2 days ago
A relic of Bitcoin’s earliest days is making a comeback, perchance reviving a contented that erstwhile handed retired bitcoin (BTC) for escaped to anyone who could lick a elemental CAPTCHA.
Charlie Shrem, an aboriginal Bitcoin developer and entrepreneur, teased the relaunch of the Bitcoin Faucet earlier Monday, posting a nexus to the leafage that mimicked the 1 built by Gavin Andresen successful 2010.
The faucet famously distributed 5 BTC per idiosyncratic to their bitcoin wallets for escaped backmost erstwhile the token was worthy little than a cent. Each of those transfers is worthy astir $500,000 astatine existent prices.
The website is not yet unrecorded with rewards and holds zero BTC arsenic of aboriginal U.S. hours Monday.
The archetypal faucet was designed to assistance onboard caller users to the Bitcoin web astatine a clip erstwhile buying oregon mining BTC was cumbersome and often required method know-how.
At the time, Andresen funded the faucet with 1,100 BTC and saw it arsenic a mode to turn the web organically. The thought worked: thousands of aboriginal users got their archetypal vulnerability to Bitcoin done the faucet, which, successful hindsight, distributed tiny fortunes for free.
By the clip the faucet unopen down, its payouts had dwindled to fractions of a BTC, but its taste interaction remained legendary — particularly arsenic BTC prices surged implicit the adjacent decade.
English (US) 