Every one should have heard of Gavin Andresen’s bitcoin faucet (2010). When 5 bitcoin was still considered dust. Maybe not in the modern sense but dust all the same. That dust is now worth more than gold.
Alchemy and the Philosophers Stone
Medieval alchemists were looking for the mythical Philosopher’s Stone in their pursuit of chrysopoeia. The term chrysopoeia (from Ancient Greek χρυσοποιία (khrusopoiía) 'gold-making') refers to the artificial production of gold, most commonly by the transmutation of base metals like lead. The Philosopher’s Stone was to achieve this through a chemical transmutation.
Modern science has shown that transmutation is possible through nuclear physics by altering the atomic nucleus rather than chemical bonds.
Pipeflare and the pot of gold
Pipeflare was launched in late 2020. It was a clone of the GlobalHive faucet which was a clone of the ZEN faucet. Pipeflare briefly gave out XTZ but then switched to ZEC as their reward token.
Pipeflare was backed by DCG and quickly developed itself into a gaming hub with its own native token FLR. FLR started as an in-house reward token and went live on the Polygon mainnet as 1FLR.
To drive adoption Pipeflare introduced a 4 level referral program. Then 10x the reward.
🚀🚀🚀
By the end of their reign we had gathered over 40,000 referrals across the 4 levels. According to Pipeflare’s dashboard was #8 on the leaderboard and had earned 44 ZEC in referral commissions. Thats not counting the dust from their faucet.
During the glory days we were collecting over $200 AUD in referral commissions. That only lasted a few months before Pipeflare started to lower the referral % and faucet reward. Eventually commission dropped to $30-$40 AUD per month before they shutdown while …. whatever it was they planned to do.
Every month the ZEC was sent to the Crypto Dust Convertor. Being a UTXO based currency there was always some ZEC dust left in the Grandson’s wallet. 0.033 ZEC sat there for over 2 years, unable to be moved due to insufficient funds.
Who would of imagined the Zcash Foundation would discover the Philosopher's Stone. Turning a lead token ($30 AUD) into a gold token ($1161.23 AUD)
Had to leave 92 cents of ZEC in the wallet to make the transaction work. $3.04 in transaction fees. Maybe come back in 5 years and have another go at the dust.
ADA - lead to gold and back to lead
Cardano (ADA) was one of Sam Volkering’s Secret Crypto Network picks. So was more than happy to collect free ADA from @freecryptos Cardano faucet.
From May 2019 to February 2020, went hard in what got dubbed “My Faucet Phase”.
The process was relatively simple. Referred myself 6 times and ran the 7 faucets on 7 seperate browsers. It was just enough to confuse their anti-fraud measures.
- alarm set every hour
- took 5-6 minutes to run all the faucets
- max play 14 times per day
- 50% referral commission
- the base faucet was receiving 3x the base reward in commission
- earned 27 ADA in the “Faucet Phase”
- went on to earn a further 23 ADA
Then for some reason they stopped paying out on all the faucets. They reckoned we had multiple accounts. They were so nice about it , offered to give their tokens back. Or
- would tell them how I did it
- but first they had to agree to be interviewed (via Twatter) for my pb0x blog
- I would promote their faucets
- get to keep all the earnings to date
- they pay me a small (consultancy) fee in Bitcoin
- agree to not use the other 6 accounts anymore
- allowed to continue to use the base accounts
- and they promote our Pipeflare referral through their promotion page
And they agreed and we became almost best friends. Still keep it touch and give feedback. I still use their Litecoin faucet as they have added surveys and you get paid even if you don’t get to complete a survey. Which can be more efficient use of my time.
To this day my account is still flagged as suspicious. The withdrawal stays pending until I message them.
In 2021 we sold all the top performing altcoins. Our average price we paid for ADA was around 4 cents. Which made it one of our 100x baggers and bought the faucet earnings to over $100 AUD.
Crypto Dust Convertor Strategy
Would we have been better off keeping all the crypto dust and collecting the Zcash windfall instead.
44 ZEC x $1161.23 = $51,094.12
Thats alot of chump change left at the casino.
Reckoned we had collected about $20,000 free crypto up till the 2021 peak. From early airdrops and faucets etc. The rewards all eventually got converted to Bitcoin and real estate. Real Estate went onto double and Bitcoin got sold in 2025.
Moral of the story strategy will almost always triumph over FoMo. Unless you win the Lotto.
DISCLAIMER: Most of the facts and figures have been extracted from my long term memory, so are close enough for the purposes intended. I promise no AI was harmed in the researching, editing and publishing of this. But lots of CO2 was produced, doing my bit to make planet earth green.
Support Your Local Bloggers Grandson Stacking Sats
Solpick.io offers their faucet, surveys and gaming. You can level up by earning from surveys or wagering. Been using for over a year and had no problem withdrawing to exchanges or wallet. Be vary of using VPN if you want to use surveys, as the third party survey site may permanently block access.
https://solpick.io/?ref=VEH2024
The other Solana faucet we use daily is
https://solfaucet.togatech.org/
This the “first-ever Solana mainnet faucet”. 0.00001 SOL paid each day to your wallet, no strings attached.
