Faucets are websites that pay us very small cryptocurrency amounts to view ads. I started using them on July 12th, 2019, when I was still on Steemit. Many people say that faucets are a waste of time, but still, I wanted to see if I could use them as an additional way of earning STEEM/SP besides post rewards. I didn't expect much at first, and even though the earnings are very small, they actually turned out to be bigger than my earnings with posts which were usually only a few pennies. I liked the results enough that I'm still diligently using faucets to this day.
I used to make weekly posts talking about how the faucets experiment was going, but since mid February 2020, there were so many ups and downs of crypto prices (mostly thanks to the coronavirus pandemic), conversion rates were unfavorable most of the time, and I chose to only accumulate the earnings and wait for a better time to withdraw and trade.
I wasn't inspired to post anything for a while. Things got ugly on Steemit while I was away, and the Hive fork happened. One day, I randomly decided to browse the blogs I follow, and suddenly found myself with the same account on two blockchains (It was a surprise that I even had the same balance on Hive. Yay for free crypto from forks!), and it took me a while to fully understand what was going on, what had been duplicated to the Hive chain and what had not, what tribe tokens (like PALcoin etc.) had migrated to Hive and what were not. But months later, here I am, and it seems to be a good time to trade my faucet earnings, in time to celebrate one year of faucets, but now on Hive instead of Steemit.
From the last time I posted in mid February until July 12th, I earned 166,067 satoshi, traded for 66.526 HIVE through the BlockTrades website. 4.141 STEEM had come before the fork(Steemd transaction link) and turned into HIVE when I got the airdrop equivalent to my STEEM balance, and 62.385 HIVE were converted at once recently, already on HIVE (Hiveblocks transaction link).
Image source: Wikimedia Commons, by Busy Stubber at English Wikipedia, effects by Ysangkok [Public domain].
As for other ways of increasing SP (and now HP) that aren't from post rewards, I had been delegating to 
From mid February to July 12th, the sum of my earnings from both of these small investments was 26.726 STEEM. Since both of these were only paying out in STEEM and BlockTrades unfortunately doesn't support STEEM transfers anymore, I had to deposit my earnings to Steem Engine, buy HIVEP and withdraw the HIVEP to my Hive account. I ended up losing a bit between trade prices and deposit/withdraw fees, and the total ended up becoming 25.512 HIVE.
I wish these earnings would go directly to the Hive side of things, so that I wouldn't have to go through multiple trades and deposit/withdraw fees... even though the Brazilians project supports authors both on Steemit and Hive, it seems they are only paying delegation returns on Steemit for now. As 0.38% a week is too good to pass up, for now, instead of powering everything down and sending it all to Hive, I plan to keep the delegation where it is (since I'm inactive on Steemit and my SP isn't being used for anything, I can delegate most of it to Brazilians). If they begin giving returns on Hive, then I'll finally power down my SP and fully move my delegation to Hive. On the other hand, Qurator is already on Hive, but not the QuratorToken. The token will remain on Steemit and continue paying out as long as the Qurator account has SP and gets curation rewards. As the diminishing earnings from the tokens aren't very appealing to me, though, I think I'll sell all the tokens while there are people who still want them.
Anyway, summing the faucet earnings and the investment earnings, I got 92.038 HIVE, which I've powered up. From this entire year using faucets, I got 198.097 HP only from the faucets, or 252.338 HP if I also add the returns from the delegations and QuratorTokens. I think the results were quite good!
I didn't expect much of this faucets experiment when I began, but now I consider it a success. I intend to continue using faucets, but I'm considering saving my earnings to use them for something else instead of turning them into HP. If I accumulate the earnings during a few months, maybe I can finally realize my dream of paying something in the "physical world" with earnings from crypto...
If anyone else is interested in earning HIVE through faucets and would like to use the same faucet websites as me, here's a post with in depth explanations of how each one works. The post is old and some things have changed (like the minimum withdraw values and how many times I use the faucets per day), but everything else is still the same. I might write a new post with more tips if there's interest.
