Eighth Week of Faucet Earnings, and a Short Interview

This time, I had thought the STEEM earnings (converted from the crypto I get from faucets) would drop quite a bit. It was another busy week for me, and one of the faucets (Bonus Bitcoin, the one that pays the most) was down for three days, and I couldn't get neither satoshi or CoinPot Tokens from it during those days... also, the CoinPot website is being too slow to update my number of faucet claims, and failed to detect the times I grinded and actually managed to complete their "100 faucet claims in a day" challenge, so less bonus CoinPot tokens for me. In the end I earned 4,251 satoshi, converted to 0.00560819 Dash. I traded the Dash through BlockTrades and got 2.843 STEEM (Steemd transaction link), quite a bit more than I had expected (even more than last week when the faucet earnings were bigger)! This is probably thanks to the still low STEEM prices.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons, by Busy Stubber at English Wikipedia, effects by Ysangkok [Public domain].

Aside from that, I took most of the SP I bought for investing and increased my delegation to Brazilians to 200 SP. The weekly payment I got for this was 0.760 STEEM (quite nice), and the amount I got for having 5.400 QuratorTokens was 0.049 STEEM. Added to the faucet earnings, my power up amount for this time was 3.652 SP. Great!

A Short Interview

In the weekend, something interesting happened. @minimining, who has a blog (in Swedish and English) about ways to earn cryptocurrencies, decided to interview me after seeing my faucet posts. Below are the questions and my answers:

When did you start with crypto and why? In which country do you live?

I live in Brazil. I first heard of cryptocurrencies in 2013, when I came across an open source software project accepting donations in Bitcoin, but I didn't pay much mind to crypto until 2017 when my country's mainstream media began talking about the subject. It was only then that I became really interested and began reading up on cryptos and following the news. Now, one of my dreams is to somehow earn an extra income in crypto and be able to use that to pay for products and services at normal stores (maybe through some of those crypto debit cards, though I'm not sure if there's any here in Brazil yet).

You earn crypto with faucets. What is that? What do you do?

Faucets are websites that earn money from advertisements and share their earnings with users, as very small cryptocurrency payments. To get the free cryptocurrencies, users must solve a captcha on a page full of ads. Faucets pay very little, and no one should expect to be able to pay the bills using faucet earnings, but faucets may be a good way to introduce beginners to cryptocurrencies, to have them learn in practice the basics, like how to create a wallet and transfer crypto to it.

There are four faucet websites that I claim from more regularly, and three others that I use only occasionally because they're very slow to load on my computer. Sometimes I visit the websites either when I remember or want to take a short break from work, and other times I leave the browser with the websites open and go do my normal activities, and when I hear the websites' sounds that indicate coins are available to claim again, I go there to quickly claim the crypto from each website, then go back to doing my things. If I am too busy, I claim from the faucets less often.

At the end of each week, I use a website called BlockTrades (which lets us easily trade one cryptocurrency for another) and trade what I earned from the faucets for STEEM (the cryptocurrency of the platform of the same name, from the Steemit.com social network). I use these small bucks to help grow my account on said social network. What I earn from participating there is also very little, so any extra earnings to improve the account already helps.

How much do you earn? How much time do you spend?

On average, I earn around 4,300 satoshi (0.00004300 BTC) in a week. Converted to US Dollars, it's really little (something like 44 USD cents at the moment I'm writing this, with Bitcoin worth around 10,300 USD). For these minuscule gains, using faucets may seem like a waste of time, but for my purpose of complementing my earnings from the STEEM platform, which are currently also just pennies, I think it's valid. Actually, I'm earning more STEEM from the faucets than from posting at the social media, so, at least for me, it's good enough for now. The STEEM price is currently very low, but I hope it will recover and rise eventually. If this happens, every penny I've accumulated over time both from posts and from faucets will have been worth it in the long run.

As for how much time I spend at the faucets, going through the four websites takes around two minutes in total (five minutes if I also include the three slower sites, so I don't use them much). I hadn't actually counted the total time I spend at the faucets per day, but I estimate around one hour and a half on the days when I have more time to claim from the faucets, and a bit less than an hour when I don't have much time. This isn't counting the delay minutes between claims, because I'm usually doing something else while I wait for the next claim time to come.

Do you think this is the best way to earn free crypto?

In theory, I think that a better way to earn crypto for free would be to take surveys. Even the faucet websites I use have a section listing surveys that pay more than 3,000 satoshi each. However, in practice, I was unable to take any survey so far. Most survey websites asked me to register and fill a form with personal information I wasn't willing to give, and I gave up on those. The websites which don't need that had me spend half an hour answering lots of questions, and in the end I didn't qualify for any survey. I know that the faucet earnings aren't the best, but at least I'm consistently earning something. Other people may have better luck with surveys depending on the country where they live or some other factor, but in my case taking surveys didn't work out, and I gave up for the moment. I might try again some other day when I have more patience.

Closing words

These questions were fun to answer! A thank you to @minimining for this opportunity and for inspiring me to write all this!

If anyone else wants to use the faucet websites I'm using, here's a post with more details and tips.