Oh lol, just noticed the same!

Hi everybody,

I created this Guide for beginners who would like to know what an airdrop is, how it works and why they're doing it.
I kept it simple, but it should give an overview of the big-picture.
I responded to the questions I was asking myself when I didn't know what was going on, here's the simple info that you should have.


Happy reading!  


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Welcome!


Here you can find a full airdrop guide to understand what is going on: What they are, why people are doing them, how to partecipate and how to store them.


WHAT IS AN AIRDROP?
An airdrop for a cryptocurrency is a procedure of distributing tokens by awarding them to existing holders of a particular blockchain currency, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.
In the United States, the practice has raised questions about tax liabilities and whether they amount to income or capital gains (Courtesy of Wikipedia).


Notable Airdrops
Bitcoin Cash was given to all holders of Bitcoin in August 2017. (Value 18/03/2017 $923,78 )
Omise gave away five percent of their OmiseGO cryptocurrency to holders of Ethereum in September 2017. (Value 18/03/2017 $10,01)
Polymath recently airdropped 250 POLY per person, which are now worth $167 (08/03/2018) We posted it.
Only this month the total value that I received through the Airdrops that I applied is more than $100.


But if you're totally new to this world you're asking yourself:
Why they should give away free money? This is probably a scam, free money doesn't exist. Well, yes, in 99% of the cases, if they're offering you free money it is probably a scam. However, you have to understand three crucial points here:

1-A Token/Coin without a community is a useless token. People have to use it, to own it.
2-Airdropping, giving away free tokens/coins, free money, is a wonderful way to let the others talk about you, it's a wonderful way to make cheap publicity. Yes, you're giving away free money because you could have sold all of those tokens, but maybe the money that you would have spent to make some proper big publicity around the internet would have cost more. Again, with airdrop you fulfill the first step that we mentioned: A lot of people will already have the token, so they don't have to buy it from anywhere.
3-They want you to hold a certain coin to receive free airdrops. NOTICE: In most cases you DON'T need to hold anything to receive an airdrop, you only need a wallet address.
Now that we have explained the context, we can say that an airdrop is the act of distributing tokens to multiple addresses. This is often used to reward holders or spread awareness for a new token.

WHAT DO YOU NEED?

Airdrops require that anyone who wants to participate should have the following:
There’s a high probability that common airdrops requires one of the following*

Email 90/100*
Bitcointalk account 10/100*
A Telegram account 100/100*
ERC20 wallets 99/100 Almost Sure*
Other crypto wallets 1/100 Very rare*
A Facebook account 10/100*
A Twitter account 30/100*
A LinkedIn account 1/100*
A Medium account 5/100*
Phone number 5/100*
Rarely, others can require accounts like Discord and GitHub.

Since these are easy to create, lets focus on how to create an ERC20 wallet.
Here you can find a good short guide: https://medium.com/swissborg/how-to-generate-your-ethereum-erc-20-compatible-wallet-address-7cc549717a6c
I suggest MyEtherWallet (MEW) or Eidoo for mobile phones.
Some airdrops now require a min of 0.1 ETH in your wallet to avoid fake accounts, but it's rare.

HOW TO BE SECURE:

Since many of the ICOs and projects in this world are scams, it's possible that you’re giving your data to someone that is using it for negative purposes. My suggestion is the following:

1-Use a different password from your important accounts, try to use as many passwords as possible (this should be a general rule)
2-Create an alternate email, don't use your personal email for airdrops or website that you don't trust 100% (and I suggest to trust very few things at 100%). Don't register to strange websites with the email address associated to your exchange account or similar important things. Why? Because if they steal your password and they have your real email, they have a full login. ( Unless you have a 2FA activated, and you should everywhere you store important data or money. By the way, even if you do, trust me, you don't want your credentials in the hands of some shady guys).
3-Don't use your phone number associated with important accounts for the same reason that I mentioned above. Create another one, use the one of your girlfriend, mother, dog, but don't use the one that you associated with a wallet or an important service. By the way, as you can see above it's very rare for an airdrop to ask for a phone number.
4-Don't ever give away your private key!


Hope that all of the information here could help you through this journey. Be safe out there!


Thank you!



On Steemit: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@onemantiger/ultimate-guide-how-to-survive-the-airdrop-fever

I modified my Steemit article and added "DT" at the end of it to prove that I'm the author.