Is it smart to make a Bitcoin Faucet

[bassguitarman]

I have made a dogecoin and a tacocoin faucet, and I'm thinking of making a bitcoin one.

What I am worried about is:

1) Tx Fees making it too expensive,

2) Bitcoin is much bigger, which means I am a much larger target to hackers, and it will cost more to keep funded.

Whats you view?

[hilariousandco]

Well there are plenty of Btc faucets around, but I think you'd need something original or a higher paying one to draw in users. And do hackers really actually go after the little amount faucets usually have in hot wallets?

[DubFX]

I don't think it would be worth for any hacker and their time.

[mprep]

I don't think it would be worth for any hacker and their time.

Really depends. Some faucets have serious holes, especially the ones using popular scripts, which only take a couple of minutes to exploit.

[Mitchell]

TX fee's can be cut by sending many payments at once. Hackers can be a problem if you use a popular/open source script, so just make your own or get someone to make one for you.

I had my own faucet for a few months, but it costed me more then I got back from ads, so I couldn't keep it running, sadly.

[galbros]

Given your success with the alt coin faucets you seem well positioned to do a bitcoin one. 

It seems to me that the most successful faucet right now is the freebitco.in one that combines a faucet with a gambling site.  Maybe if you did something like that you could make it work out financially for you. 

Something to prevent botting is an absolute must.  Primedice has a faucet built into it and even with recaptcha it is constantly having to fight off botters.

Good Luck!

[bitsmichel]

Insert Quote
I have made a dogecoin and a tacocoin faucet, and I'm thinking of making a bitcoin one.

What I am worried about is:

1) Tx Fees making it too expensive,

2) Bitcoin is much bigger, which means I am a much larger target to hackers, and it will cost more to keep funded.

Whats you view?

Its difficult to make a faucet profitable. I ran a kind of faucet earlier, were you submit jokes.. daily there were 2 or 3 winning jokes who won 0.0001 BTC. So per month its 0.006  BTC (2.6 usd).  The problem was there was not enough traffic - for every 1000 visitors you get about ~ 0.0025 btc trough the ad service im using. Unfortunately, traffic was about 10-20 a day. Im not quite sure why so few people were interested in btc for jokes 

Anyway, it depends on these factors:
 - how much do you give to the users?
 - how much traffic do you have?
 - how much do advertisers give you?

You'll notice in generally faucets give 0.00000400 BTC or less per day, maybe 0.0001 a week.

2) Bitcoin is much bigger, which means I am a much larger target to hackers, and it will cost more to keep funded.

You could simply put a counter on the site. Say get the value from a MySQL database, increase it. Keep and send the money on another machine (perhaps in another country/location). In that way, no risk for mtgox style hacks.

[BitCoinDream]

I don't think it would be worth for any hacker and their time.

Really depends. Some faucets have serious wholes, especially the ones using popular scripts, whcih only take a couple of minutes to exploit.

Ha Ha ...so true. Copy-pasting same script which is not maintained for long will definitely have its own drawback. Moreover every tom-dick-harry is now opening a faucet not knowing how BTC works ...the outcome is so inevitable

[Shogen]

I have made a dogecoin and a tacocoin faucet, and I'm thinking of making a bitcoin one.

What I am worried about is:

1) Tx Fees making it too expensive

Maybe you could send the payment weekly, instead of daily, to reduce to number of tx (which is indeed good for the receivers as well, as they will have less inputs for their future tx).

[ranlo]

I have made a dogecoin and a tacocoin faucet, and I'm thinking of making a bitcoin one.

What I am worried about is:

1) Tx Fees making it too expensive,

2) Bitcoin is much bigger, which means I am a much larger target to hackers, and it will cost more to keep funded.

Whats you view?

If you want to run a Bitcoin faucet, don't expect to get rich off it. And if you don't want to be targeted by hackers, hold a small amount of coin.

If you're worried about transaction fees, use a service like microwallet (I don't know exactly how it works but a lot of faucets use them).

[#yolo]

I can't see it being profitable in anyway currently, sure there are more casino's/markets related to BTC's but these don't target faucets (At least this is what I think) considering people there rarely use these. The market is very saturated too and you need some effort to find advertisers.

[brianbbad]

Not really worth it if you're trying to make money off it, but it is smart if you work in the web development industry and you want to have a nice web page to show off. (I don't think a potential employer would be impressed by a tacocoin faucet page, and dogecoin has yet to gain as much respect as btc).

