You've probably heard of Cointiply, allegedly one of the best Bitcoin / crypto faucets out there. I've come across Cointiply through some fellow Steemians and am also using one's referral code (we'll get to that).

After sticking around with it for a couple of weeks and trying all methods to earn coins there, I wanted to share some insights into what works well and what's just a waste of time. There's a nice article here by @abrockman and a more recent update here, but I would like to include some of the other earning methods, as well.

What's Cointiply?

If you haven't heard of it - Cointiply is mainly a Bitcoin faucet. You can do all kinds of things to earn free Bitcoin (or Dogecoin, if you prefer). These activities include:

• An hourly faucet to give you up to 1000 coins
• Watching videos
• Filling in surveys
• Clicking PTC Ads
• The Mulitplier game

10000 coins will give you 1$ worth of Bitcoin.

The faucet is rather straightforward; the only noteworthy thing is that you get a bonus on it when you play the faucet every day, so I suggest you put Cointiply on your browser start screen.

The Multiplier game was covered by @abrockman very neatly, so I won't go into much detail there.

Videos

Watching videos has been one of the easy options to acquire coins. There's two ways of earning coins, of which one has worked much better than the other.

Once you've clicked Videos, you have the choice between Adscend and Cointiply:

Adscend gets you to an external site and supposedly credits you with 51 coins every 3 videos and 3 ads you've watched. However, I wasn't able to get more than 51 coins credited per new "page reload + re-open the Adscend video page + click on videos", no matter how many hours of videos I watched. This was pretty disappointing, so I actually stuck with the Cointiply Video Ads.

These have worked quite well at 8 coins per video (the videos are typically between 10 and 30 seconds long), but I was only able to watch exactly 374 videos before "no videos were available" to me anymore. But hey, it still was an easy 2992 coins for the mining game ;-)

PTC Ads

These are quite useless, as there aren't many that are typically offered. Often there is just one, and this pays a meager 18 coins, so you can skip PTC Ads for the time being.

Offer Walls / Surveys

Surveys have been my main income of coins so far. They can be very time-consuming and don't pay as well as on other sites (mostly between 800 and 4000 points if you fill the complete survey). But there are ways to tweak this a little bit.

I've mostly used the "tap research" offer wall, but it actually doesn't matter that much. It's mostly that this offer wall really pays reliably, so there isn't much of a reason to change.

The trick here is that it seems the amount of coins paid depends solely on the time spent with the survey, not on the actual success of the filling process. Therefore, if you click on one offer and a new tab opens, you keep the tab open and idle for, let's say, 20mins (don't touch the Offer Wall tab during that time either) you get the full amount of suggested coins, even if the research institute itself deems you "not eligible" for that survey. This way you can make sure you max out your offer wall earnings.

Mining game

This is the main and juicy part, as often suggested. Long-term, this will probably give you the highest returns at the lowest effort and the most fun.

In addition / deviation to @abrockman's suggestions, I've set up my own strategy. Before I get to that, please keep the following in mind:

• Your mine produces 1 coin per 34 Mining Power (MP) per hour
• Your mine efficiency automatically goes down by 2% per hour
• You can bump up your efficiency for 101 gems per 1%, up to 200%
• The MP per coins spent is always the same, no matter which buildings or upgrades you buy (except for the Maintenance Hangar), and it equals 100 coins per 1 MP
• The Maintenance Hangar gives you 5% extra efficiency per day
• Checking in for free gems gives you between 200 and 600 gems each time

We can deduct the following observations from that:

• You need roughly 19*200 = 3800 gems per day to keep your mine at 200%, which is what you want
• Checking in will probably not be enough, so you'll have to get gems from the gem mode or buy gems from the market
• Gems are currently (but that changes a lot) roughly 10 gems per 1 coin in the market (the current gem mode rate is worse, so watch out whether gem mode is good for you)
• Therefore, you need roughly 380 coins produced daily by your mine to be breakeven without ever checking in for free gems. This makes (380/24)*34 = ~540 MP to get your mine profitable if you just go there once a day and buy new gems from your coins. Don't waste your coins if you can't afford for roughly this MP (after efficiency enhancements) as you'll likely have a negative ROI

There's one more thing regarding upgrades:
Upgrades of buildings expire after 100 days, and you'll need extra gems to revive them (a lot of gems!). In order to avoid that, I've been buying the most expensive base buildings I could afford so I wouldn't have to buy upgrades which will expire for as long as possible.

Referrals

You get a 25% referral bonus on the faucet claims of your referral targets (lifetime!), plus 10% of their offer wall earnings. This is quite cool, so in order to support this article, feel free to use my referral link to sign up at Cointiply:

http://cointiply.com/r/jKMKJ

Leave a comment once you've signed up to get an upvote from me.

Cash out

As usual with faucets, you need to accumulate quite a lot of coins before you can cash out. In case of Cointiply, that's actually doable:

• 35000 coins to withdraw to your FaucetHub wallet
• 50000 coins to withdraw to your Dogecoin wallet
• 100000 coins to withdraw to your Bitcoin wallet

Do your math whether you want to go the long game with the mining game or whether you'd rather withdraw your coins for actual BTC / DOGE.

Let me know what your strategies are and whether the stuff above works for you, as well, or whether you feel there's anything missing here.