With a new thread reminiscing about the time that American software developer Gavin Andresen gave away 19,700 BTC, Reddit’s r/Cryptocurrency community revived an interesting piece of Bitcoin (BTC) history on Sunday.
The Reddit community was taken back to June 2010, when Andresen first launched the Bitcoin Faucet website and of which the domain was ‘freebitcoins.appspot.com’. The thread that took the Reddit community back to June 2010, was started by “uGroundbreakingLack78”. Just by solving a Captcha, a programme intended to distinguish human from machine input, visitors were given the opportunity earn 5 BTC per day.
User “uGroundbreakingLack78” explained:
“To fuel the first faucet, Andresen loaded it with 1,100 BTC of his own. After these were given away, the faucet was reloaded, with early bitcoin miners and whales also donating coins.”
The faucet’s creator announced his “really dumb” idea of giving away free BTC on the now infamous Bitcointalk forum in a post that appeared June 11, 2010. His motivation: “[…] I want the Bitcoin project to succeed, and I think it is more likely to be a success if people can get a handful of coins to try it out.”
Andresen played a major role in Bitcoin’s development during its formative days. He was the main software developer for BTC’s reference implementation, having joined the core development team in 2012 after Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous founder, announced they would be leaving the project.