Faucet

A faucet is a way of getting free cryptocurrency without having to resort to mining or exchanges. Faucets are often trutless services. Modern facuets allow for account creation in order to store a balance until payment is due and offer the ability to link your address to a faucet hub in order to claim bigger rewards or get it a faster pace.

History
Early faucets supported only Bitcoin and would often give multiple BTC in return without waiting. As the difficulty and value grew, the rewards were adjusted accordingly and now give back only bits. Unfortunately, high fees caused by the scalability problem on top of growing scarcity forced wallet operators to resort to ads, wait times, minimum payment threshold and date.

Timer
The most common type of faucet is a timer-based faucet. A person reclaims their rewards within 10 minutes to an hour at max.

Games
The second most common type of faucet is a game. The most common game is typically 2048.

Profitability
A faucet's profitability depends on how much effort a person is willing to put into it. This depends on the reward, payment threshold and the time it takes to reclaim the next reward. The most ideal outcome is if the reward is high enough that it takes only two tries to go over the threshold. This is usually only found in cryptocurrences that provide low fees.