Faucets were the beginning or entry point for many of us into crypto space. While we didn't have much knowledge on what exactly does a bitcoin/cryptocurrency mean we have started using faucets! Faucets on the whole were simple money making strategy by solving captcha through which we received satoshis. They were accumulated and we finally withdrawn them to our wallets by paying a minimal fee. But LN doesn't work that way. For one to transact through off-chain, they need to open a channel on-chain between the faucet owner and receiver by paying in bitcoin. Meanwhile if the faucet owner agrees to use LN and requests the newbie user to open a channel by paying in btc, they might assume that as a scam and runaway without using the faucet.

This is quite enough to prove that if LN were to be adopted, we would require to pay first to open a channel. LN requires your money to start a channel man, faucet owner doesn't pay for everything! Faucets are a way of introducing a newbie into crypto space and not making them run away without using those faucets and on top of that it might be a little complicated for new users to understand how LN functions.

Even though I don't use faucets myself, I do agree that it's good for introducing new people to Bitcoin.
What's really needed is a faucet that doesn't rely on misleading advertising and possibly harmful pop-ups etc.

But yeah, who would build something like that, if there's no profit to be made with it?
Maybe a big corporation that's invested in Bitcoin and does this as some sort of promotion?

Here's code for a lightning network faucet at least (for testnet): https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-faucet

Disclaimer: I have not looked at the code, use at your own discretion.

Have you tried googling? I've found these:

Mainnet

https://www.coinpanic.com/Lightning/CommunityJar

Testnet

https://faucet.lightning.community/

https://htlc.me/ (not a faucet, but an online wallet with pre-allocated tBTC balance)


Faucets are bad, because it's just paying tiny amounts of money people for watching ads, and guess who is engaging in this activity? Those who can't afford to buy anything, because they are broke and have to waste their time on faucets in the first place.

It's interesting topic for discussion. I think faucets changed a lot since the early days of Bitcoin. In past faucets were used to spread word about Bitcoin and help to make it more popular. Now faucets aren't working as charity organizations. Now faucet ownersvare aiming to reach profit from advertising networks. Spreading a word about Bitcoin, adopting new innovative things aren't their mission anymore. And transaction fees are low in recent months, so faucet owners now don't see any reason to find new ways how to pay to their user.
And as Lucius said, now majority of faucets now are paying through microwallets like Faucethub. All payments from faucets to users are made off-chain, so faucet owners aren't concerned about things like transaction fees at all. Now there are just few faucets which makes direct payments to Bitcoin addresses. Faucet payments through Lightning Network sounds like utophia right now. To make such payments custom made faucet script would be needed, and faucet owners would need to have good technical knowledge to enable such payments. It doesn't looks feasible now and in near future.

People are totally missing the point about Faucets. The latest version of faucets are profit driven operations and they are not really geared towards increasing adoption. The old faucets was geared to adoption, because the coins were donated for that purpose.

One of the challenges I see is the complexity of the Lightning Network at the moment and also the cost to maintain these LN faucets for a long time, when the userbase increase.

It will still be a good experiment to see if the LN adoption will grow, when people are first introduced to it with LN faucets. I believe people will start using it, when there are some motivation to do it. <Apart from the tx speed> 

No, I am not saying that people should only donate millions of dollars for this, the alternative can be funded by advertisements on the website. The price of a bitcoin does not matter, because you will not be giving out whole bitcoins, like back in the day. 

The Lightning Network is the game-changer and people should group efforts together to make a success of this project. Once the Lightning Network goes mainstream, more applications will be developed for it and that would stimulate demand for coins, which will increase the price. <A win-win for every Bitcoin owner> 

Faucets are not inherently bad, just the current implementation of most faucets are not all too kosher.
I could see great use-cases of a community-funded faucet for example.

In essence, they're a great way to teach people about Bitcoin, without them having to spend money on it.
People generally want to learn how something works without having to spend money on it, especially with something like Bitcoin.


Indeed, I did answer my own question

I'd definitely support a crowdfunding effort like that.
Just like you, I also started out using faucets, after that I purchased some Bitcoins through Kraken.

I definitely see the merit in having a LN faucet that is not driven by advertising.

I'm with OP on this. I actually used a faucet a lot earlier than in 2016 when I finally decided to properly "get into" Bitcoin by getting my own proper wallet and client, and it had absolutely nothing to do with collecting free money. I'm 100% sure you'll still find a healthy number of users who'd use a faucet for purely educational purposes.

99bitcoins used to run a "faucet", I know because in 2016 when I wanted to see what a tx looked like in my wallet, I used it and got 0.0001 BTC. It was a different sort of faucet because it wasn't just a captcha-solving puzzle, you got to it after reading an educational article and then you had to send an email asking for it (absolutely no spam since then, too!).

Was a tiny amount, perhaps, but enough to even let me make a spend.

I definitely think faucets are a good way to help educate and spread awareness but yeah, as eternal says, implementation is currently really bad - but that's because most of these commercial sites with faucets market their faucets specifically to people who want to watch ads or click on ads to get fractions of a cent.

Implement to educate, something like how 99bitcoins did it. Faucets for kids are an awesome idea too, imo.

I've been playing around with a Lightning wallet lately, and discovered this Lighting faucet: https://light.yuyaogawa.com/faucet/ that's still working.

I'm considering creating a topic: "LoyceV's Legendary Lightning Network Satoshi Doubler Trippler", in which anyone who sends me 1 Satoshi through LN, gets back 3 Satoshis. It'll be a lot of work without a bot though.

I'm quite impressed with how smooth LN operates already, and would like to see the network grow further.

LN offers the opportunity to get rid of the middle man, which is what Bitcoin is all about. I don't care about getting a very small amount in Bitcoin from a faucet, if I have to make hundreds of claims before I can withdraw. But I'd jump through several hoops just to get 5 Sat out of a LN faucet to test it.

I won't make it, I went for LoyceV's Legendary Little Lightning Loans instead.

I said one satoshi, not a million I can tripple 1 satoshi all day long, a million is going to be expensive.

I had been reading about it for a very long time, installing a client was long overdue.