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I’ll admit, I was a little late getting into Bitcoin, but given that its worth still seems to be trending upward, I have started getting some of my payouts in Bitcoin instead of Paypal. Granted, it fluctuates a bit wildly, so if you are intending to use your payouts as soon as you get them, then Bitcoin might not be the best way to get paid.
Multiple, multiple websites have sprung up in the past couple of years (or longer, but that’s how long I’ve noticed) offering, as they almost all say, to “let your computer mine for Bitcoin”. In a sense, I suppose that you can get Bitcoin for doing the simple tasks that these websites require, but you certainly won’t get a Bitcoin doing it. (One Bitcoin, as of this writing, is worth about $2400.)
Instead, you will get paid in Satoshi. A Satoshi, for the uninitiated, is 0.00000001 of a Bitcoin, which means that, at present, it is worth approximately $0.000024. Or, more accurately, not much. You would need about 417 Satoshi to get one penny at the above exchange rate.
I have tried out a few Bitcoin faucets now. Pretty much all the faucets I have seen follow the same format: click a box, solve the captcha, receive Satoshi, wait a few minutes, repeat. Unfortunately, I have found some disheartening trends across those faucets. First, the first faucet I found continually reduced the payouts (so that the payouts are now regularly below 200 Satoshi); then, to add insult to injury, the faucet doubled the time between payouts.
But the overall trend with regard to faucets is simply this:
The amount of money received from Bitcoin faucets, for the work and time involved, is simply not worth it.
Seriously, if you have anything better to do than clicking over to your faucet of choice every ten minutes, 15 minutes, 60 minutes, or whatever, then you probably would be wasting your time to try the faucet out. The faucet mentioned above, with its current payout, paid every ten minutes (instead of the previous five), might get you a penny an hour. Might.
Now, if you don’t have anything better to do and want to give one of those Bitcoin faucets a try, here are my thoughts on the ones I have used:
- D’Alien Games: This one started out so promising (when I first checked into Bitcoin faucets, about two months ago), paying out 500-1000 Satoshi every five minutes. As stated above, now it pays about 120-200 Satoshi every ten minutes. Pays on Mondays, once you have reached 20,000 Satoshi. I used to be able to get paid every week, but not anymore.
- Bonus Bitcoin: Promises a higher potential payout every 15 minutes, but a lot of times, I received way less than 100 Satoshi. Also, users have to get 50,000 Satoshi to get a payout without Bonus Bitcoin taking its pound of flesh, so it took a long time to get paid. I got paid once (simply because I’m stubborn) and let this one go. You should also be warned that this site likes to play loud commercial videos and will occasionally send you to another site, just because.
- People BTC: This one only gave out Satoshi every hour, but their payouts were generally much better than the other two faucets. Generally I received 2000-3000 Satoshi per hour, which still wasn’t much, but since there was only one captcha per hour instead of, say, six, the payout per captcha entered was much higher. I never got paid from this site. Unfortunately, that site now shows an “account suspended” page, so this was the biggest disappointment of all the sites I tried.