How to get started with bitcoin (safely)

in #bitcoin6 years ago

I had some time to research and test a few things on how to get some free money. How do I start getting some Bitcoin without actually investing my own non-existent money? Well, even the 'free' money costs, in this case, it only costs time and cost of the Internet for all the time that you will be using to try and amass some crypto for free. At least you won't actually need to spend any actual money.

Note: I personally use all of the things listed here, I didn't have any issues so far in around a year of use, but you still need to use common sense, potentially large piles of cash are at stake here (if you are patient or lucky enough that is).

Option 1 (safest and most generous BTC faucet)

According to a few different sources Freebitco.in is the best and most generous place to start. It is a Bitcoin faucet that also functions as a wallet. They are paying some small interest to your balance once you reach 30k satoshi. To withdraw your funds you will need to amass 30k satoshi since that is the amount they set as a minimum. Considering how many people seem to use that faucet and how much traffic they have, they are quite generous.
It will take you around a month or two to get to 30k satoshi balance depending on your luck and in case you are not a gambling type since there is that quite tempting hi-lo dice game as one of the options on their site.

Option 2 (BTC mining with FaucetHub)

The faucet above used to have the same BTC mining setup before they removed it, most likely due to people like me complaining that the miner gives anti-virus warning for no reason. Right now FaucetHub has a nice mining option and a capacity to store funds taken from faucet linked to FaucetHub. This site works like a multi-coin wallet with an exchange so you can convert your funds between 5 or 6 major cryptocurrencies (there are currently 14 different ones available). This place works with the third-party faucets that work exclusively with FaucetHub so you can use those to slowly drip some coins to your wallets on the site and later either withdraw them to your own wallet or gamble them away or exchange them for other available coins. They seem quite nice as far as website support is concerned, I have been using that site for a while now and I haven't had any problems so far. They do however advise against using their service as a serious longterm wallet that holds a lot of funds, make of that what you will. I myself move over all my funds to a private wallet after I reach a certain margin. And I will never ever use those offer walls and surveys and other dodgy crap they offer, I can't trust it.

Option 3 (BTC mining with FaucetHub third-party faucets)

If you have decided to try out FaucetHub, you may have seen a lot of spam and tips and other things in the chat over there. FaucetHub does however clearly state that they are not responsible for any damages done to you and that you should watch out for scams. So while kind of annoying there are safe faucets that work FaucetHub reliably.

Once you have checked out FaucetHub you can go over to btcmines.club. They are reliable but they did run out of funds at one point so, people who used it and wanted to withdraw mined funds had to wait for around a day or so. No big deal. They require you to whitelist them from AdBlocker so they can function which is understandable as they only bounce you to a site with ads for you to fill in the captcha (worth noting that the process can misfire and send you to a wrong place at which point you can press a back arrow on the browser to go back to where you came from). They also link to other similar faucet sites which I didn't try out, but I assume they are operated by the same people and use the same philosophy.

With FaucetHub all third-party user created faucets require you to turn off AdBlocker and solve captchas on the pages full of ads, I do strongly advise you have a reliable anti-virus software that will protect you from various retarded websites that will pop-up from these. But, they do, most of the time payout in regular intervals as they advertise.

Bonus (secure private wallet)

Once you have enough funds from all the faucets you bothered with to get your free money, you should store it in a safe place, preferably one that will not be lost or hacked or whatever. I personally recommend Exodus, it is reliable, stores many different coins, can exchange them in between each other (minus transaction fee), it has all the prices for each coin listed in it, and it can transfer coins from and to different wallets. What more would you need?

Cheers!