In 2015, faucets are bad for bitcoin

[Herbert2020]

i don't think faucets "harm" bitcoin. if anything they are a nice help for beginners and newbies to start of their bitcoin journey with a small amount of satoshi to play with and learn.
if you do a survey or a poll topic you'll see a lot of members here started off by using faucets (me included)

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[dothebeats]

i don't think faucets "harm" bitcoin. if anything they are a nice help for beginners and newbies to start of their bitcoin journey with a small amount of satoshi to play with and learn.
if you do a survey or a poll topic you'll see a lot of members here started off by using faucets (me included)

The faucets don't really "harm" bitcoin in anyway, but a user who relies too much on faucets would likely face problems in the future as it will create dusts in his or her wallet.

Sending less than 0.01 BTC to any recipient — The network considers these small outputs to be “dust,” and discourages them by requiring a fee. If it was not discouraged, someone could take 1.0 BTC, and create 1,000,000 transactions of 0.000001 BTC each, for free, which would clog the network. So, that's one definition of dust.

^ From the Armory client wiki.

[R2D221]

and there are a lot of faucet sites out there that are scams....

How does this work? Either you get free bitcoins or you don't... but they never ask you anything in exchange.

[Nerazzura]

i don't think faucets "harm" bitcoin. if anything they are a nice help for beginners and newbies to start of their bitcoin journey with a small amount of satoshi to play with and learn.
if you do a survey or a poll topic you'll see a lot of members here started off by using faucets (me included)

Agree with what you say. Like a school that has levels. they may not immediately become a college student.they be surprised and hate. So all the needed process.Let beginners start of faucets

[BootstrapCoinDev]

and there are a lot of faucet sites out there that are scams....

How does this work? Either you get free bitcoins or you don't... but they never ask you anything in exchange.

By definition its a week clicking nonstop with max ~8min intervals for minimum payout

[R2D221]

and there are a lot of faucet sites out there that are scams....

How does this work? Either you get free bitcoins or you don't... but they never ask you anything in exchange.

By definition its a week clicking nonstop with max ~8min intervals for minimum payout

But that's not a scam. You know exactly how much you are receiving. There's no lie anywhere.

[countryfree]

i don't think faucets "harm" bitcoin. if anything they are a nice help for beginners and newbies to start of their bitcoin journey with a small amount of satoshi to play with and learn.
if you do a survey or a poll topic you'll see a lot of members here started off by using faucets (me included)

I've used faucets too, when I discovered BTC, but after a few weeks, I got serious and I bought BTC via an exchange. Today, BTC's much larger, and all newspapers and magazines have written stories about it, so someone discovering BTC can easily find tons of info about it. So in addition to my past arguments, faucets aren't needed anymore.

More than anything, if someone wants to experience BTC, he needs to buy some. Or do some work.

[Bizmark13]

I think Faucets are great for Bitcoin personally.   It gives people new some small amount of coins to play around with it and see how they like it.  If you spend 8 hours a day every day doing faucet, you might get 1 BTC(MIGHT).  Basically you would be like making .001 cent per hour.  No one wants to actually do that.  Faucets are great for newbies who want to earn some coins without risking any of their own money at the start.

I did the calculations and it's actually worse than I expected. A high paying faucet might give out 1,000 satoshis per hour. I know Freebitco.in gives out 600. If you used the faucet 8 hours per day, you would get 8,000 satoshis per day. Since 1 BTC is equal to 100 million satoshis, it would take 12,500 days (34 years) to make 1 BTC. By then, it's likely that the BTC price would be much higher than today so it's possible that you will never reach 1 BTC at all (since faucet payments tend to drop as the value of BTC rises).

i don't think faucets "harm" bitcoin. if anything they are a nice help for beginners and newbies to start of their bitcoin journey with a small amount of satoshi to play with and learn.
if you do a survey or a poll topic you'll see a lot of members here started off by using faucets (me included)

The faucets don't really "harm" bitcoin in anyway, but a user who relies too much on faucets would likely face problems in the future as it will create dusts in his or her wallet.

Sending less than 0.01 BTC to any recipient — The network considers these small outputs to be “dust,” and discourages them by requiring a fee. If it was not discouraged, someone could take 1.0 BTC, and create 1,000,000 transactions of 0.000001 BTC each, for free, which would clog the network. So, that's one definition of dust.

^ From the Armory client wiki.

The problem of dust withdrawals can be mitigated somewhat by using services such as Coinbox.me and Microwallet.org. You can visit a number of different faucet sites and wait until you have a significant amount of BTC which can then be transferred to your actual wallet. Earning enough from faucet sites to make 0.01 BTC would be hard, but 0.001 BTC could be possible.

and there are a lot of faucet sites out there that are scams....

