The shocking news that one of the oldest and most generous family of faucets, the Moon Family of Faucets and the CoinPot micro-wallet is closing down has been broadcast into the cryptoworld like a firestorm.

First, of all, The Moon Family of faucets is a collection of faucets that rewards micro-amounts of cryptocurrencies to its users after completing a captcha. Whereas most faucets only allow users to claim in specific intervals (such as hourly or daily), in the Moon faucets, it is the user who chooses the claiming period after the minimum period of 5 minutes. Yet, the claim rate is exponentially proportional to the claiming period which means the longer the claiming period the slower is the rate of claiming. Moreover, the claiming amount is affected by various factors such as the exchange rate between the USDT and the corresponding cryptocurrency in each faucet.

The Moon faucets started initially as the Moon Bitcoin which was providing to its users free satoshi in every claiming period. Possibly even the popular expression used very often lately in the cryptocurrency market, when the price of a cryptocurrency skyrockets beyond the usual levels, "To the Moon" has its origin to that Moon Bitcoin Faucet itself.

After the partnership of the Moon Bitcoin Faucet with the Coinpot microwallet in July 6, 2017, more faucets in alternative cryptocurrencies such as LiteCoin, Dash, Bitcoin Cash and DogeCoin emerged that were also linked to Coinpot. Personally it was through the Moon Family of faucets that I raised my initial funds in altcoins and withdrew them into my flexible account. The whole Moon Faucets or if you prefer the CoinPot micro-wallet family of faucets included the following websites:

• CoinPot coinpot.com
• Moon Bitcoin moonbit.co.in
• Moon Dogecoin moondoge.co.in
• Moon Litecoin moonliteco.in
• Moon Dash moondash.co.in
• Moon Cash moonbitcoin.cash
• BitFun bitfun.co
• Bonus Bitcoin bonusbitcoin.co

In their recent extensive statement, http://coinpot.co/news they explain first of all that it won't be a sudden immediate shutdown but they inform their users that the shutdown will take place in 2 phases.

Phase 1: 31ST JANUARY 2021. At midnight on the 31st January 2021, All 7 faucets will cease to operate. No further faucet claims will be possible after this time and each faucet will be replaced by a holding page advising of the closure. Moreover, in the CoinPot micro-wallet website, no more registrations will be available and operations such as Lottery, Multiplier, Challenges, VIP Rewards and mining will be terminated.

Phase 1: 28TH FEBRUARY 2021. 4 weeks later at midnight on the 28th February 2021 the remaining operations of CoinPot such as Sign In/Out. Conversion and Withdrawals will be terminates. That means that users will have until 28th of February to complete any remaining conversions and withdrawals. One thing that hasn't been mentioned is whether the minimum payout limit will remain, therefore users are being advised to consider the following payout limits when they will complete their final conversions and payouts:

• Bitcoin core: 0.0001 BTC (10,000 Satoshi)
• Bitcoin Cash: 0.001 BCH (100,000 Satoshi)
• LiteCoin: 0.005 LTC (20,000 Litoshi)
• DashCoin: 0.002 Dash (20,000 Dashtoshi)
• Dogecoin: 50 DogeCoin

Also, the statement informs that all private user data, email addresses, security credentials etc will be removed from the servers for all 8 web sites, however it isn't mentioned whether they will be deleted, kept on a hard copy or transferred to another location.

In their statement, the CoinPot team explains right from the beginning, that their main reason for closing down is the "lack of time" and the fact that they had to devote more and more time from their spare time to fight fraudulent users who were trying to find a way to claim bigger amounts of cryptocurrency with illegitimate ways. Yet, as a result they managed to earn valuable know-how in the management of such system and also to create a very sophisticated anti-fraud system.

Certainly, I can understand that the CoinPot faucet couldn't have been a full time job but a side project of passionate fauceteers and I believe that all Moon Family of faucets users are grateful for the time they dedicated to manage the whole family of faucets. And of course they were rewarded for their devoted time with the advertising profits but also with the precious expertise in cybersecurity, faucet management, and web development both back-end and front-end. I am pretty sure that their professional IT background is very relevant to the above mentioned skills although their grammar skills suffer a lot. In their own words the CoinPot team states ...

