In an early burst of hopefulness I signed up for all sorts of things in Cryptoland that I never would have bothered with back in USDollarland. Based on a couple of reviews I had seen and judgments from the anonymous internet that many of these crypto faucets sites were legit, I signed up for sites like Cointiply, SurveyTime, and FreeEthereum.com pretty much right away. I didn't have high expectations, but still, some part of me thought I would be swapping free crypto for fancy seasonal lattes in no time flat!
You might have heard that Cryptoland is full - FULL - of thousands of different coins. When I took the plunge as a cryptonoob, I had heard of BTC and ETH, and even XRP because of trouble with US regulators, and that was it. After a day on FreeEthereum.com, I scrolled all the way down for the first time and saw a bunch of other faucets. In a surge of excitement, I also signed up for a bunch. Not all of them, but several. I had a veritable football stadium bathroom's worth of faucets. Here is the list of faucets in my corner of the FreeBlanketyBlank.com Cryptomatic Multiverse:
FreeEthereum.com
FreeChainlink.io
FreeCardano.com
FreeBinance.com (wouldn't you like to have some of that right now?)
Free-LTC.com
FreeTron.com
and, for some reason the last one I signed up for was FreeBitcoin.io
And to cap it off, about 2 weeks after signing up for all that stuff, I signed up for FreeBitco.in. I'll mention that site after dealing with all the FreeBlanketyBlank.com sites.
So, after 1 month grinding away in the Faucet Mines, is there anything that actually works? Can you get actual crypto in your wallet? Is a month long enough?
In a nutshell, no. Not really. With an exception or two that might still be worth your time.
Surprise, surprise, it turns out that no one actually wants to take BTC from their pockets and give it to you. But the distance between that fantasy and the reality of all my hopeful clicks was a lot farther than I thought it would be.
Let me give you the breakdown. Each FreeBlanketyBlank.com site has the same loose format. You can click the Roll button once an hour, and about once every day or so, you can stalk their Twitter feed and get another free roll. You will shortly see why I don't bother with that. A graphic of spinning digits whirs for a bit and then gives you your number from 0-10,000. According to a banner across the top of each faucet says it is "Provably Fair" which my brain reads, every single time, as "Probably Fair." I really don't know what that means but you can check something about their system if you like somehow. If you roll 0-9,885 you get the equivalent of $.03 in the site's coin. In the case of BTC, they just give you .00000001. A Satoshi. Higher rolls get you a decimal place's worth more, so $.30, then $3.00, then $30.00 and finally the grand prize, $300.00 for a perfect roll of 10,000.
I want to pause and acknowledge that what I am about to reveal does not reflect well on me, but it is the sad truth, so be gentle.
I have clicked "Roll" 265 times on each of these sites. In a month. And I actually still have a real job. It seems very pitiful, but I will always be honest with you. Pitiful, right? In my defense, I have found that it is OK-ish because I open a new tab on BRAVE browser, which feeds me an ad about every 4 new tabs, so I am also earning BAT. Is that OK? I have been in the Faucet Mines too long to know anymore...
What size truck do I need to bring my haul to the bank?
I will start with BTC in Satoshi, then list all of them with US$.
BTC - .00000265. That's right, I rolled under 9,885 265 times. I am that good.
And now in US dollars:
ETH - $.15
LINK - $.09
ADA - $.09
BNB - $.12
LTC - $.09
TRX - $.06 (oh Tron...)
BTC - $.12
As near as I can tell, I have never gotten anything better than the minimum (otherwise at least one of the tallies would be $.36 or more), so the difference in value is due to the different price performance of the underlying coins.
Fair? Well... For convenience sake, let's assume I had equal rolls on each site (sometimes individual sites are down, but let's say this occurs at random). That means I rolled 265 times on 7 sites. That's 1,855 rolls. According to their Provably Fair chart, there is about a 1.34% chance of getting something, anything, other than the minimum roll. I should have gotten 30 or so hits of 30 cents or more, I guess, but I got it 0. Either correct my math or agree that I am the least lucky dude alive. Or, come to your own conclusions about how Fair it is.
