Crypto 360°

Friday, 20 August 2021

Across the world, a massive amount of natural gas is vented into the atmosphere as it has no where else to go. Portable Bitcoin mining farms are now taking that gas and recycling it into network security. Cyberpunk vibes.

submitted by /u/DocumentingBitcoin
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A new lightning faucet for the newcomers! Already distributed to 4000+ users.

TLDR: Our new lightning faucet (https://LightningNetworkStores.com/faucet) is an open and smart faucet that always gives away at least one satoshi (250 sats at the time of this post). No action is required in return. People can donate to it anonymously or get featured. The goal is to introduce new people to the lightning network and grow it to one million users.

You might have heard about LightningNetworkStores.com before, we have been tracking merchant adoption of the bitcoin lightning network (LN) since February 2018. About one month ago we launched an LN faucet that pays with LNURL-withdraw (avoiding copy/pasting an invoice). The user experience should be quite friendly: just click a button and get satoshis.

The amount that can be claimed has varied between 300 sats and 45 sats and it is the balance between how fast users and the faucet are receiving satoshis. Money goes into the faucet from mainly two sources: part of the revenue from the website and donations to the faucet. When users donate to the faucet they can choose how fast their donation will be distributed and whether they want to be anonymous or not. If the user is not anonymous he will be featured along other donors according to how much he is donating per new faucet claim (sats/claim). Donors can donate multiple times and their donations will be aggregated. There is a third source of money for the faucet, hCaptcha, but this has been negligible so far.

You can see usage statistics of the faucet here. The data there excludes some behavior flagged as abusive and might be subject to tweaks. We won't go into details on how we prevent abuse, but if you are curious feel free to message us or take a look at our github repository to get an idea.

Why did we build a faucet now? In our case, it can generate better traffic than social media adverts whose crypto policies are very uncertain. This ends up being simpler in the long term. Additionally, there is no continuously running bitcoin faucet that we know of, but since we have LN it's possible to have one. Most people are being introduced to LN with custodial wallets like Wallet of Satoshi and Bluewallet which require no setup. Having an open faucet where you can always get a few sats was the missing piece for a good UX when getting started with LN.

Enjoy!

submitted by /u/johnturtle
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