What do you think?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
In
one of their exchanges, 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):
As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With 20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.
So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim, are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about...
Hal
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?
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?
