What’s A Faucet?

Usage

Users will visit the website and enter their Bitcoin address into a form. They will be prompted to solve a Captcha image before claiming the Bitcoins, in order to prevent robots from abusing the site. The user will then be given a certain amount of Bitcoins, usually randomly decided by the system from a list of possible rewards, and the amount is typically in satoshi, the smallest denomination of Bitcoin.

After claiming Bitcoin from a site, the system will set a fixed time, usually from a few minutes to an hour. After that time has passed, you will be able to claim Bitcoins from the same site again.

There are different types of faucets. Some are drip faucets, which will credit your account on their site with small amounts of Bitcoins every few seconds. Once you have collected a certain amount of satoshi on their site, you will be able to cash out those earnings to your Bitcoin wallet. Drip faucets typically award bonuses if you cash out on consecutive days.

Payouts

Most faucets pay to FaucetBOX or Paytoshi accounts. Registration on these sites is not required, they will automatically create your account when you claim Bitcoins on faucets that use them. Once you claim on a faucet, the faucet will send the amount you claimed to one of these sites, which will automatically create your account (if you don’t already have one) and credit it with that amount of Bitcoins. Remember to use the same Bitcoin address every time you claim, as that is what identifies you on FaucetBOX and Paytoshi.

You can always check your account balance on their home pages. You don’t need a password, only your Bitcoin address. Once you reach a certain payout threshold (which you can set), the site will pay the balance in your account to your Bitcoin address. Note that if you are using local wallets downloaded on your computer or phone, you might not want to set that threshold too low as that would mean more payouts, which could slow down your wallet with too many transactions.

Some faucets offer instant payout to Xapo users, so you can bypass holding Bitcoins on their site or on FaucetBOX or Paytoshi.

Sustainability

Faucet sites mostly rely on advertising. A number of them have pop-up ads that will inevitably open when you click the input field to enter your Bitcoin address. The costs of running a faucet don’t just cover the Bitcoins given out to faucet users, but also overall maintenance of the website.