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As discussed in my first blog article on bitcoin, using faucets to earn your way into the world of bitcoin is not for the faint of heart and requires both a technician’s mindset and a worker’s mindset if you are to do what I did, which was earn $3 USD or 0.003+ BTC in the space of two months WITHOUT REFERRALS! Because of the large number of digits following the decimal, earning 0.003 is no small feat when we’re talking faucet earnings.  Most people in the bitcoin world don’t think this is a wise way to spend your time.  However, I proved to myself that for the person short of cash, it is a viable way to earn bitcoin in your spare time.

Before you consider entering the Faucet Alleyway, stop and take stock!

You MUST  NOT:

• be easily swayed by advertising!
• be easily confused by lots going on!
• insist on waiting for every page to load before deciding if it’s good or bad
• be computer-illiterate!
• have tunnel-vision!
• be slow-moving!

If you are going to venture into the faucet alley-way, you absolutely MUST:

• be laser-focused!
• be aware of what’s going on with every tab you have open!
• Understand the basic parts of a browser and make heavy use of them!
• Ignore advertising!
• Learn quickly!
• Understand typical malware behaviour and spot it fast!
• Be able to clean your own machine of malware or have plenty of cash to pay someone else to clean it for you on occasion.
• have quick reflexes with mouse and keyboard!

Your toolkit MUST include:

• browser other than MS Explorer
• plugin/add-on to block unwanted content not allowed in your home
• up-to-date antivirus program
• Ccleaner set to delete history and cookies as well as clear the DNS cache and old prefetch data.

How’d you do with your self-assessment and computer readiness?  If you ARE any of the “MUST NOT” items, this pursuit may not be for you.  Moving forward will put both you and your computer at a level of risk you may not be able to recover from.

However, if you are confident you are not affected by the “MUST NOT” list and confident you can handle the “MUST HAVE” list, and your computer is set up to handle the required toolkit, then let’s move forward.

The important thing to understand is that this is WORK!  Don’t sit down to my list of faucets thinking you are engaging in a leisurely activity.  This is anything but leisurely!  Boring perhaps at times, tedious at other times, but leisurely it is NOT!  You have to be on your toes constantly! Your computer’s security can’t be allowed to lapse either. This is because a jaunt down Faucet Alley is akin to swimming with sharks.  Some are friendly, some ignore you, and some come at you with teeth bared and eyes blazing! One of the faucets in my list is a bit of a nasty shark and I honestly wonder at the way the owner has chosen to make money off his site.  I have learned to handle the onslot this faucet delivers at times, but I don’t recommend visiting if you are lax or negligent in ANY of the MUST HAVE/INCLUDE lists above!  If you are not necessarily wary of what might jump out at you AND prepared to handle it the moment it happens, DON’T GO THERE!

Secondly, you need to understand this takes TIME!  Want to make money doing faucets??? You need to be religious about claiming as often as each site will let you! Of course you have a life to live away from your computer and perhaps you have other tasks you need your computer for as well, so don’t visit Faucet Alley all day long!  But when you do sit down to work the faucets, try to have several hours available at a shot.

Thirdly, all those ads you are seeing are paying the site owner so they in turn can pay you!  Don’t use an ad blocker!  Having said that, it is wise to have a plugin that blocks unacceptable content that goes against your family values, but don’t block ALL ads as a general rule.  Most faucets have a check built into them whereby if they notice a trend of ads being blocked, they will eventually “stop working” until you enable ads again.  Now if a site’s ad networks insist on showing you offensive ads regardless of your filter’s settings, put the site into quarantine for a few hours using the Brave browser.  If the site “stops working” open it back up in your favourite browser and see if the offending ads are gone.  If they are, continue on as normal.  It is precisely because of these ad networks being less than family-friendly at times, that life for the faucet earner can get so dangerous.  In fact, I recommend doing it in a location or at a time when impressionable eyes and ears are not present, to protect them from the visual or audible dangers that lurk around some corners in this alley way.

One of the rules of thumb I learned very early on my career as a computer repair technician, is that about:blank in a browser’s address bar can spell trouble, particularly for Internet Explorer.  About:blank has been taken advantage of by numerous drive-by installation threats dropping backdoor trojans, worms, rootkits and other nasties onto people’s computers.  This is one reason for the sharp eye paying attention to everything going on with laser focus ignoring the ads!  In my experience, allowing your antivirus scanner to scan links wreaks havoc with the various captcha codes you need to solve, particularly those that tell you to click images until there are no more.  Each image sent to you in that grid is a link that has to be scanned by your AV link scanner.  It’s better to develop a sharp eye for trouble than to bog down your computer with so many link scans, especially if you use my method for earning satoshi via faucets.

If you see about:blank show up, it will be there for one of three reasons:  1) Slow connection to the next page being loaded.  Many faucets use pop-overs and pop-unders.  These are full pages not merely pop-ups in small windows.  If a server is slow in delivering the site destination, a threat could be on it’s way.  2) The site being loaded is the one you were just at because now the page you were on has become a pop-under and your original site needs to reload.  Watching your address bar change from about:blank to another site address and having your mouse over the tab’s x button will help you discern if you are reloading the page you want, or having to close a tab you don’t want.  Eventually you will learn when a pop-under has just taken place, or a pop-over, and in the case of several of the faucets in my list, you can get both happening at the same time, meaning you close the left-most, right-most and leave the center tab loading in the little threesome that suddenly developed.

