In 2015, faucets are bad for bitcoin

[erikalui]

The problem is that most faucets will not let you withdraw until you reach 0.001, which can take over a week of viewing ads, clicking around and wasting lots of time in general.

Very true!

This is my point. I haven't said that faucets give very little money. I said faucets give users a bad experience, and that they're bad for image.

You may also note that all the original faucets are gone. I believe the original faucet, the one managed by Gavin Andresen shut down in Summer 2013.

Not really as I use 3 faucets as of now which are moonbit, freebitco and alien faucet which pay pretty well and you can reach their minimum payout faster than other faucets. The original faucets used ot pay barely 0.00001 BTC and they used to send mostly to blockchain wallet where the fee charged is high.

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[ChuckBuck]

That just shows you how far we still have to go in regards to Bitcoin.  It's 2015, 6 years after the experiment started, and we still have noobs expecting to get rich, collecting pennies a week...

The only time faucets were worth it if you miraculously held throughout was Gavin's one:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100703032414/http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

[tss]

That just shows you how far we still have to go in regards to Bitcoin.  It's 2015, 6 years after the experiment started, and we still have noobs expecting to get rich, collecting pennies a week...

The only time faucets were worth it if you miraculously held throughout was Gavin's one:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100703032414/http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

wow.  5 btc a pop.  what were they worth then?  not even pennies huh?

[shogdite]

The problem is that most faucets will not let you withdraw until you reach 0.001, which can take over a week of viewing ads, clicking around and wasting lots of time in general.

Faucets are the equivalent of those work-from-home jobs ads you see promising earnings of $1000 every week, in reality you end up spending hours licking stamps for a few dollars a days.

[ChuckBuck]

That just shows you how far we still have to go in regards to Bitcoin.  It's 2015, 6 years after the experiment started, and we still have noobs expecting to get rich, collecting pennies a week...

The only time faucets were worth it if you miraculously held throughout was Gavin's one:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100703032414/http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

wow.  5 btc a pop.  what were they worth then?  not even pennies huh?

Yup, sub pennies.  I'm betting most of the people back then cashed out as soon as BTC price hit a buck or so.    

[NeuroticFish]

40-70k satoshi per week on a faucet is a medium/good income, I think.
The result is that you get your wallet full of dust which will cost A LOT to send away.

There are ways to "fix" this - create new wallet from time to time, use xapo or alike, ..
But when you get in a week an amount on the same level as the tx fee, then ... yes, something is wrong.

It's wrong because a human being work has to worth more.
It's wrong for the Bitcoin ecosystem, people learn and get used to send money without tx fee, while tx fee is one of the long term keys for bitcoin network to live long.



I have a bad habit to compare with dogecoin, because that's in its early days and help me get an image how bitcoin maybe was in the past (I was not here back then and this image may be awfully wrong).
A good faucet gives 5-12 dogecoin at one visit. tx fee is 1 dogecoin.
So for the same "health" level, I'd say a bitcoin faucet should give at least 30k satoshi at once.
But that's too much if you think in fiat and if you think about the revenue from ads.

So the faucets are a business. Not a helper for newcomers.
And that business is not actually great for bitcoin itself.

[Bizmark13]

That just shows you how far we still have to go in regards to Bitcoin.  It's 2015, 6 years after the experiment started, and we still have noobs expecting to get rich, collecting pennies a week...

The only time faucets were worth it if you miraculously held throughout was Gavin's one:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100703032414/http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

wow.  5 btc a pop.  what were they worth then?  not even pennies huh?

Yup, sub pennies.  I'm betting most of the people back then cashed out as soon as BTC price hit a buck or so.   

That archived page is from July 3, 2010. I couldn't find an exact exchange rate for that date but I was able to find the following info:

Over a five day period beginning on July 12, the exchange value of Bitcoin increases ten times from US$0.008/BTC to US$0.080/BTC.

So if we assume that it was $0.008 back then and Gavin's faucet gave out 5 bitcoins, then that would have been worth $0.04 or about 14,000 satoshis. Very few (if any) current faucets pay out this much so it seems that Gavin's faucet was quite generous.

I guess this isn't too surprising. After all, the intended purpose of his faucet back then and the intended purpose of faucets today is quite different. Gavin created his faucet so that new users can test out the software and learn how bitcoins work. Faucet owners today create faucets so that they can squeeze a profit from the ads while giving out the bare minimum required to prevent people from leaving.

EDIT: Found this quote from a later archived version of the same faucet:

When I started the Faucet, Bitcoins were worth about a half a US penny each, so five were worth about 2.5 US cents.

So it was $0.025 per claim which is roughly 9,000 satoshis. Still very high for a faucet though.

[leex1528]

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.