How does this work? Either you get free bitcoins or you don't... but they never ask you anything in exchange.

By definition its a week clicking nonstop with max ~8min intervals for minimum payout

But that's not a scam. You know exactly how much you are receiving. There's no lie anywhere.

If a faucet doesn't pay out despite promising that it would then I'd say it's dishonest and a scam - albeit a scam for pennies. While you don't actually lose any of your own money, you do waste your time solving captchas and clicking buttons and the faucet owner does get a tiny bit of money from ads. A faucet that does pay out, on the other hand, would not be a scam. Even if it only paid out tiny amounts (as long as the pay rates are displayed clearly on the site).

[Tdowns]

I play and withdraw from faucets all the time. Its neither bad nor good.  I doubt anyone seriously uses them as the rewards

[Herbert2020]

i don't think faucets "harm" bitcoin. if anything they are a nice help for beginners and newbies to start of their bitcoin journey with a small amount of satoshi to play with and learn.
if you do a survey or a poll topic you'll see a lot of members here started off by using faucets (me included)

The faucets don't really "harm" bitcoin in anyway, but a user who relies too much on faucets would likely face problems in the future as it will create dusts in his or her wallet.

Sending less than 0.01 BTC to any recipient — The network considers these small outputs to be “dust,” and discourages them by requiring a fee. If it was not discouraged, someone could take 1.0 BTC, and create 1,000,000 transactions of 0.000001 BTC each, for free, which would clog the network. So, that's one definition of dust.

^ From the Armory client wiki.

i don't think any user will rely on faucets for too long. everyone will eventually realize that it is not worth the time spent.
and i totally agree with the dust problem, although the problem can be minimized by increasing the withdrawal limit in faucet payment handlers.

[BitcoinFr34k]

I would have to agree with them being bad for bitcoin and for the persons mental health lol It is a waste of time for anyone who is not a newbie just getting started in bitcoin and learning which it does a good job at in my opinion so they will not go anywhere soon

Bad for mental health? Really? The worst part about comments like this is that back when faucets gave .1 BTC and up *per claim* (as in 2.4+ BTC a day was possible per faucet) people claimed the same thing because they were valueless.

I have the feeling in the next 5 years people are going to cry about how they didn't do faucets back in the day (now). If you had started a few years ago, you could have been earning hundreds of BTC a week off less than an hour of work. Not so worthless now, is it?

The value of what is received from faucets today may possibly be wroth more in the future, however you should not rely on the value of the bitcoin received from faucets increasing in the future when determining if it is a good idea to use a faucet, the reason for this being that you could invest your time in other ways to earn income and then use that income to purchase bitcoin on an exchange

[ranlo]

I would have to agree with them being bad for bitcoin and for the persons mental health lol It is a waste of time for anyone who is not a newbie just getting started in bitcoin and learning which it does a good job at in my opinion so they will not go anywhere soon

Bad for mental health? Really? The worst part about comments like this is that back when faucets gave .1 BTC and up *per claim* (as in 2.4+ BTC a day was possible per faucet) people claimed the same thing because they were valueless.

I have the feeling in the next 5 years people are going to cry about how they didn't do faucets back in the day (now). If you had started a few years ago, you could have been earning hundreds of BTC a week off less than an hour of work. Not so worthless now, is it?

The value of what is received from faucets today may possibly be wroth more in the future, however you should not rely on the value of the bitcoin received from faucets increasing in the future when determining if it is a good idea to use a faucet, the reason for this being that you could invest your time in other ways to earn income and then use that income to purchase bitcoin on an exchange

While I agree with this, we could also stretch it out to say that using coupons is a waste of time, that waiting for freebies is a waste, doing mail in rebates is a waste, etc. In all of these cases, you could be spending your time on something more valuable. The whole point is to have a relaxed method of earning (or saving), rather than doing "normal" work.

[Kprawn]

Well, I am having a ball with "faucets" 

Such a great way to make passive income and to test your creativity. {Example : I started with faucets and I grew a small referral network... now I have enough referrals to pay for my weekly advertizing costs}

I also give some coins back to my referral network... so they not only receive coins from the "faucet" but also from what I am giving back to them.

Some of these faucets have nice features to automate this, so I am doing nothing... just filling my adverticement account balance, from my income from the faucet.

Some of these faucets are a kickstarter to bigger things.... There are users, who used the faucet income to gamble, and from that, they have won jackpots to fund bigger projects.

