Receiving Bitcoins

A few months after starting this blog, I developed a personal method for Buying Bitcoins (August 2015). That let me investigate Buying Stuff with Bitcoin (September 2015), which led me to conclude It's for Speculating, Not Buying Stuff (October 2015).

There was still one piece of the bitcoin puzzle that was missing : receiving bitcoins from someone else. How could I do that without going through the rigmarole of selling something? Then I remembered the concept of Bitcoin Faucet:-

Bitcoin faucets are sites to earn some bitcoins for free. They usually needs address entry and captcha filling. You can revisit faucets every given time to get more. (en.bitcoin.it/wiki)

I located a couple of working faucets, opened their pages on my second laptop, gave both the same wallet address, and spent a few days entering captchas. Both faucets required waiting an hour before repeating the action, and since the second one required accumulating a minimum amount, I continued to action both until I reached that minimum. While I was doing that I received a message from my wallet (Coinbase.com) saying,

You just received 0.00048 BTC (worth €0.18 EUR) from an external bitcoin account.

I had no idea where that money came from. Getting back to the faucets, I reached the minimum amount on the second faucet and requested from both that the funds be sent. A few days later I received another message from my wallet saying,

You just received 0.00032 BTC (worth €0.12 EUR) from an external bitcoin account.

That was the amount I had accumulated on the first faucet. I never received anything from the second faucet, the one requiring the minimum, which had told me 'Expect your payment in next 24 hours'.

The faucet exercise led me to investigate several other aspects of bitcoin. I'll save those topics for future posts.