The quick answer to this is that we no longer have the time or resources to maintain the faucets at the quality level you have become used to.The longer answer...The faucets and CoinPot have always really been run as a hobby, something we do for fun and learning outside our families and day jobs. We have always tried to earn enough from advertising revenue that we could pay for the servers and hosting costs and then pay out everything else to you as faucet claims and referral commission. This policy meant that our faucets gained a reputation as the highest paying faucets around and grew very quickly.Added to this, the success of CoinPot with its games/mining/challenges/VIP etc meant that we were spending more and more of our spare time improving/fixing things. Unfortunately the biggest time drain has become fighting fraud and identifying cheaters. This is neccesary as otherwise our extremely small profit margins would be wiped out overnight!

Moreover, they claim that they won't disappear completely from the cryptoworld although the Moon Faucet chapter will soon be closed forever for them but they plan to use their sophisticated anti-fraud system into their next bigger project. Again, in their own words...

During the last few years we have built an incrediby complex and successful fraud engine that analyses users claiming patterns and looks for fraud/bot usage. This grows constantly with new techniques to fight the bad guys! We are extremely proud of how this fraud fighting works - and it is this part of the CoinPot system that will live on in the future...Starting from next month we are embarking on a major new project which we cannot reveal too much information about right now. It is within the crypto world but totally unrelated to faucets, and it will be built around the CoinPot fraud engine and all the knowledge we have accumulated from this over the years.

Therefore, what I can understand is that they do have time, but not for the Moon Family of faucets anymore as they have decided to move into a larger project based on their anti-fraud system. If we go back few months ago, on June 2020, the CoinPot Team announced that Moon Bitcoin/Dogecoin/Litecoin faucets website fell victims of Makop ransomware and as a consequence the whole family of faucets were unavailable to its users. On 1 June 2020, Coinpot made the following announcement:

On Monday 1st June 2020 we sustained a targetted and comprehensive attack on our servers that are used to host CoinPot and our faucets.This attack was in two parts...

1. Most of our servers became infected with the Makop ransomware.
2. At the same time there was a low level DDOS attack preventing us from accessing the servers.

These attacks meant that CoinPot and the faucets went offline immediately and stayed that way until we started to find ways to fix the problems. Predictably the ransomware attack was accompanied by demands for an amount totalling over $200k USD to decrypt and release the infected files.This amount is far beyond anything we can afford to pay. Even if we were able to pay, there is no 100% guarantee that we will get the files decrypted and it would most likely encourage future attempted attacks. Therefore we decided not to go down that road and refused to engage with the attackers.We have a strong (or so we thought) backup process. So we now took the steps to start restoring the sites on new clean servers. 24 hours of hard work later...CoinPot and most of our faucets were back on line exactly as before.However our 3 oldest faucets were running on legacy software/hardware that hadn't been updated for too long a time. Unfortunately we now discovered that some of the backups for these sites also contained data corrupted by the Makop ransomware.Since then we have been trying to fix this and recover this corrupted data - but now we must accept that we have hit a brick wall. The data is lost.

For sure, That was a huge problem for the Moon Family of faucets. The CoinPot team managed to resolve the mess and after 10 days of hard work, they managed to recover or re-establish the compromised faucet websites as it was announced in a relevant statement. Still, I believe that this incident played its role to the recent closure announcement. I wouldn't be surprised that the decision to close down the whole Moon Family of Faucets was under consideration since that period. Yet, I was surprised that soon after the CoinPot team announced a new rewarding system of the Coinpot tokens making me to believe that the Moon Family of Faucets was a long-term project and one of my major faucet source to claim free micro-amounts of cryptocurrencies.

