bot links and pass through short link. This process has been considerably extended and made more difficult after price of BTC increased over the years.

We can say without any doubt that the reward for time spent on faucets is too small these days, and that faucet owners resort to various tricks to earn more, which of course reflects on the overall impression from the user’s perspective.

Most of faucets are very aggressive in advertising, and very often they can be a source of various malware /virus infections - not to mention that most of the advertisements are promoting scams, bitcoin generators, doublers and mostly suspicious projects. It is important for any faucet user to protect yourself as much as possible with good antivirus+firewall+antimalware and to not click on ads or download anything.

Regarding fees and dust transaction, there is microwallet through which most faucets work today - so this part is solved, transactions are being sent in batch, fees for users are almost insignificant. Faucets should only serve as a way of education for users, but they can be source of income for faucet owners.

I made this topic to help newbies with some info about faucets, something similar is last time updated back in 2016 - Faucet risks
 

Thank you, for your thread, and link to Shoreno's thread; both are informative ones.
I have never known about what mentioned in two threads, honestly.

In my perspective, I think that even faucets (nowadays) give people significant amount of bitcoin (or whatever coins) from their works - in fact faucets nowadays have very low payrates; faucet hunters should have a computer/laptop that only used for their faucet works. In case, they works for bad sites, and their devices infected, they will still be safe.

Saving more for future maintenance fees for your laptop too. Hunting faucet is good way to waste our time, electricity, devices longevity, and eye-sights, but it is not too bad to use faucets to test new casinos (not to hunt for a fortune, but solely to test new platforms, and new games)

I was lucky when I was still a newbie in the world of Bitcoin way back in 2016 all the faucets I have participated isn't one of those fraudulent ones. I don't know if its luck or criminals are not yet into the faucet scams during that time. But now I've been seeing a lot of faucets where I need to download their software so that I can start earning which for me is really questionable to begin with, faucet websites doesn't even need to be that complicated in the first place in order to run and earn. Also for newbies reading this their are phishing sites acting out as faucets but what they really want is to obtain your private keys from you having the mistake to enter them in the first place, if they asked for more then your address or email address (to sign up) then you should stay away from it.

Searching also the faucet in Google to know its legitimacy also works by putting some keywords like this.

If they are only using it to mine then I know just like what you said a website enabling it to do so is already enough but for me to download a software just to get a few pennies out of you every 30 minutes or so now that's something fishy and chances are if it's not about utilizing your cpu/gpu it's about introducing malware into your system. One thing to note that is not only faucet sites are trying to hijack your cpu/gpu anymore, I know normal websites are doing it as well. One of the biggest names that has been found doing so is UFC as they have used their website's visitors to mine monero before. That's why using system monitors like NZXT's CAM is useful in these situations even if you are just browsing the web.

It is true that at one point few years ago Google AdSense is hit hard everything that is related to crypto, and faucets were no exception. But some faucet owners have AdSense on their faucets even today, and the thing seems to be working for them because I see ads have been active for over 6 months without any problems.


Time of browser mining on faucets is ended with shut down of most popular service for that purpose Coinhive some 5 months ago, and this is no more problem for users. Almost any good antivirus is block any type of browser mining, so this was only problem for users who were without any protection on internet, and this is same as leave the house door open and think that thieves will not come in.


If you mean fees for withdraw from faucets to user wallet address they are very low, as I write in OP most faucets today use microwallett FaucetHub where users accumulate coins, and after they reach minumum amount they can withdraw. For example for minumum withdraw amount of 20 000 satoshi, fee is only 400 satoshi - https://faucethub.io/fees

Honestly.. It's pretty difficult. You could try to take some risk and engage in P2P trading with a high risk processor (Paypal) and catch high fees from buyers (20-30%), other than that, it might actually be smarter to just learn a trade (Programming for example), and either apply that into the BTC world, or simply buy Bitcoins whenever you get your salary from said trade job.

There's really no magic way to earn a lot of Bitcoin quickly. Anything you see that resembles that is either a HYIP/Ponzi, or a scam. (trading signals etc.)

i find it interesting how the meaning of certain things have changed throughout the years. for example "faucet" has never meant to be a way to "earn" bitcoin! it was a way to quickly acquire some coins with no effort so that you could test this new phenomenon called bitcoin. this was a real "faucet".
then it turned into a way for people to "farm" them and earn bitcoin and for the creators to display a ton of ads and make money (in this case fiat, absurd isn't it?) from them.

there are other things that have changed their meaning. for example "airdrops" used to be like faucets where people could simply ask and receive a certain amount of the "new coin" so that they could try it out and see if it is worth the effort. nowadays it has turned into a job where people have to advertise for that coin and get paid in that coin, where the whole process is called "airdrop"!

Interesting to learn. I wasn't around at that time and always thought bad about faucets and a source of malware. But if you look at it, many things changed in the space since then.

For me, the taps are a waste of time because they offer very little bit of bitcoin. A person can only get a big lot if they win the weekly lottery
As well as we can not rely on a single tap we need a lot of them to raise capital is very simple and in a length of time