What is a bitcoin and what are faucets?

Welcome to the Faucet Runner!

This site aims to provide visitors with the best information, tips and strategies to help them learn, and earn their first coins! To get the newbies from Beer Money and elsewhere started, here’s a bit of jargon busting:

What bitcoin/cryptocurrency?
You probably shouldn’t be asking that if you found this page, but no problem! A bitcoin is a unit of digital cryptocurrency; and cryptocurrency is a cryptographic medium of exchange..!

What are the units of currency I need to be concerned with?

• 0.00000001 Satoshi
• 0.00000100 uBTC/microbit
• 0.00001000 Kilobit
• 0.00100000 mBTC/millibit
• 0.01000000 Bitcent
• 1.00000000 Bitcoin

Most bitcoin faucets issue in satoshi, a sub-unit of bitcoin named after the founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. The satoshi is the smallest possible unit of bitcoin. $0.01c is worth 2200 satoshi (2.2 Kilobits) at the time of writing.

What are faucets?
Faucets are websites that pay visitors a small amount of cryptocurrency, on a fixed time, from 2 minutes, to 24 hours. The amount, and frequency you can claim depends from site to site. They are funded primarily by advertising revenue generated by visitors like me who are happy to exchange their clicking time for bitcoin. Some faucets pay directly to your wallet, while others send them to ‘micro’ wallet services – see below.

The idea of faucets originally was to introduce people to the concept of cryptocurrency with no investment or risk. The first bitcoin faucet was called Faucet Closed, ironically empty now and can be found here. It is interesting to see that all of the last sends appear to be from botted email accounts..

What is a wallet?
A wallet is basically a secure digital holder of your private Bitcoin key. It functions in a similar way to your real wallet – holding cards (or keys) that are linked to your bank account. Multiple keys can be generated, and using more than one key for your various Bitcoin transactions is highly recommended.

Wallets are available in several forms, ranging from the more secure, but harder to setup desktop wallets, to online wallets, and finally mobile wallets. You can find a great in depth article on wallet options here.

Here is a great, to the point video explaining it a bit more and with some key points on further security:

What is a microwallet?
A microwallet is a ‘micro’ version of a bitcoin wallet that collects micro-payments of bitcoin from faucets. Some faucets pay small amounts of satoshi to a microwallet provider such as Microwallet, Faucetbox and ePay. The first time you use a faucet, your account with the microwallet serive is automatically created for you.

Each microwallet has a threshold, usually around 5000 satoshi with ePay and Microwallet, and 10000 satoshi for Faucetbox. These thresholds aim to avoid the mandatory bitcoin network ‘miner’ fees. Once you have accumulated enough satoshi, the microwallet will automatically pay out to your main wallet.

Each individual bitcoin key is linked to its own microwallet, so keeping track of your keys is important!

Can faucet sites scam me?
Generally speaking, no. Your private key is anonymous and it can only receive bitcoin transactions that you authorize. Faucet websites are typically funded by ad revenue, generated by users like you and me who visit their sites. Unlike most websites, users are rewarded for their visits in small amounts of bitcoin. To prevent bots from collecting the coins, a CAPTCHA response is usually required.

Not only does it require money and an air of legitimacy to run a faucet, it also requires regular visitors who are satisfied enough to return, so scamming is highly unlikely.

What are the best faucet sites?
I will touch on the various types, and the best ones in a separate post. One of the overall best places to begin your journey, and the place I began is Land of Bitcoin. It features its own built in faucet, and allows you to rapidly surf over 100 faucets using its handy in-frame browser.

Can I become a millionaire?
No, in short. I am not one of those people who expects a satoshi to be worth $1 in the future, and I won’t speculate on that. It is possible to generate decent amounts with regular, planned ‘runs’ through selected faucets. This blog is all about increasing the efficiency of these runs, and to maximize the coin that you can earn! I am already a satoshi millionaire..