Are faucets safe for a novice

[strat_the_cat]

As the title says…

Are faucets safe for a total GUI novice to use?
Are there any risks?

[codinghorror]

I can’t think of any. It’s like asking if there is a safety problem in sharing your bank account number so someone can wire you five bucks.

By itself, no, because otherwise how would anyone get paid?

Chia Faucets List

I’m creating this thread to compile a list of all Chia faucets. Please reply if you run a Chia faucet! I’m attaching the ones I know below: Chia Faucet Claim some XCH daily through the faucet! We offer a reward 10000 times the amount of the official Chia faucet. Additionally, you can play games to earn more Chia. https://chia.togatech.org/ Chia Garden Discord Faucet Claim XCH every 24 hours in Chia Garden’s discord server. https://chia.garden/tools/faucet/ Chia2u A Chia faucet that can b…

[durin]

It’s probably even safer than bank account number as you can generate a new address for each transaction (which I believe is considered to be a good practice anyway)

[codinghorror]

Yeah, that is kinda like those “generate a new credit card number each time” services.

[Alex]

Well we do have a disclaimer on our faucet in regards to privacy. Sharing a receive address publicly technically opens a possibility to mach some coin transactions to/from the wallet in the future. It’s not a serious concern for most novices, but it’s something that warrants a small disclaimer, I think.

[casualChia]

@Alex

to mach some coin transactions to/from the wallet

So what exactly does this mean?

[FunEarnings]

Ok, so for most faucets, it’s fairly safe. If you enter your address in an input box that only you see, it’s really only going to be between you and the person who runs the faucet. You have to trust the person running the faucet to be honest to some extent and not link your address with your identity (like a social media username), but given their position in the community, they do not want to ruin their reputation and will ensure your addresses remain unlinked to your identity. For the Chia Garden Discord Faucet, you are sharing your address publicly with everyone on the server, but I’ve heard from the dev team that they are working on a private message feature to ensure your address is private.

The worst a faucet can do is make your address public and tie it back to your identity. They can’t spend any of your funds, they can’t hack your node, they can’t find out who you are. If you don’t mind people seeing your wallet balance or watching when you make transactions to known addresses (like exchanges), you are fine. I would say 99% of people don’t really care if their address is public, if anything they are happy because someone might send free Chia their way. There are ways to link addresses together even if using different addresses with complex chain analysis, but faucets are generally safe and can’t do anything malicious.

[chialinks]

The one risk if you don’t use a new receive address with a faucet is that the faucet owner can link your IP address to your XCH balance, divulging which city or even neighborhood you live in if you aren’t using a VPN. Of the faucets on this list, the official Chia faucet is probably the safest to use.

[strat_the_cat]

Thanks to everyone for the replies…
Some very interesting comments…

[Alex]

@casualChia

So what exactly does this mean?

1. it is possible to see all the transactions coming to the same address (easily mitigated by using one-time address).
2. it is possible to see where you spend the amount received from faucet (even if it’s a part of a larger amount). Of course, it’s unlikely that Faucet knows anything about the receiver address anyway.

So the de-anonymisazion danger is somewhat theoretical. Faucet is not likely to leverage public address knowledge and match it in any way. Compared to the amount of tracking you experience on any modern website and to KYC requirements, it’s basically private.

[FunEarnings]

Yes, I agree with what Alex stated. While it’s technically possible to see what city you are in and then link your addresses together, it takes a while and is not feasible with the level of addresses that are entered into our faucets.

I run the https://chia.togatech.org/, and I believe Alex runs the Chia Garden Discord Faucet, I can confirm my faucet is just as safe as the official one, and I’m sure after the Discord faucet implements private messages, Alex can say the same. Yes, there’s some degree of trust, but you either trust us or you trust the Chia devs. Obviously, we don’t want to destroy our reputation by doing something malicious, just like the Chia devs wouldn’t.

[chia-faucet]

They are safe, because they do not require anything from you. You provide no more data, than minimum necessary for sign up. As an example, you may use our faucet for both testnet and mainnet.
https://chia-faucet.com/