Be sure as well to go through your favourite browser’s security settings.  Set all plugins or addon’s to “ask me” so that you get a heads up if anything strange wants to take place.  I have Firefox set to prevent requests to install programs, and one of the faucets in my list regularly tries to ask permission to install something!  Not good!  This same faucet will at times try to force its way onto my system with spawning pop-unders.  Due to this behaviour, I’ve had two threats successfully get onto my system and I had to shut down my computer the hard way before beginning clean up in safemode.  Again, if any of this sounds way over your head, you might not want to be earning satoshi via Fauce Alley!  The number of faucets that use such tactics is fairly large it seems.  Knowing how this one faucet behaves periodically, I can spot other problem faucets very quickly and will not frequent low-paying faucets who behave in this manner.  The only reason I tolerate this particular faucet is because of how well it pays on an ongoing basis.  I rarely have to quarantine the site, and my filter catches most offensive material it’s ad networks might try to show.

Because browser-based threat delivery often ends up in temporary file locations such as browser caches, having a tool such as Ccleaner on hand can help with the clean-up.  Run this tool fairly frequently when you follow my faucet claiming method, but also use it in safemode whenever you have to clean-up after a threat that landed on your system.  Follow up that cleaner with a scan by Malwarebytes free or pro, then boot back into normal mode and carry on.  Mac and Linux users, I’m not sure how you’d do this on your OS’s, but I’m sure some well-deserved research could do you some good in this regard.

If I haven’t scared you off good and proper from this form of earning satoshi, then let me share what I’ve enjoyed about this form of obtaining bitcoin:

Travelling around the world from the comfort of your computer chair!  That’s right.  The reCaptcha codes that many faucets ask you to complete are pictorial in nature, and come from literally all over the world.  You’ll see street signs in various languages, storefronts from towns and villages in locations you’ve never been to or perhaps heard of, mountain sides, rivers, quaint little residential streets or bustling downtown scenes.  Even food dishes make it into the mix.  This takes the monotony out of the mix while also testing your ability follow instructions and further develop that keen eye for detail.  The goal of these reCaptcha’s and SolveMedia puzzles is to prevent bots from stealing satoshi from these site owners.  You WILL see ads offering to collect from faucets for you, but those are bots and bots are strongly discouraged as a form of cheating the system.  So hone your keen eye for detail and be an honourable satoshi hunter!  Perhaps share in the comments what languages you’ve seen on street signs, what countries you’ve vicariously visited and where you enjoyed going the most in the last round of faucet claims.

My method for using these sites to earn satoshi, is as follows:

1) Have all faucets open in tabs in your browser of choice.  Don’t use a rotator because you won’t be able to engage in my method very well with one of those.

2) Begin with the one-hour claim sites and note the time you began.  You’ll want to return to those in one hour. Next, move to the half-hour claim sites, you know you can claim again here when your one hour sites reach their half-way countdown.  Then move to the 15 minute claim sites and get those going.  If you have any 5 minute sites in your tabs, visit those last.  Thus begins your earnings session!

3) Now begin going around and around and around.  Generally-speaking, in the time it takes to do three 15 minute claims in a row because their timers all coincided, you’ll be able to visit your 5 min before and after all three.  When that string of claims is done, you’ll be close to claiming again in your half hour sites.  Repeat, then include your one hour sites and go around again.

4) Keep an eye out for the pop-overs and pop-unders and close them as fast as you can.  Some sites will do both, placing the reloading faucet in the middle of a sudden group of three tabs.  As you get used to the routine, you’ll learn to recognize this grouping and have the under and over closed by the time the faucet has reloaded.

5) It is best to use the XAPO wallet and XAPO faucets if you want to have your claims accumulate at a decent rate in one pool.  I haven’t done much with it yet, but another satoshi collector is called faucet hub.  I have to see what those faucets are like before I can write about them, but cashing out of a collector still means having enough in there to cover network fees.  This is the only reason I haven’t gone with faucethub or epay.

One thing to be aware of when looking at your wallet balance as it grows:  XAPO gives you the US equivalent, fully expecting that you will use your bitcoin to benefit life in the real world.  The potential problem can be watching the US amount instead of the BTC you are growing.  The US amount goes up and down based on factors affecting volatility in trading BTC.  If you have a goal of so much BTC, only watch that amount.  Remember, you’re investing TIME into this project, not cash out of your own bank account.

6) As already stated a couple times now, this is WORK!  You can get mentally tired out if you are having to clean up your cache and temp files several times in one sitting because of some rogue ad in an ad network’s line-up on one or more of the faucets you happen to have open.  Pay attention, ignore advertising, watch the clock, follow instructions, and have several hours at a time to get the ball rolling well and watch the satoshi accumulate.

How fast can YOU accumulate satoshi without referrals??!! Can you rise to the challenge??? Do YOU have what it takes to walk down Faucet Alley???