What Is A Bitcoin Faucet?
A Bitcoin Faucet is a website or app that gives away bitcoin for completing a simple task such as liking a tweet or playing a game.
The term faucet is used as a reference to a tap or valve for turning on the flow of free bitcoins.
The First Bitcoin Faucets
In the early days of Bitcoin, faucets began as a learning mechanism to incentivize new users to download a bitcoin walletWhat Is A Bitcoin Wallet? A Bitcoin wallet is an app or software that enables you to send, receive, and store bitcoin. Although the term "wallet" is commonly used, bitcoin... to accept and experiment with some bitcoin. As the first point of contact with bitcoin, new users could paste their address and receive some free bitcoin. Some of the very first bitcoin faucets gavre away more than a whole bitcoin since they had almost no use at the time.
As soon as people started to pay attention to Bitcoin, it didn’t take long before hackers programmed bot scripts that would outsmart these websites by automatically creating hundreds or even thousands of bitcoin addresses to receive small amounts of bitcoin and after a while, all of these microdonations would add up to a pretty substantial amount of bitcoin.
Bitcoin faucets have since evolved into a service for mining personal information for advertisers. The more primitive faucets require simple actions from the user like viewing a short video ad, becoming a member, join their mailing list or sometimes by clicking on an ad to a specific website. More advanced faucets will vet their users and only “give” you any bitcoin if you are a member of their target audience.
The Most Addicting Bitcoin Faucet
Most bitcoin faucets are nothing more than spammy flash in the pan type sites that offer no long-term value for the end-user which is why most of them die off after a while. Any sort of faucet will have something of value that users will want to come back any use consistently. If the site pays out, it tends to succeed.
Cointiply
Cointiply is a bitcoin faucet that does a small giveaway every hour along with the ability to play some basic games and click on some ads in exchange for their native tokens called “coins”. These coins are pegged to the dollar somehow and are displayed in both coins and satoshis so you can easily view your BTC balance.
BitKong
Some faucets can see the big picture and have found ways to keep their users coming back such as BitKong, a popular bitcoin gambling site that allows you to place simple wagers as you climb a ladder to win up to 10 bitcoins. BitKong offers up to 2000 free satoshis every 10 minutes (up to 50 times per user) with the hope that you will deposit more bitcoin and keep playing. In fact, they tote themselves as “The Most Addictive Bitcoin Game Ever” and judging by their numbers, they just might be the most successful bitcoin faucet ever.