Free crypto comes at a price

Even if the sums that can be earned from bitcoin faucets today are miniscule, you might reason that they’re worth using anyway. After all, just like with Andresen’s faucet in 2010, holding onto the Satoshis you receive could prove a highly profitable play a few years from now. That’s why ‘stacking sats’ is a very popular, and sensible, bitcoin philosophy.

While it’s true that bitcoin could be worth significantly more in the future than it is today, the greatest exponential growth occurred in bitcoin’s early years when it was still being discovered. Thus, a few dollars’ worth of bitcoin earned from faucets today probably isn’t going to make you rich, no matter how long you hodl, but 4x in a year does suggest that there is some upside.

As a reality check, look at this faucet payout schedule in USD from early 2020

• Min withdrawal: 2.48 USD
• Min transaction fees: 0.066USD
•  0.0017 USD dispensed per hour so 1 USD = 588 hours
• A faucet user would have to spend 73 working days accumulating BTC to meet cash out thresholds

73 Days
Time required constantly hitting a Faucet to reach 
minimum withdrawal

Clearly that is a lot of effort for such a small reward, though you do have to factor the increase in BTC price of 400% in 2020.

If you are clear about the effort/reward dynamic, it shouldn’t deter you from experimenting with faucets; they’re a useful way to acquire BTC for free and familiarise yourself with how a bitcoin wallet works, given they are built into your faucet account. 

Faucets are also gamified, so there is a fun element and combined with some of other suggestions in our Earn Crypto section, can add up to a modest sum which you might then apply other tactics to grow further, such as trading or gambling.

That being said, those “free” coins you earn every time you interact with a faucet come with a price, namely your time, attention, and data.

Faucet operators aren’t giving away bitcoin out of the goodness of their hearts; they’re doing for commercial purposes. Typically because they earn money from advertisers for forcing you to watch commercials or submit your personal data, which is used for marketing purposes. 

In some cases users are encourage to try and gamble with their free bitcoin on casino games, to win their way to a sum that can be withdrawn. Given the bitcoin came for free you may not see any issue with this, but the idea is to habituate the playing on games such that you end depositing your own bitcoin. The faucet funds are the proxy for free spins at a regular online casino.

You may conclude that this doesn’t sit well with Bitcoin and everything it stands for: financial freedom and the ability to transact in relative privacy.

Most sites that offer free bitcoin via faucets do not disclose how your data is used or who it’s shared with. After weighing the evidence, you might find that faucets simply aren’t worth the trade-offs they carry, or mitigate this by using an email especially for this purpose.

Not all faucets work the same, however, and you may find some that provide a fairer deal in terms of what they demand of you and reward you. Assess each site on its own merits, and decide whether the faucet in question is worth your time and precious data.

Benefits to using bitcoin faucets:

• Can claim free BTC on a regular basis.
• No requirement to already own cryptocurrency.
• Little technical knowledge required.
• Multiple faucets can be used to maximise earnings.

Drawbacks to using bitcoin faucets:

• Only dispense small quantities of BTC at a time (usually a few cents’ worth).
• Many faucets have a minimum withdrawal threshold, meaning you can’t claim your coins until you’ve earned enough from the faucet.
• Require sharing your data with third parties.

If you like the idea of earning free cryptocurrency, but aren’t convinced by the concept of faucets, there are plenty of other ways to acquire crypto for free, as you’ll discover in our next guide.