Crypto Exploration Update - Part III (BTC faucets & Earn.com)
BTC Faucets
Over the last two weeks we've been checking out some BTC faucets. In case you're unfamiliar, a faucet - in the crypto sense - is usually a simple website that requires human interaction in order to pay out a very small amount of coins.
An example would be entering captcha to earn 100 satoshis (.00000100 BTC) or about $0.01 USD.
The point of most faucets is to help get a currency into wider circulation. It hands the currency out for almost free, which in turn encourages people to do all sorts of things with it.
Unfortunately, most of the BTC faucets these days are not worth the time - other than to just play around with them. Even if one could manage to deal with the sheer drudgery of repeatedly taking the required action, the amount earned would be pitiful. And then most of the earnings would be lost to fees when transferred. That said, with our experience so far, there are a couple that stand apart from the rest and we've deemed worth the time - even if just barely.
Freebitco.in
While this site has many offerings, it's primary one is a free hourly spin to win some BTC. Basically, most rolls will yield you 20-30 satoshis - but if you roll a high enough number you can earn more. Each roll also nets you a few lottery tickets which are automatically entered into a weekly drawing for more BTC. The process of rolling previously required more effort, entering captcha - sometimes several times, but now it's a simple "I'm not a robot" checkbox and then you can roll. As such, it should not take more than 10 seconds to complete a roll.
First place in the lottery is usually 1 BTC+, not bad for free-almost-no-effort tickets.
MinerFarm.com
MinerFarm is a BTC faucet wrapped up as a game. As far as gameplay goes, it's really slow. On the scale of months if you don't invest your own BTC to speed things up. When you sign up, you will be given a virtual 100GH/s miner and a power supply. You'll automatically be joined to the default mining pool and you can start virtually mining BTC. Out of your earnings, you'll pay several different kinds of artificially created fees like electricity and maintenance. There is a degradation system that will track wear and tear on the machines and even personnel that you can hire to alleviate some of those issues.
There is a store where you can purchase new equipment and personnel and an exchange where you can supposedly trade those same items with other players, though it looked pretty dead to us.
We just did the free sign up and we're not planning on putting any BTC into the platform. If it eventually mines enough so that we can purchase more equipment, we might do that. In about two weeks, we've mined 0.00016862 BTC after fees.
One major downside to the platform is that the equipment will shut off if the player doesn't log in for a few days. It doesn't take long to log in, or to turn the equipment back on in the case that it does shut off, but it seems a bit unnecessary.
Earn.com
We're not even sure how this platform popped onto our radar, but it's getting more and more of our attention lately. The premise is this: people get a lot of email, so why not make people pay for the option to send you a message - with some assurance that you'll respond to them. That way, individuals who get a lot of inbound communication can raise the bar for who can reach out to them. On the flip side, if someone has a legitimate reason to reach out - for example, with a business proposal, they know they're not sending it into the void.
After registering, using your real name/info, you'll be prompted for the amount that you would like people to pay to receive a response from you. Right now, the options are $1, $5, $20 and $100 - interestingly, there is no ability to set a custom amount. Your registration will then go through a review and approval process which can take a couple days. Once approved, you're set to start receiving paid messages and you can join lists.
Lists are groups of people with a specific skill set or experience. This could be something like knowing SQL or having purchased Ethereum. Lists are how you expose yourself to buyers looking for sets of people they want to message.
So, has anyone paid to message?
Yep! Initially, we added ourselves to the Airdrop list, so we've been receiving messages from new platforms and coins that are doing airdrops. Most times, this involves supplying an Ethereum address, joining their Telegram channel, and signing up for their newsletter. Occasionally, there are additional steps like survey questions or a signup but most requests take less than 5 minutes. In addition to receiving the tokens to the provided Ethereum address when the airdrop occurs, we also receive $1 on Earn.com as soon as we complete the task.
After receiving about 10 requests over the last week, we just recently added ourselves to more lists. We'll see if that affects the requests coming in.
As you can see below, we've received about $10 in BTC in our Earn account.
Do you have any faucets that you use - BTC or otherwise? Any thoughts or questions on Earn.com or the idea of paying to message people? Let us know in the comments.
This is Part III in a series. Here are links to Part I and Part II. Next up is Part IV: OpenBazaar.