The adventure begins...
Welcome to the first of many posts about creating and running your own Bitcoin (or any other altcoin) faucet. I have just recently created my own faucet and I intend to use my own learning experience as inspiration for my posts. If I found something challenging, there is a good chance you might also find it worth some extra attention. So, it'll be faucets 101 from a n0ob perspective, written for other n0obs.
First some shameless self promoting. To see an example of what I'm talking about, visit my faucet KemaBTC. I'll be using this faucet when I need to give examples of something.
Not limited to, but some of the topics I'll be looking into.
- Getting started
- Hosting
- Software
- Monetizing
- Promoting
- Resources
Getting Started
So, you've decided you want to create your own facet? There are some very basic considerations you will want to start with.
There is of course Bitcoin but there are also many many altcoins out there and you can find faucets for quite a few of them. Your choice of currency will bring both benefits and limitations. Bitcoin is the big kid on the block and any faucet scripts out there will (to my knowledge) support Bitcoin. When it comes to altcoins it's not so simple anymore.
Some faucet scripts will support altcoins while other won't. What payment system do you want to use? There are several microwallets that are very good at handling faucet payouts but there is also the option of sending the coin straight to a wallet address. Your choice of payment system will help you but it'll also limit you at the same time. What kind of security do you want for your faucet? There are plenty of bots out there who will try to exploit your faucet given the opportunity. So, some form of captcha will likely have to be implemented to keep the bots out and verifying human visitors. Are you interested strictly in security or is user friendliness just as important? How good are you at coding? Most faucet scripts use a combination of HTML, PHP, Javascript and SQL. If you're not a coding wizard you might want to consider finding a n0ob friendly faucet script?
Myself I decided to stick with Bitcoin. Everything will be compatible with Bitcoin, you will have less worries about currency conversions and it's the most well known crypto currency with a large following. In my next post I'll start providing some examples that will help you get your feet wet.
See you soon, and don't forget to upvote this post.