When I first got into buying Bitcoin, I naturally also looked into ways of earning Bitcoin, and one of the first ways was through these sites called faucets. These sites pay you a small amount of Bitcoin or an altcoin to complete microtasks on their sites.
These sites were a great introduction and a low-risk way to get into Bitcoin, see how it works, accept payments, set up wallets and all that good stuff you need to learn once you get started.
I’ve seen quite a few faucets come and go, since it’s not always a profitable exercise, and sites need to manage their ad revenue with their incentives to keep people coming back and growing the site.
More fees less worth it
In the beginning, facets were great because you could get a lot of stake for a few dollars, so you could earn hundreds of thousands of sats and keep most of them for yourself as mining fees were still pretty low. As Bitcoin continues to grow in acceptance and price, it sure doesn’t make much sense to be doing 1,2,5, $10 transactions on-chain.
You’re just getting to keep less and less for your efforts and faucets become a bit of a waste of time. After realising this, I pretty much gave up on the idea of stacking sats, via faucets and microtasks.
Staking sats on the light
I’ve recently started using the lightning network again and checked out some of the dapps built using LN and came across a site aggregator called Lapps. Lapps allows anyone to list their dapp should it have LN features or use LN as the base for transfer of funds.
The Lightning Network is pretty easy to use, all you need is an LN-enabled wallet, you can find one here there are both custodial and non-custodial options available so pick your poison.
I’ve been using the custodial “wallet of satoshi”, I don’t recommend it because I always say have your keys to your crypto but this was just to test out the concept of stacking sats.
Sending transactions across the lightning network is super quick, easy and cheap as chips, as the transaction fees are in the milli-satoshi level. Meaning you can actually transfer as little as 1 Sat.
I started messing around with dapps on lapps and earning a few satoshis and sent them to my wallet immediately, they clear within a second and it’s pretty awesome to be able to stack sats and keep most of what I earned.
I’ve managed to sack around 0.003 Sats with the Lightning Network, and I am really enjoying using the service.
LN transactions in Wallet of Satoshi
I like where this is going
As the main-chain focuses on the inflation-proof store of value, the mesh network that is this side chain is starting to show real promise, yes there are trade-offs in security for the speed you get but I think that you should always have some “liquid/lightning” Bitcoin ready for a quick transaction.
If more dapps, wallets and exchanges adopt the lightning network, it will make so many of the transaction issues easier and allow the smaller guy to get in and move his $5 around without a worry.
Being able to earn and collect and spend Bitcoin this quickly and cheaply means it opens up opportunities for things like freelancing tasks, rewards, giveaways, bounties, eCommerce and so much more.
In many cases, it could mean you don’t need to use an altcoin for example, why would I need lite coin now? I only used it because it was cheaper to transfer to exchanges but with LN, I don’t need to lose money on swapping between BTC and LTC to save on transactions.
