So, having read a number of articles on coin faucets, I decided to give it a try. Why not, right? Free crypto currency is not to be sneezed at. Now, I have been doing this for about a week or two, using coinfaucet.io on the Brave browser and thought I'd let you know my findings and let you make up your own mind.
Firstly, Coinfaucet.io has 14 crypto coins/tokens including some of the big names: Eth, BTC, Cardano, Binance, XRP, USDT, USDC, and so I thought...well this looks attractive from the get go!
Then I started to play around a bit and it was really super easy. You get one spin per hour (think casino) on each crypto currency. They claim you can earn more spins by watching their adverts but that never seemed to work for me. Just doing the one spin per hour was enough though frankly anyway, and every few hours it gets you to prove on each spin that you are not a bot by selecting all squares in a grid that contain a traffic light, or bicycle or boat or plane etc....you get the picture if you've done anti-bot validations before.
Now, the way in which it allocates percentages of crypto to you is based on the value of your spin and these potential values are tiered. So spin in the top tier and you earn $300 of that crypto coin/token, spin in the lowest tier and you earn $0.0003 of that coin...and you earn factors of 10 in between the lowest and highest tier (see image below).
Now the problem is that not once have I got anything but the lowest tier in all the spins I have made which has been in excess of 1000 total and reading up in forums I have discovered that nobody seems to have ever seen a number above 9880 on a spin, which would earn you the dollar value equivalent of whichever currency of $0.0003 per spin.
So let's see how this pans out if you "play" this coin faucet game for a year and never get anything but the lowest tier spin (which makes sense as given the bracketed values, if you want to "win" a decent value, let's say even the the second lowest tier of $0.003 (so almost 1/3 of a cent, then you would have odds of 115/10,000 of getting that, and the odds get worse as you climb the tiers)).
Anyway let's calculate:
There are 24 hours in day but you need to sleep 8 and work 8 so let's say you do 8 spins per day per coin. If you don't have to do the anti-bot validation then a full set of 14 spins to cover all cryptos takes 2 minutes. I timed it! Let's multiply that by 8 spins per day per crypto and you are looking at 16 minutes of each day spent spinning a little crypto barrel on your smart phone. By the end of this you will see...not so smart!
16 mins per day multiplied by 356 days in the year gives you a total time investment of: 5696 minutes or 94.93 hours or 4 full days of your life, or discounting sleeping time and working time, approximately 12 days of free time. Do you know what you are likely to get in return for that mammoth sacrifice? I can tell you because it is easy to calculate: you will get $0.0003 x 14 crypto coins x 8 spins x 356 days = $11.96. This equates to $0.12/hour.
Now, I don't know about you but my time is much more valuable than that.
I have recently read that some coin faucets also include options to do surveys and that these are not too bad in giving more decent returns so I may check out Cointiply (being one of them) and let you know how I go on that. But I personally cannot recommend that anyone wasteS their lives spinning numbers on coinfaucet.io unless you're just wanting to muck around and practise setting up wallets and transferring crypto with no risk to your own wealth.
Haha this ties in nicely with my post earlier about faucets and the value of our time ;)