Gain Bitcoins without working (#NOT)

One of the general laws of economics was defined by Pareto, a great Italian engineer and economist. It is very simple: There’s nowhere you can eat for nothing [1].

That means that in economics, everything has a cost. So, you should not take too seriously the promises of gaining money without working, that the Web sites named faucet, or paid-to-click, do when they say they will give Bitcoin values for free.

At first, because they offer only a few satoshis [2]. Then because to get the money offered they force us to read the result of a captcha, a software that generates a string of transformed characters, that have been geometrically deformed. The purpose of it is to avoid that automatic systems (using OCR) try to receive the money offered. That is: a captcha is a means to make sure that only humans are able to decode the transformed characters it generates. However, in practice, even human beings have sometimes difficulty in understanding the transformed characters, due to its huge deformation. That way, sometimes one is forced to do many attempts to decode the transformed characters, till the captcha provides a sequence that can be understood.

So, the Bitcoin revolution on economics hasn’t invalidated Peano’s general law…

The faucets make money by selling the ads they post, and that the users have to read each time they try to decode a captcha-generated string.

Is it worth using faucets?

Of course it is. They allow one to learn to use Bitcoin, with a very low risk, both for the user and to the system. When trained by the use of faucets, the beginnning users really decide to get involved with BitCoin, they’ll have conditions of evaluating the possible risks and gains of using it. That way they won’t be disappointed with the new culture presented by the system. And so won’t start a movement to reject it.

In the near future, this blog, that shows his user learning Bitcoin, will tell how to create a Bitcoin account that will be filled exactly through faucets.

Origin of Bitcoin terms

Having explained the faucet concept in the Bitcoin context, it remains to know where the expression came from. It is not common knowledge that the word faucet is a synonym to “tap”, the usual word for a device used to dispense liquids. The idea is that a Bitcoin faucet offers a limited, but continuous flux of Bitcoins. Exactly lik a common tap does with water.

The term paid-to-click means that the user is paid to click in the ads that are shown in the Web page of a faucet. And that is exactly what should be done: faucets survive with the sales of advertisements. If a user clicks in a user that was shown, the faucets will receive a little more. In the end of the day, that will bring more stability to the faucets and higher prizes for their users.

So, the conscious faucet user should click as much ads as he can.

References

[1] Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society, New York: Dover Publications, 1935

[2] Learning Bitcoin, The Bitcoin Units

The Bitcoin units

An artistic realization of a Bitcoin, à la mode of the Euro Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bitcoin_euro.png

Traditional currencies like the euro, Brazil’s real or the USA dollar,
are usually divided into their one hundredth part, the so called cent. One cent is a decimal digit 1 writen after a zero, past the decimal mark. In the case of the USA dollar,

1 cent = US$ 0.01

However, no matter how many times the promotional image is shown, there’s not a coin, in gold or whatever, of one Bitcoin. And yes, not even the image used in this text…

That is: each Bitcoin has only a digital existence, in the network of computers that constitutes the Bitcoin system.

Due to this, and to the fact Bitcoin was built using the mathematical technique called cryptography, there was never the need to keep in Bitcoin the traditional divisions of the other currencies. So, a first usual subdivision of Bitcoin is the thousandth, represented by mBTC. Obviously,

1 mBTC = 0,001 BTC

That is: one mBTC is a decimal digit 1 preceded by two zero digits, just after the decimal mark. Another way of saying this is via scientific notation:

1 mBTC = 1 x 10^-3 BTC

However, another subdivision is much more used among Bitcoin users: it is the satoshi. The name is an hommage to the creator of Bitcoin system [1].

A hundred million satoshis should be used to make a single Bitcoin. Another way of saying this is that a satoshi is one hundredth millionth part of a Bitcoin. That is:

1 satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC

That is: one satoshi is a decimal digit one preceded by seven zero digits before the decimal mark. In the scientific notation that is:

1 satoshi = 1 x 10^-8 BTC

The notation μBTC is not rare in the Internet. The Greek letter μ (read it mu) in this case indicates the prefix micro from the international decimal system, that is the millionth part of something. That is: a decimal digit one preceeded by 5 zero digits before the decimal mark. That is:

1 μBTC = 0.000001 BTC

That can be written scientific notation as

1 μBTC = 1 x 10^-6 BTC

In short,

1 BTC = 1.000 mBTC = 1.000.000 μBTC = 100.000.000 satoshi

Or backwards,

1 satoshi = 1 x 10^-2 μBTC = 1×10^-5 mBTC = 1 x 10^-8 BTC.

Caveat

There is a page in the semi-official Bitcoin wiki, that refers to a much larger number of Bitcoin units [2]. Unfortunately, these units are not being widely used in the Internet. They will be commented in future blog post.

References

[1] Satoshi Nakamoto

[2] Units

The Bitcoin world

There’s a lot to say about Bitcoin, and one of these angles is the least polemical: being international and digital, Bitcoin is a fenomenon of the current days, just like the Internet.

In the political context, Bitcoin profited from the deregulation started in Reagan and Thatcher era. In normal situations, it’s possible that the country governments blocked Bitcoin’s free circulation. In spite of the natural creativity of the market to dribble several barriers.

In any case, the Bitcoin volume in circulation still is much limited. And it doesn’t scare the governments. In terms of volume, it is comparable to the mileage tickets that airlines offer: they can also be considered another coin.

And that without mentioning the maximum number of Bitcoins is forever limited in around US$ 210 millions. Let’s considered that besides that this limit will met in 2140, considering the current computational and mathematical technology.

References

Bitcoin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Visited on 2014-05-02