So if you're prone to poking around the work-at-home world, that may have lead you to "Bitcoin faucets." These are basically microtask sites, but with more of a focus on looking at advertising than doing useful tasks. They pay out in tiny fragments of a Bitcoin (or similar cryptocurrency like the Monero) instead of the cash or "fun bucks" other microtask sites do.
The inflated value of Bitcoin might cause you to think there is something inherently more valuable about doing microtasks at Bitcoin faucets as opposed to, say, Mechanical Turk. After looking the whole thing over, however, I'm convinced it's actually an even poorer time investment than scrabbling to make minimum wage by Turking.
The Trouble With the Faucets
The first and most important thing to understand is that faucets pay so little, "trickle" seems like too generous of a word to describe what you get.
But you might be thinking "Well, the payouts may be tiny, but there at least a hundred of these things at this point. If I regularly make the rounds between all of them it could add up to something, especially if Bitcoin keeps appreciating."
Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work that way. If you're not familiar with Bitcoin, you definitely need to take a minute to get familiar with its transaction fees.
To try to summarize it as simply as possible - every time you move Bitcoin around, you have to pay a fee to do so. Those fees tend to be pretty hefty. So the faucets will generally set minimum earning thresholds which take a long time to get to. That complicates the scheme of pooling as many trickles as possible together.
If that were the only problem, it still wouldn't be so bad of an idea. There are some faucets that offer instant payouts (though there is a bit of added layer of complication in that some require you to receive them through a very specific site, like CoinPot or FaucetHub, which creates another collation problem).
Here's a list of all the other potential problems:
- Have to hope these mostly anonymous, somewhat dodgy sites don't crash / abscond with everyone's money before you hit each payout threshold
- Most involve watching or clicking through ads, so you have to turn off adblocker protections and hope that they don't deliver ads that contain malicious code
- They might be monetized by running a mining script in the background that eats up all your CPU resources; at the very least it will probably eat up enough to keep you from opening other pages
Risk / Reward
A common realistic range that I'm seeing for earnings from these sites is somewhere between 20 - 200 satoshis each.
Satoshi is the smallest unit of a Bitcoin. It takes 100 million satoshis to make one coin. As I write this, 1 US dollar is equal to about 7,040 satoshi. Admittedly, I'm not willing to dive into trying these sites as I feel like the return on time investment is very poor stacked up next to what I already do (writing and building sites), and I'm also very leery of what kind of Computer STDs you could catch from these ad-heavy fly-by-night faucets. But it really looks like it would be a battle to just make a couple bucks a day at these rates.
The only seemingly in-depth "analysis" of earnings per day I've seen of these are loaded with referral links for every faucet they mention, so I don't trust any of the numbers I've seen. The only one I've found that seems honest is from two years ago, but it's in line with my expectations for average earnings from these sites - about 50 cents an hour at best.
My BS detector says this is a real bad time investment, and the whole cryptocurrency faucet system should be ignored. If you have a positive experience to share, though, I'd love to hear about it in the comments - just please don't attach any referral links or the post will be deleted.
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