[mrhelpful]

Its great you got all these things to play with, but look at your competitor?

And when I mean by competitor its the oldest ones already here that most have registered to, because of the long constant pay.

One of them which you know I`m sure, freebitcoi.n and bitvisitor etc.

Most of these users arent going to spend more time, (in my observation) - since the faucet does take time away from them.

This isnt to shut down your idea, its just to see if you can do in another way. Such as people now focus on if theres a rotation site that does all the faucet sites that are known. So its not much of waste of time opening 8 different tabs on google chrome, etc.

[ranlo]

This isnt to shut down your idea, its just to see if you can do in another way. Such as people now focus on if theres a rotation site that does all the faucet sites that are known. So its not much of waste of time opening 8 different tabs on google chrome, etc.

I disagree. While faucet rotators like cryptoplace are great, they also offer up a benefit for faucet owners (in that they help drive more traffic to those sites). If a good faucet is created and it's competitive, I, for example, would gladly put it at the very top of my list (first faucet visited) which helps the users and the faucet owner.

[boymilk]

I have made a dogecoin and a tacocoin faucet, and I'm thinking of making a bitcoin one.

What I am worried about is:

1) Tx Fees making it too expensive,

2) Bitcoin is much bigger, which means I am a much larger target to hackers, and it will cost more to keep funded.

Whats you view?

All of the BTC faucet services that I used deposited bitcoins into a microwallet.org or coinbox.me account which only sent the bitcoins to me once enough had been accumulated from multiple faucets and a certain limit was reached (about 3 cents worth I think). I don't think any of them sent BTC directly into my wallet.

It took me about an hour to reach this limit so I stopped bothering with faucets however.

[Zebra]

All of the BTC faucet services that I used deposited bitcoins into a microwallet.org or coinbox.me account which only sent the bitcoins to me once enough had been accumulated from multiple faucets and a certain limit was reached (about 3 cents worth I think). I don't think any of them sent BTC directly into my wallet.

There are quite a number of sites (usually older or bigger ones) that send the payment out by themselves, such as bitcoiner.net and bitvisitor.com.

It took me about an hour to reach this limit so I stopped bothering with faucets however.

Smart decision IMO.
I don't know why, but some people are really obsessed with faucets even when they only get a tiny bit of bitcoin.

[Unluckyduck]

1. Almost no faucets add tx fees to and sometimes it takes days to show up but free is free

2. Like the others have said, no hacker worth his salt would go after such a paltry amount

[bitsmichel]

I don't know why, but some people are really obsessed with faucets even when they only get a tiny bit of bitcoin.

The psychology behind it is the action/reward system. Press button the button, get a reward (even if it is after 20 presses). It really is like Pavlov dog training 

I think people are not so obsessed with faucets, my one had only between 5-30 visitors a day, and unlike others it even had jokes 

[ranlo]

Smart decision IMO.
I don't know why, but some people are really obsessed with faucets even when they only get a tiny bit of bitcoin.

People asked the same thing back when faucets gave out whole Bitcoins and they had no value. They said the same thing again when they paid out mBTC's and they had no value. See where I'm going with this? :p. It's all speculation. If you had hit up faucets back in the day, you could have hundreds of Bitcoins now. While they had no value then, they do now. If you had hit them after that, you could have a few full Bitcoins. While they had no value back then, they do now.

[Malin Keshar]

Smart decision IMO.
I don't know why, but some people are really obsessed with faucets even when they only get a tiny bit of bitcoin.

People asked the same thing back when faucets gave out whole Bitcoins and they had no value. They said the same thing again when they paid out mBTC's and they had no value. See where I'm going with this? :p. It's all speculation. If you had hit up faucets back in the day, you could have hundreds of Bitcoins now. While they had no value then, they do now. If you had hit them after that, you could have a few full Bitcoins. While they had no value back then, they do now.

you could do more profitable things,then buy bitcoins, then have more hundreads of bitcoins. Or, if you are in the full bitcoin faucet giveaways times, just mine btcoins.



@topic: for me the faucet market for bitcoin is saturated, so you should put your faucet like part of a bigger site, like a cassino or a bitcoin news site. Or maybe make faucets in others languages, like spanish, french or russian. Not sure if would make difference