Yes... 500 Satoshi per hour might not be worth it for some people.... but it's a beginning for others... Just create the opportunities and people will prosper. 

[Bad Uncle]

I play and withdraw from faucets all the time. Its neither bad nor good.  I doubt anyone seriously uses them as the rewards

What are you using them for then? I'm sure you'd be able to make much more from a signature campaign as Jnr Member so you're probably wasting your time with them unless it's something you enjoy doing, but regardless of that you'd still be better doing something else with your time.

[activebiz]

I think faucets are helpful for newbies. and also useful for people starting and need to test out sending/receive of bitcoins.

[fox19891989]

When BTC started, nobody had any and it was worthless, so it was right to give away thousands of BTC to make it popular. All that has changed. Now that BTC's worth something, now that companies are building on BTC, now that serious business transactions are made with bitcoin, it's about time for faucets to adapt.

BTC is real. It's money, and you've got to work to earn some. I hope all faucets will disappear in 2015. Faucets are hurting bitcoin by making some people believing you can get it while doing nothing sitting in your home. No, BTC isn't like that, and it shouldn't be any easier to get than any fiat currency. Even for small amounts.

LOL, no people will be rich from faucet, faucet only gives a penny, with about 200-1000 sat once, once per hour.

Some people try faucets because they wanna accumulate a few btc to buy a little things or gamble, not to be rich, dude.

Nobody won't work and live in faucet money.

[foxkyu]

LOL, no people will be rich from faucet, faucet only gives a penny, with about 200-1000 sat once, once per hour.
Some people try faucets because they wanna accumulate a few btc to buy a little things or gamble, not to be rich, dude.
Nobody won't work and live in faucet money.

absolutely right. you can't be rich if your income from faucet
almost impossible, except if you have a ton of referrals
people using faucet usually to pay fees if want to send btc
so it's not a big deal at all

[CrackedLogic]

LOL, no people will be rich from faucet, faucet only gives a penny, with about 200-1000 sat once, once per hour.
Some people try faucets because they wanna accumulate a few btc to buy a little things or gamble, not to be rich, dude.
Nobody won't work and live in faucet money.

absolutely right. you can't be rich if your income from faucet
almost impossible, except if you have a ton of referrals
people using faucet usually to pay fees if want to send btc
so it's not a big deal at all

False. Those pennies could be worth hundreds of dollars if it's held onto for a long period of time. 1 -  10 bitcoins used to be given out by faucets when bitcoin was first released.

[Bizmark13]

While I agree with this, we could also stretch it out to say that using coupons is a waste of time, that waiting for freebies is a waste, doing mail in rebates is a waste, etc. In all of these cases, you could be spending your time on something more valuable. The whole point is to have a relaxed method of earning (or saving), rather than doing "normal" work.

In my experience, you might get 10-20 cents per week from a faucet. Even using your analogy, I would say that spending a week to get a coupon that saves you 10 or 20 cents is not a good use of your time.

That being said, I'm guilty of using faucets myself although I just stick with Freebitco.in these days. They might have some limited value for paying transaction fees if you manage to save up enough and withdraw all of it at once, but I still think they're a waste of time.

False. Those pennies could be worth hundreds of dollars if it's held onto for a long period of time. 1 -  10 bitcoins used to be given out by faucets when bitcoin was first released.

It's an interesting theoretical exercise but nobody really knows if Bitcoin will reach $1 million or not and the question of whether or not it's a good idea to use faucets is debatable even if you are fairly certain that the BTC price will reach stratospheric levels. I posted an old topic about this very subject almost a year ago and the responses I got were pretty interesting:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=720087

It's also unlikely that Bitcoin will be experiencing the same rate of growth that it had in 2009-2013. As I mentioned previously, going from a $4 million market cap to a $4 billion one is fairly easy. Going from a $4 billion market cap to a $4 trillion one is bloody hard. So you might have to wait decades before your 300 satoshis is enough to buy even a soda.

[cparsley]

Okay, how many of us whenever we joined the BTC-world started cause we saw you could get some of this new fangled BTC stuff and it was worth a buck or two if you managed to get a full BTC?

Yes, we're now (at time of this message) at about 290x-300x that single dollar evaluation, but for some newbie to get his first 5460 satoshi or god forbid 0.0001 to get their feet wet in the bitcoin world is not then, now or forever more a bad thing. The more acceptable and use of our Bitcoins the better it is for absolutely everyone, and puling up a way for that to happen after you've gone through would be wrong, not just for yourself, but for the cryptocurrency community as a whole.