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Bitcoin faucets have been around ever since Bitcoin started out more or less. The idea of faucets is simple – visit the faucet in order to get a small amount of Bitcoin to experience your first Bitcoin transaction.
The first Bitcoin faucet ever created was made by Gavin Andresen on late 2010. The faucet gave out 5 whole Bitcoins to every user (at the time these were worth around 8 cents). Since then Bitcoin has developed and so did the faucets.
Today faucets are used mostly by people trying to earn Bitcoin micro-income. Faucets nowadays supply a small amount of Satoshis (anywhere between 50-10,000) every few minutes. Some of the more notable faucets are Bitcoin Aliens, Milli and Bitcoinker.
Setting up a faucet is pretty hard for the average user since you need to have some programing knowledge in order to set up the system. However, lately a new Bitcoin faucet WordPress plugin was created that allows any wordpress user to set up his own faucet.
The process is pretty simple and requires basic knowledge in operating the WordPress CMS. The plugin is currently in its Beta stages, which means that users may encounter bugs here and there but the developers are quick to respond and take care of them. Support is done mainly through the comment section on the plugin page.
You may be asking yourself what’s the incentive for running a Bitcoin faucet? Well the answer is of course money. Faucet owners are able to make money from ads due to the huge amount of traffic these Bitcoin faucets are getting. In fact some of the most highly visited sites inside the Bitcoin ecosystem are Bitcoin faucets.
In the past, faucets monetized their traffic through Google Adsense, but in the last few years Google started to ban faucet traffic from their Adsense program. Today most of the faucet sites will use different Bitcoin ad networks in order to monetize their traffic and revenue can accumulate to a few hundred dollars a month.
On the downside, Bitcoin faucets create a lot of dust transactions in the Bitcoin network since users are getting sent very small amounts of Bitcoin on a daily basis. That’s why a large part of the Bitcoin community opposes to the concept of these Bitcoin faucets.
Recently a list of posts was published on the journey for creating Milli – one of the more popular Bitcoin faucets today. The posts detail the many obstacles, failures and accomplishments along the way.
It’s hard to say what the future holds for Bitcoin faucets buy for now it doesn’t seem like they are going to go away anytime soon. As Bitcoin’s price continues to rise probably so will the popularity of faucets.
Cover Image via Flooring Florida
