Many early adopters who made a fortune from cryptocurrency first got their hands on coins by receiving them for free from bitcoin faucets back in the day. Today there are still a number of ways for you to get bitcoin for free including airdrops, giveaways, bounties, tipping, referral programs and faucets.
Also Read: How to Mine Bitcoin in 2020
How to Get Bitcoin Without Reaching for Your Credit Card
If you want to start stacking satoshis or test out using digital assets without having to spend any money, there are several options available for you to do so in 2020. This guide will present some of them before reviewing a few bitcoin faucets that are still operational today.
One of the best ways to get coins is to earn them from something that you already do. So if you have a website, blog or even just a large following of friends online, you can capitalize on that by joining a referral program that pays in crypto.
Bitcoin.com offers such a program for Bitcoin Games, a provably fair online casino where users can play popular games using BTC and BCH. It requires no registration and lets you earn up to 25% of the house edge on all bets made by people you direct to the platform, with no top limit on how much you can earn. To join this program all you have to do is go to the BCH referral page or the BTC referral page, and your account will already be automatically set up. There you can find your unique referral link and banners in many shapes and sizes to share. The same page can also be used to track your earnings and referral statistics.
Another referral program from the company is offered by the privacy-focused peer to peer exchange local.Bitcoin.com. It enables you to share your referral link with anyone you think might be interested in trading on the marketplace and earn BCH for every trade they make. Once you have an account on the platform, just visit the referral page to get a unique referral link that you can share with your friends. This link will take them to a signup page, and when they create an account they will be added to your list of referred users. You will earn 20% of fees incurred by their trades throughout the lifetime of their account.
Speaking of Bitcoin.com Local, the platform recently added a dedicated portal for buying and selling items in exchange for bitcoin cash. This Marketplace is a Craigslist-like venue for listing goods and services that allows anyone to earn BCH directly. So if you have an old smartphone or anything else you don’t use anymore you can sell it secondhand and turn it into free coins.
Other Ways to Earn
An additional way to sell your services for BCH is to become a bitcoin bounty hunter if you have the skills to spot software bugs or track down hackers. The Bitcoin Bounty Hunter service from Bitcoin.com allows people to anonymously crowdsource payments for completing tasks and get paid in bitcoin cash, with more than $280,000 in bounties currently available on the platform.
Another way to get some free tokens is giveaways. Many in the crypto community are committed to spreading adoption and if you follow influencers on Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and other community forums you’ll sometimes find someone who will be willing to send you some satoshis just to get you started. For example, about four moths ago Bitcoin.com Executive Chairman Roger Ver announced on Facebook he was giving away a total of $5,000 worth of BCH to his friends and anyone on the social network that posted a bitcoin cash address in response to the message.
Before trying this, take note that there are a lot of scammers in the field impersonating influencers, so you have to watch out for red flags and never send William Shatner or Elon Musk any coins if they promise to send you back 100x more.
Crypto communities also like to reward active members with free tokens from time to time. In the BCH ecosystem we can see this with the Lead SLP token which you can earn in a number of ways such as helping new users learn about bitcoin cash by hosting meetups, introducing BCH to businesses that will adopt it for payments and more.
Tipping is also popular in some crypto communities and allows people to be rewarded for their participation with free coins. In January 2020 it was reported that in just one week close to $6,000 in BCH was tipped to authors on read.cash, the blogging website that lets readers boost content creators with bitcoin cash upvotes.
Airdrops are a way for projects to introduce a new token that’s just been added to a trading platform by handing some out to users for free. To find these you need to follow the online conversation around projects you like in community forums and social media, where you’re sure to come across new airdrops from time to time. And sometimes exchanges also offer less direct ways to get new coins they list such as Coinbase Earn. This is a service meant to incentivize people to learn more about new cryptos by awarding tokens for completing tasks such as watching videos and taking quizzes on the asset-related content. Once all these tokens become liquid you can exchange them for your preferred crypto such as BCH or BTC.
Faucets That Are Still Giving Away Crypto in 2020
Software developer Gavin Andresen made Bitcoin History when he created a website that gave away free BTC in June 2010. The first bitcoin faucet handed out a meager 5 BTC per request, now worth about $50,000 less than a decade after.
“For my first Bitcoin coding project, I decided to do something that sounds really dumb: I created a web site that gives away Bitcoins,” wrote the man who was declared by Satoshi Nakamoto as the lead developer after his departure. “Why? Because I want the Bitcoin project to succeed, and I think it is more likely to be a success if people can get a handful of coins to try it out.”
To fuel the first faucet, Andresen loaded it with 1,100 BTC of his own. After these were all given out, the faucet was reloaded, with early bitcoin miners and whales chipping in and donating more coins. By the time the faucet had given away its last coins in early 2011 and was discontinued, 19,715 BTC had passed through its wallet.
Unfortunately, these days any website claiming to offer 5 BTC for free is an obvious scam. Moreover, the inconsistent and high transaction fees on the BTC network have made giving away even just 5 satoshis per user impracticable too. If it can take 50 cents for sending one transaction, no site can be expected to send micro-transactions worth much less than that. So BTC faucets had to stop operating or try to find ways to limit users from making direct and small withdrawals.
For example, the Bitcoinker faucet claims you can get “up to 100,000 satoshis” every five minutes. However, the minimum withdrawal from the site to your actual BTC wallet is 20,000 satoshis and trying it out you only get an average of 5 satoshis every time. So you will have to solve the captcha on the site 4,000 times, which assuming you did every five minutes without a break would take about four days.
Other sites claiming to still be BTC faucets are actually something else completely. Some are actually gambling sites that just offer a few free satoshis to start you off but there is only a minuscule chance you will win enough to reach the withdrawal minimum without putting in more BTC of your own. Some are actually online freelance platforms that require you to put in work, such as answering surveys or completing other tasks. Some websites might also be secretly using your browser for mining an altcoin in the background, exploiting your CPU and giving you a fraction of what you could have made yourself.
Luckily, there is still a very good alternative.
The Bitcoin.com Free service really provides you with an easy way to get coins for free thanks to the extremely low fees on the bitcoin cash network that make it possible. More than 300,000 people have gotten free BCH from this faucet service already, in a process that takes two seconds if you already have our wallet or a few seconds more if you need to download it depending on your connection speed.
All you need to do to receive some bitcoin cash from the Bitcoin.com Free service is to take three easy steps. First, you have to install the highly rated Bitcoin.com Wallet app for your phone if you don’t already have it. Then you need to log in to the faucet with your Google account and hit verify in order to prevent abuse of the service. Finally, just enter your wallet address to claim your free electronic cash. A small amount of BCH will be sent to your wallet within seconds, showcasing the amazing speed of the bitcoin cash network.
What do you think about getting free cryptocurrency in 2020? Do you know any other ways people can get some free coins? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Disclaimer: Walkthrough and guide editorials are intended for informational purposes only. There are multiple security risks and methods that are ultimately made by the decisions of the user. There are various steps mentioned in reviews and guides and some of them are optional. Neither Bitcoin.com nor the author is responsible for any losses, mistakes, skipped steps or security measures not taken, as the ultimate decision-making process to do any of these things is solely the reader’s responsibility. For good measure always cross-reference guides with other walkthroughs found online.
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