And has anyone else noticed that, despite trying very, very hard to make it look legit, the free bitcoin lottery seems to pay out small winnings on about 1 out of 3 plays? Doesn't that seem an order of magnitude too easy for a 6/49 game? Not that I'm complaining, it's fun to feel like I'm 10x luckier than everybody else, but it smells fishy.
The fact that they're effectively getting 3-5 captchas for about the same average payout per hour as each of the clone faucets makes me think they're just a classier captcha farm. Oh, well, I enjoyed it for a while, I'll keep doing it until I hit the coinbox payout and then stop until something that doesn't feel sleazy comes along to legitimize coinbox.
Thanks for your views. I suspect that coinbox and that lottery and all the sites that use coinbox are all part of the same thing.
It is all rather curious.
The coinbox thing is a good idea. It would be nice if more sites could use that, are something like it, especially now with the new small tx rules.
I didn't mention this in the newbie thread because I don't want to turn off newbies from bitcoin. I imagine the pitiful ROI discourages most of them before they enrich the spammers too horribly much, anyway, if that's what's really going on here. *shrug*
I wouldn't worry too much. I don't think it will turn off too many and if people can't see the true intrinsic value of Bitcoin and are just in it for small freebies they won't have much of an effect on the Bitcoin economy one way or the other.