Back in the old days, around 2010, there were Bitcoin faucets like this which 'dripped' 5 BTC a day.

Coin faucets?

A coin faucet is a web app that gives visitors crypto currency, usually in exchange for viewing a few adverts. Originally these sites were purely to help the spread and adoption of crypto currency, now the majority are attempting to make money from advertising traffic.

As the value of Bitcoin rose, the original faucets quickly dried up, delivering smaller and smaller fractions of a Bitcoin per visit. The transaction charges for sending a few fragments of a coin became uneconomic, until a new business was born, the microwallet.

Microwallets?

Microwallet sites, like Faucethub.io, let faucet owners deposit cryptocurrency, which is stored by the microwallet site, off of the block chain, to be sent later to people claiming from faucets. When a claim is made at a faucet a message is sent to the microwallet saying that a user has been awarded some fraction of a Bitcoin (or now days any one of 100's of Alt coins). The claimed coin is transferred internally from the faucet address to the user's microwallet account.

Once the user has reached a threshold, the point where the transaction fees are a small enough proportion of the total being claimed, the coins are available to be withdrawn into the user's crypto wallet via the blockchain. The creation of Microwallets to aggregate faucet claims neatly sidestepped the disproportionate costs of transactions fees, breathing life back into faucets, and had the added benefit of providing central points for owners to promote their faucets.

Can faucets survive the Bitcoin Bull market?

Today Bitcoin once again surged in price, topping out at $13,901 according to CoinGeko. Bitcoin faucets typically pay out around 10 Satoshi (0.0000001 of a Bitcoin)

Today's faucets earn income from advertising networks mostly in fiat currency, Dollars, Pounds, Yen, etc. and buy the appropriate crypto currencies on exchanges or via the Microwallet sites. When Bitcoin surges in price all crypto currencies tend to follow suit. Unfortunately, advertising revenues don't tend to rise with Bitcoin price, meaning that to stay in business faucet owners will need to reduce the number of Satoshi paid out to keep the fiat value paid out aligned with their income.

So, faucets can survive. But there is one more question, if Bitcoin soars faucet pay-outs will at some point have to fall below 1 Satoshi. What happens then? Nanowallet sites?