Moreover, I would add that the current situation of the cryptomarket, with the prices of bitcoin and the rest of Altcoins "to the Moon" also played a major role to their recent announcement. Back in summer 2020, when the prices were quite low, the profits from the faucets claims were quite generous and I managed to raise my first funds in altcoins which I withdrew into my flexible savings accounts and now I earn an interest from them while working. Yet, the previous months, since November 2020 until today, it is obvious that all faucet websites have minimized the claiming faucet amounts stressing at the same time their advertising profit margins to extremely low levels. Especially, the bitcoin-based faucets have suffered the biggest reductions in the free claims amounts provided to their users.

In okex earn section, the reward has been reduced from 80 satoshi to 50 satoshi and I believe that we are still grateful that the reduction was only 30 satoshi per claim considering its popularity.

In Freebitco.in for example, the faucet claim reward is just 5 Satoshi, however users can benefit from the 4.08% APY interest for keeping more than 30,000 Satoshi in their micro-savings accounts.

In Bonus Bitcoin, I started claiming 15 Satoshi every 15 minutes back on June 2020 and now the claiming amount has fallen to the very minimum of 2 Satoshi which many crypto-fauceteers will find worthless to deal with.

In Moon Bitcoin faucet the situation is similarly disappointing and possibly had led many users to abandon the Moon Family of faucets. Today with the current "explosion" of the cryptocurrency market and the variety of applications and services that have emerged competition is tougher, offering greater earnings, that the ones that Moon Family of faucets can offer. In his article, Is It Worth Your Time? A Closer Look At Freebitco.in [Khazrakh] analyzes why Freebitco.in and relevant faucets might not worth your time TODAY.

As a conclusion, like the rest of the users, I am extremely disappointed that one of the oldest and successful family of faucets, the Moon Family of faucets is closing down. However, I believe that the reason beyond the imminent closure of Moon Family of Faucets isn't just the luck of time. After all, the CoinPot team have plenty of time for their anti-fraud project but they have decided to focus on there instead of the Moon family of faucets possibly because it appeals to them to be more profitable for them. However, I believe that the ransomware incident and the current price rates of cryptocurrencies certainly has played their role but the CoinPot team didn't want to mention these reasons. My last hope is that a consortium or a team of passionate fauceteers such as the CoinPot team will make an offer to acquire all the assets of the faucet family. However, It is unlikely that this possibility might be put forward today.

For me, the closure of the Moon Family of faucets isn't the end of my hobby as a fauceteer. New families of faucets have emerged and will emerge in the future. For the time being can provide a respectful amount of cryptocurrency for free and I truly believe that they have the capability of being as successful and long lasting as the Moon Family of Faucets.

In my blog www.cryptomonkey.weebly.com you will find an extensive collection of cryptofaucets, GPT/PTC (GetPaidTo / PaidToClick) and other crypto services and applications that can be used in order to earn free cryptocurrencies.

One of these families is the Free Cryptos family established on 2020 with huge interface similarities with Freebitco.in. They also provide free crypto claims through daily coupons on their twitter profile.

Free Cryptos provides micro-faucets in various cryptocurrencies and crypto-assets with minimum payout as follows:

• Free Binance Coin = 0.05000000 BNB

• Free Bitcoin = 0.00020000 BTC

• Free Cardano = 5.00000000 ADA

• Free DogeCoin = 50.00000000 DOGE

• Free Ethereum = 0.00500000 ETH

• Free NEM = 1.00000000 XEM

• Free NEO = 0.05000000 Neo

• Free DASH = 0.01000000 DASH

• ​CoinFaucet = 5.00000000 XRP

• Free Steam = 5.00000000 CSGO

• Free USD Tether = 1.00000000 USDT

• Free USD Coin = 1.00000000 USDC

• Free Tron = 50.00000000 TRX

• Free Chainlink = 0.10000000 LINK

• Free LiteCoin =  0.01000000 LTC

P.S. As a declaration of honor for the free claiming funds Moon Family faucets, I have decided to keep the whole corresponding article in www.cryptomonkey.weebly.com, until the very last day of its existence.

Disclaimer: All information found on this article is for informational purposes only. I do not provide any personal investment advice so please make your own research before proceeding to any investment/trading actions

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