Welcome to this new blog of mine and thanks for reading! My name is Max and I'm just starting out here on Publish0x. After several weeks of only reading and tiping, I now feel that I can contribute to this community. So to start things off, this will be a blog in which I analyse crypto faucets regarding their efficiency and long term rewards.

Faucets - quick ways to earn free crypto?

Several blogs here on Publish0x drew my attention towards crypto faucets. The idea seems simple and seductive: you sign up, perform some easy, repetetive task and are rewarded with crypto. Most faucets feature Bitcoin, some also have Litecoin, Doge, Dash, Ethereum etc. If you trespass a certain amount of crypto, you can withdraw your earnings to your private wallet.

Over the last few weeks I tried several of these faucets. Being the math-lover I am, of course I calculated the gains I could get out of those reward systems in the long run. The first faucet I want to present today is RollerCoin.

RollerCoin

RollerCoin seems to be quite enjoyable at first glance. Instead of clicking one button every 15 minutes (as is often the case for other faucets), you start in the role of a bitcoin-miner. As a costumizeable character, you sit in a room and try to improve your hashes per second to mine bitcoin. By playing some mini-games that take no more than a minute, the hash-rate can be improved for 24 up to 168 hours. Every 5 minutes, a fictional block is mined that is currently worth 3000 Satoshi. The reward is split between all users according to their proportion of the overall hash-rate (Network Power). Opposed to a lot of other faucets, you also earn crypto while you are not actively doing anything, just by passively "mining" proportional to your current hash-rate.

While I increased the hash-rate by playing, the mini-games got harder and slightly more rewarding. I decided to spend about two hours playing mini-games in order to increase my hash-rate to 234.196 Th/s which yielded roughly 0.97 satoshi per 5 minutes. While gaming, my in-game PC was upgraded several times, when I reached 15, 30 and 60 won games. With (what I believe to be) the best PC, your gains in hash-rate will persist for a whole week (168 hours) as opposed to the 24 hours you get with the initial computer. But be careful, the better computer will only remain active if you finish at least one game every 24 hours.

Analysis

So let us now start the analysis of the long term rewards. I will split this into two approaches, the casual approach (around 2 hours of actively increasing your hash-rate per week) and the dedicated approach (3 hours per day, equals 21 hours per week). Let's also assume that my performance in the mini-games was somewhat representative for the average user and that you will log in every day to keep your improved PC alive.

The average user will therefore be rewarded with 0.001 BTC per year. With the currect price of Bitcoin, this represents about 10 $ for around 104 hours of "work". The dedicated user will increase his mining power to 10.19 satoshi per 5 minutes during the first week and will then stay on this level for the rest of the year. This will sum up to 0.0107 BTC per year or around 107 $. Both models have a reward of close to 980 satoshi per active hour, quite high compared to other faucets. The minimum withdrawal is 0.0001 BTC, so even with the casual model, you can withdraw almost every month. However, until now I don't have enough Bitcoin to withdraw, so I can't share any experience on the time it takes to recieve the rewards to your wallet.

Mining Rigs

Well, one could say, you forgot the main feature of RollerCoin: the automated "mining rigs" you can buy with your satoshi. So, let's also take a closer look at those machines or why you should rather spend your BTC on icecream instead. The mining rigs are one way to build hashing power passively without playing mini-games. Their price depends on the demand in the last 24 hours, increasing by 50% for each machine bought by any user. Currently, the smallest rig costs 4696 satoshi and provides a hashing power of 1168 Gh/s, which corresponds to 0.5% of my mining power gained by 2 hours of playing mini-games (note that succesfully finishing a mini-game will yield roughly between 500 and 1200 Gh/s). Accordingly, the yield through that rig alone will be 0.0048 satoshi per 5 minutes, corresponding to 508 satoshi per year. That means your miner has to run for more than 9 years to be profitable. I doubt that RollerCoin will still be a thing in 2028, but you decide for yourself ...

All of the other rigs perform similarly, so instead of investing in mining rigs, I think you're better off clicking through the mini-games. However, I didn't buy one of those rigs yet (for reasons of efficiency), so if you have any experience mining with them, let me know if my analysis was wrong on that point.

Is RollerCoin worth your time?

So let's get to the be all end all of questions for faucets: is RollerCoin worth your time or are you better off selling newspapers at the corner of the street? Probably, the latter :) Well, to be fair, if Bitcoin has a ROI of x10 or even x100, you could make up to 10,000$ a year as poweruser, but you might make that same amount with some casual freelancer coding jobs, filling online surveys or playing music in the streets - and that doesn't involve gambling on high Bictoin prices. However, compared to all the other faucets I tried, RollerCoin is definitely more enjoyable and it feels very rewarding. This is probably due to the fictive mining environment you get put into. So if you want to give it a try, head over to RollerCoin.