In order to withdraw my great wealth, I need a minimum of $12.00 or so. As you can see, after only 1 month, I am nearly 1% of the way to going to Starbucks and getting whatever seasonal latte they will have waiting for me in the year 2029.
Now, I promised I would talk about FreeBitco.in. You detectives out there will notice that I am including a referral link for this site, but not the FreeBlanketyBlank.com sites. That's a clue. To be brief, FreeBitco.in is a faucet site that also has a lot of other things going on. Wheels of Fortune, its own exchange-listed coin, the chance to win a Lambo bruh! You name it. Lots going on. But I only do the faucet and the daily Wheel spin. The faucet seems to pay out differently for different folks. I'm based in the US, which seems like a pretty crappy country to be doing crypto stuff in because the base payout is .00000002, only 2 Satoshi. Ouch, that's only 2x the FreeBlanketyBlank.com site. Here is my total as of right now on the site. Remember I have only been using this site for 2 weeks, 1/2 the time as the other sites
BTC - .00002025
Still not much, but it's $1.00 more than the blanketyeffingblank.com faucet. I could get a seasonal latte later this year, man!
What are my recommendations?
When I started writing this article, I had every intention of continuing to open a new tab for BAT and clicking Roll on FreeBlanketyDiaperPoo.com just like I have been. But after doing this analysis, I would rather punch my own eyes out. NOT WORTH IT!!!!
But I am a stubborn guy and I love FREE, so how about the winner of this analysis? I'm going to stick with it like the dummy I am. I am slowly but surely accumulating on FreeBitco.in, the site seems very transparent, and if you sign up for alerts, you get 1 free spin of the wheel of fortune every day. The most common payouts are essentially useless Lottery Tickets (minute chances in their drawings), mostly useless Reward Points (need hundreds of thousands to do anything), and occasionally 40 or so extra Satoshi. I like that it is predictable and easy to use, so I can recommend it for people who are OK grinding on faucets for the spare Satoshi (like me!). It would be great if you wanted to use my referral. This is a Faucet-Plus site as they also host sports betting and lots of ways you can wager (aka, lose) your Satoshi in the hopes of getting more.
The other Faucet-Plus site I really like right now is Cointiply (my referral link). I wrote a guide to how I made $50 from nothing in 3 weeks on Cointiply if you are interested in learning my tips. Lots of ways to gain real value here.
Another site I use all the time and see big potential - for the patient - is BetFury (my referral link), which I already mentioned up above. It is a gambling site that has a generous-by-today's-standards faucet that they probably hope lures people into getting used to gambling and then depositing their own Crypto to lose. If you can control yourself though, it is a steady source of BTC, and can even be leveraged to gain ETH and BNB.
I want to close with two quick tips that will always pay off, especially in a place as complex as Cryptoland.
1. Just go head and check for sure. While writing up this post, I was going to just say "I have been monkeying around with these sites for about three weeks" because I figured that was would be good enough for something low stakes like a single blog post. However, in my other work, I forced myself to develop the habit of just checking. I mean, we live in a world where people pumped millions into the wrong stock, over and over again because it had a similar name (remember Zoom?). You can't eff around with guesstimates when it comes to investing. I think that is especially true for crypto. Anyway, I realized that I had kept the "welcome to free blanketyblank .com" emails, so I just went ahead and checked. I think that is a rule to live by in this domain.
2. Do the math. Again, I was going to take a shortcut in estimating how many times I had rolled for free blanketyblank on these faucets. I mean, who keeps track. Well, free blanketyblank keeps track - in fact, that's what my wallet, as feeble as it is, tells me. To determine how many times I had used these faucets, I only needed the least common denominator proportionate to the dollar value of the coin, and then to divide that by the lowest payout. The first step is just a way of saying that I might not have gotten the lowest payout every time, but if 5 of the faucets were all at a similarly meager level of coin and 1 or 2 were a bit higher, then the 5 most likely represented the total stash from a straight streak of lowest possible payouts. Doing your math is critical, critical, critical. I have a great example of how this has helped me a lot with BetFury, but that is covered in my guide to maximizing BetFury through patience rather than luck.