[Q7]

The problem is that most faucets will not let you withdraw until you reach 0.001, which can take over a week of viewing ads, clicking around and wasting lots of time in general.

Faucets are the equivalent of those work-from-home jobs ads you see promising earnings of $1000 every week, in reality you end up spending hours licking stamps for a few dollars a days.

Which is what OP is trying to bring up all along that somehow faucets can actually be bad in terms of damaging bitcoin's reputation. Maybe i what i think is that probably in few years down the road when Bitcoin adoption has really gone mainstream, we need to consider all this again. For now, i think it still has a role basically as a platform for newbies to try out the system.

[finlon]

I see a lot of people claiming that faucets are good for people who are new to bitcoin. Can anyone explain how it is so , because currently ,faucets pay out a very small amount, and you cann't really have a good introduction to bitcoin by just making one or 2 transactions of the TX fees with it.

[yatsey87]

I tried using faucets when I started, but they took too much time and/or never really payed out. While the concept is nice to get people started, long term seems like not so much so. Its easier to just buy some instead of waiting for handouts that never come.

It is easy but a lot of times newbs don't realize that or don't have the money to spend and just want to get their hands on some free coins. I don't thinbk they are bad per sey but people need to learn that they're not worth the time but they might get people interested in bitcoin at least.

[leex1528]

I see a lot of people claiming that faucets are good for people who are new to bitcoin. Can anyone explain how it is so , because currently ,faucets pay out a very small amount, and you cann't really have a good introduction to bitcoin by just making one or 2 transactions of the TX fees with it.

I think it is a good intro lesson to Bitcoins and how they work.  What I mean by this is it helps people see how you have an address, how to collect from an address, how the transactions work, the value of what Bitcoin is actually worth and it isn't very stressful.  Try teaching Bitcoin to someone who knows very little about computers, it isn't the most easy thing to tell them what an address is, how to look up transactions on Blockchain, and how to see the balance of your wallet without them actually doing it, it is simply a learning tool

[CrackedLogic]

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.

 

It's only been about 7 years since bitcoin has been released. I do not consider it to be old enough for faucets to disappear. Faucets are still here to spread adoption and let people who are new to bitcoin experiment with it.

Bitcoin is still in it's early stages only until about 5 years from do I expect it to disappear. However if you do not want faucets to exist, boycott them.

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.

Well technically we were able to sit at home and mine bitcoins.

[Gervais]

I see a lot of people claiming that faucets are good for people who are new to bitcoin. Can anyone explain how it is so , because currently ,faucets pay out a very small amount, and you cann't really have a good introduction to bitcoin by just making one or 2 transactions of the TX fees with it.

I think it is a good intro lesson to Bitcoins and how they work.  What I mean by this is it helps people see how you have an address, how to collect from an address, how the transactions work, the value of what Bitcoin is actually worth and it isn't very stressful.  Try teaching Bitcoin to someone who knows very little about computers, it isn't the most easy thing to tell them what an address is, how to look up transactions on Blockchain, and how to see the balance of your wallet without them actually doing it, it is simply a learning tool

I think it's also a good lesson for them to realize that you don't get much for free in this world, especially not without working for it. I agree faucets can have their place and are useful to get to grips with bitcoin but they'd be better of using that time doing something else. You could probably earn more on this forum from signature campaigns but you could also do small tasks or jobs in the real world and buy bitcoin directly for the cash you make.

[Amph]

faucets are good for newbie, who want to have confidence about bitcoin micro value(satoshi, microbtc, milli, ecc...)

[chriswen]

faucets are a business model.  You can't stop faucet owners from operating.

[dsly]

I don't really think existence of faucets affect bitcoin in anyway. People who don't want to try out faucets are free to stay away. its mostly for the newbies anyways

[Jybrael]

I don't really think existence of faucets affect bitcoin in anyway. People who don't want to try out faucets are free to stay away. its mostly for the newbies anyways

Yeah but the payout is so low that it isn't even worth bothering with the faucets and there are a lot of faucet sites out there that are scams....if only we had worthwhile faucet sites it would have been better.

[1K]

Faucets aren't bad for bitcoin. They're bad for the newbs that waste their precious time on them. As far as the bitcoin economy goes they're providing adoption and awareness at least.

I don't really think existence of faucets affect bitcoin in anyway. People who don't want to try out faucets are free to stay away. its mostly for the newbies anyways

Yeah but the payout is so low that it isn't even worth bothering with the faucets and there are a lot of faucet sites out there that are scams....if only we had worthwhile faucet sites it would have been better.

But they obviously do bother (thought you're right it's not worthwhile).

[BillyBobZorton]

Faucets give people bitcoin to experiment with.

This. I started playing with bitcoin wallets thanks to faucets. If it wasnt for faucets i would have never gotten satoshis to experiment sending BTC.