I've seen quite a few posts about crypto faucets recently. I reckon it's a sign that despite all the attempts by the SEC to push crypto prices down with regular doses of FUD and irrational regulation, we're actually just starting to creep into a bull market.
But I've got a few thoughts of my own on faucets.
Image by Jonas KIM from Pixabay
The Risk Factor
If you look at any faucet screen, it's full of offers, links and popups promising additional rewards and all kinds of other stuff. Often, it's not clear which are in-site links and which go to external sites. Many of them are shortened links.
Once you click on them, many of them take you to places where you have to do other actions to claim your reward - do a survey, sign up for an online casino, register on a website, or whatever.
I regard this as all highly risky. The question to ask yourself is "would I click this link if it came in an unsolicited email, or give these details to a random stranger ?" For most of us, having a spare device just to run faucets is not cost effective.
Without clicking all these links, you're limited to the most basic activity on the faucet - usually a once every 30 or 60 minutes spin to get a random payout.
The Earning Potential
I tried a faucet over the last 24 hours. It was Freepancake.com, where you win by doing an hourly spin. I guess I did about 10 spins, which is quite a damning indictment of how much time I spend in front of a computer. I earned .00228 CAKE, or about £0.00285.
Each spin only took about 30 seconds, but there's a definite opportunity cost in terms of watching the timer count down, and stopping whatever else you are doing then having to pick it up again.
I reckon I only need a couple of upvotes from this post to earn far more than the faucet made me !
Even if you could find enough different faucets, and not lose too much in fees when you withdraw from them, I can't see how you'd make anything even close to minimum wage or a living wage in most countries. I see the argument that if the sats you're stacking up increase in value, the effective earnings increase. The price would have to go up by many orders of magnitude for this to be the case !
A Better Alternative
Faucets do occasionally have uses as a way of (for example) picking up a few sats to be used to pay some fees in a crypto you don't otherwise hold. One or two of the ALGO faucets are useful for this.
But other than that, the work you have to do is, in my opinion, just not worth it unless you literally have nothing else to do with your time.
So if you are tempted, might I suggest you do this instead. Take that amount of time, and make some fiat with it. Do some overtime at work. Sell something on eBay. Whatever. Then take the fiat that gets you, convert it to HIVE, convert it again to HBD, stick it in savings and collect the 20% APY interest each month.
I'm pretty sure that if you do this, at the end of the year you'll have made a lot more money and all without getting trapped into a cycle of clicking once an hour like one of Pavlov's dogs.