I own cryptocurrency now! And it was FREE!  Yep. You read that right. Free.

With some of the lesser known altcoins, you can get free coins from faucets online. You just put in your wallet address, and the faucet gives you some for free.

Altcoins = any cryptocurrency that isn’t bitcoin (I think. Not sure if Ethereum and Litecoin are altcoins or not).

So here’s how I got some free coin.

I’d heard that the Dogecoin community is friendly and helpful. Better yet, it still has faucets where you can get free Dogecoins. Thanks, Ben. I’ll check it out.

TIP: don’t pronounce this like the car (Dodge). It’s Doge like loge (the best cheap seats at the symphony). Long “o”, soft “g” (?). Who am I kidding, I don’t know what a soft “g” is, but it seems right. Pronunciation: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/loge

Anywho. . . dogecodin.com seems like the headquarters for Dogecoin, and it’s based around a super-cute dog. Now I’ve decided I should get a Shiba Inus if we ever get a dog.

Within an hour, I had my first coins in my hands. Wow! This really works.

I won’t repeat dogecoin.com’s directions here, but I will highlight some important points.

I got the full wallet. There is a lite wallet. The full wallet is required if you ever want to mine.

Don’t give up! It took me 3 or 4 days to download the blockchain.

Blockchain: the technology that makes cryptocurrency work. Every transaction is recorded on the blockchain. Each currency has its own.

I had to re-do the settings on my laptop so it wouldn’t go to sleep on me overnight.

Get coins!  Once I had the wallet downloaded, I immediately wanted to try out a faucet. It wasn’t obvious, so I just clicked around. Here’s how it works:

If you’re going to get Dogecoins, you’ll need to tell someone how to give it to you. That means you’ll need an address for your wallet. I clicked File, and it bought up a few options, including:

– Much sending addresses.
– Much receiving addresses.

(The doge community doesn’t take itself too seriously. Silly grammar rules the day).

I clicked “much receiving addresses,” which opened a new window. Then clicked “+ New” in the lower left, and it prompted me to label the new address. I called it “faucet 1 17_10_18” since I was going to use it on my first faucet. Then I had “faucet 1” plus a long, impossible to remember “public key.”

Public key: the long, impossible to remember letters and numbers that are the “address” for wallets and such in the cryptocurrency world.

Here’s what yours should look like (with fewer rows your first time).

Don’t worry. They’re safe to make public. Here’s a public key I generated just for this blog: D8NgDAZN6rbVUE3a8HZ9uHhBGrrUzZStVc

To use my key, I clicked the line of the address, then clicked copy at the bottom. Then, it was time to try my first faucet. . .

. . . so I pasted it into dogefaucet.com and . . .

Wow, much fun! 0.50720457 doges have been added to your balance!

Wow. That is much fun. Did I just get free money? Let me check my wallet. . .

Zero. Nada.

 What the . . . ? Did I mess up? No. Here’s what’s up.

1. I was days away from downloading the entire dogecoin blockchain. No transaction more recent than 3 years and 50 weeks would have shown up in my records.
2. The dogefaucet.com won’t actually transfer the doge to your wallet until you have accumulated 20 dogecoins.

TIP: that means you’ll want to use the same address for each faucet. Dogecoin.com tells you use a different address for each transaction. If you ever want to accumulate enough dogecoin to have the faucet transfer it to your own actual wallet, you’ll need to use the same address over and over.

This faucet will give you coin every 3 hours.

I started using 3 faucets. The other two are

Dogecoin Water Bowl – http://indogewetrust.com/   Don’t know how often you can use it.

Free Dogecoin  – https://freedoge.co.in/  Free coins every hour.

Free Dogecoin stores your pubic key, so you don’t have to paste it every time. It also offers online games where you can “let it ride” so to speak and maybe win a lot more. I only played the second game twice.

After a week, I had 46.09049702 dogecoin. (One of my spins on Free Dogecoin gave me more than 16, I think).

At current value, that’s still less than a dollar. But, bitcoin went from $0.25 to $32 per bitcoin in a very short time, and now it’s over $7000.

Dogecoin is cool because you can use it to tip other people online. If you get active in the dogecoin subreddit, /r/dogecoin, you’ll see talk of tipping and tip bots.

Soon, I’ll try to move some of my dogecoin into my personal wallet. These faucets are fairly silent on how to do that, but I’m sure the directions are out there somewhere. My next step would be to search the twitter account of @NateSchoffer for instructions. It appears he is responsible for setting up Dogecoin Water Bowl.

WARNING: if you’re doing this with your kids, Nate’s current twitter banner contains profanity.

Also, your kids can find anything, I mean ANYTHING on Reddit. But, they probably already have. You might as well know what’s out there and talk about it, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. (Depending on how old they are – don’t Reddit with 6-year-olds).

Encrypt your wallet. This is how you keep other people from getting in. Since I have trouble remembering passwords, I use LastPass to generate and save my passwords.

Who knows if Dogecoin will ever be worth a dollar, much less $1000. For me, it’s a great way to experiment with crypto. Still, we can hope. To the moon!

Next time: How I’ve already earned $50 off my $200 bitcoin investment. If you want $10 of free bitcoin, set up an account on coinbase from this link, invest more than $100, and we’ll both get $10 of free bitcoin.  https://www.coinbase.com/join/59ecb8cfa3176b00e1ff7d07

HINT: there’s a hard fork coming up around Nov. 16. Coinbase won’t allow bitcoin buying and selling right around then.

Also, Coinbase charges fees, so you’ll want that $10.

More tips.

1. Start a spreadsheet with your transactions. I keep up with the date, the faucet, the amount, and the time. (So I know when it’s been 3 hours). You’ll want this for when you’re ready to get your coin from the faucets to your wallet.
2. Don’t save it on dropbox or other cloud storage. When you have real money (like my bitcoin investment and private key) recorded there, you want to keep it private.
3. /r/dogecoin is your friend. Search https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/ for answers. (That’s how I learned everyone takes 3 to 4 days to download the Dogecoin blockchain).
4. Ask questions. Dogecoin is a fun and helpful community.
5. Get started. I didn’t know if I could do it either. I’m so glad I just dove in.

Hopefully, I made this a little easier on you. Hit me up with your questions and comments.

[INSERT witty cypto-related tag line here]

– CryptoGirl