Former Twitter CEO and Bitcoin evangelist Jack Dorsey is taking the cryptocurrency community on a nostalgia trip
Dorsey has teased the return of the Bitcoin faucet, a truly legendary piece of Bitcoin history, through his X account
The details of Block’s new initiative remain scant until the launch
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The history of the faucet
In June 2010, Bitcoin was still an obscure technical experiment known only to a small circle of cryptographers and early cypherpunks.
Gavin Andresen, one of Bitcoin’s earliest and most prominent core developers, made it possible for curious internet users to try out this new digital money with the help of the original “Bitcoin Faucet.” The website was literally giving away BTC for free to anyone who wanted to test the software.
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The numbers are, of course, mind-boggling by today’s standards.
Visitors simply had to complete a basic CAPTCHA to prove they were human to receive 5 full Bitcoins. At the time, 5 BTC was practically worthless. Andresen funded the faucet entirely out of his own pocket, loading it with 1,100 of his own mined Bitcoins
Today, those 5 free coins acquired from a single CAPTCHA click would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars
The original faucet operated for a couple of years and gave away tens of thousands of BTC. It was eventually drained and shut down as the asset’s price finally began to climb.
It is incredibly safe to assume that Jack Dorsey’s resurrected faucet will not be handing out 5 whole Bitcoins to every visitor. Still, the return of the concept is a massive nod to Bitcoin’s grassroots origins.
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