Bitcoin Forum

Today is bitcoin's 14th birthday. So here is a reminder for you. In 2010, Gavin created a Bitcoin faucet that gave users bitcoin for solving captcha. You had to solve old style captcha which would have taken like -10 seconds and 5 bitcoins were yours in return. If you did this once a day, you could have been a millionaire today.

Here is what the website looked like in past

https://web.archive.org/web/20100703032414/http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

Were you aware of this news ?

Who could have thought that Bitcoin will work out as intended? No one, that's why people sold their Bitcoin very early, I played with a few faucets years ago and I sold everything for less money, no regrets.

Today it's harder to sell Bitcoin because we have come to understand how valuable this asset is, Bitcoin is the hardest asset to get for free, it's the most scarce with very low inflation, mostly on par with Gold.

This way of thinking is exactly why there are very few "millionaires" around. You are thinking of gaming a system (the faucet) that was not supposed to be used that way to earn peanuts! This is while there were (as there are today) lots of better ways to honestly earn a much larger amount of bitcoin. For example you could have turned your computer on and used your CPU to mine a single block to earn 50 bitcoins as the reward! Or even you could have spent $100 to buy 2000 bitcoins!

I see absolutely no point thinking about what you could have/should have done more than a decade ago as it won't do you any good. The same goes for all those articles during bull run with titles such "if you spent $100 on bitcoin 12 years ago now you would have xyz millions". The only thing that it achieves is newbies investing in altcoins instead of bitcoin, thinking that they are too late while they should focus on getting bitcoin now.

In 2010, I was too young to engage in earning money or to understand how financial operations work. But among those who managed to learn about Bitcoin so early and tried the faucets, I'm sure the majority would lose what they got or sell whenever it costs anything significant (say, at $50 per coin). So it's all very hypothetical. Overall, I agree with Rikafip that it doesn't matter. I think we should focus on reality and on how to behave going forward.

So what? are we need to collect every faucet right now in order to become a millionaire lol.

The main point is holding, so regardless any way you can earn Bitcoin easily at the early time, if you're not hold your coins until now, you wouldn't become a millionaire. Just start DCA-ing Bitcoin when it's still cheap. There's a high chance the next bull run might reach $100,000.

I have missed the opportunities preety late as well like back in 2015-16 also when I heard about bitcoin but didn't invest in it at that time so it's just past regret that we can have in present but nothing can be done.We think if we have done it in past we would have been millionaire but the thing is if you make that move timely and it gives you return in future.But we all have somehow missed it but some are still millionaire even after investing late so now there is no point in making such imaginative scenario in our mind.

It is always easy to look at the past and say if.

Now we are living in the present and we are deciding our future with our decisions and activities. We actually can avoid regret if we make right decisions for what we believe in. 90% of Bitcoin in total supply was mined by miners so far and not many bitcoins left as rewards for mining and miners.

Controlled supply (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply) and the chart Bitcoin inflation vs. Time are good tools for us to avoid regret if.
https://bitcoinblockhalf.com/images/bitcoin-inflation-chart.png (https://bitcoinblockhalf.com/)

Well we have this in our community, everyone can visit the original thread here: Get 5 free bitcoins from freebitcoins.appspot.com. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183.0)

I'm sure some of you will find this thread priceless as you can see another legendary bitcoin personality there replying, laszlo and others (including satoshi himself  ;D).

That's a long time ago though, no one thought that bitcoin will be so big right now. And not only this, there are numerous example in the past, we have seen a lot of tweets as well for some old supporter of bitcoin who sold them early and now regretting their decisions.

If we could have seen this, then for sure many of us will jump on the early bandwagon and probably keep tons in our wallet to become a millionaire.

But it's not to late though, I guess we can still be crypto millionaire in the future if we keep on accumulating.

That faucet didn't last long because even then there were people who abused everything they could, and your reminder doesn't really make much sense considering that everyone could mine Bitcoin on their computer back then, and the reward per block was as much as 50 BTC. Therefore, if you claim on that faucet every day in one month (30x5 = 150 BTC), while with only one mined block per day, you would have even 1500 BTC per month.


Most people know about that faucet, but in the context of the time it existed, I don't believe anyone got rich using it. Those who mined at that time probably said even then that it was a simple waste of time.

Ah, didn't realize there was a thread available for these avenues of receiving bitcoin for just solving captcha.
I was one of those users of these sort of websites early on into my adventure into cryptocurrencies. But unfortunately not early enough when there were bitcoin faucets. Think they were called rai or what it is now known as nano.
It was a fun way to dip those toes into the waters of the unknown back in 2015-2016.
Even the bitcoin pizza persona had taken to using faucets to try out the water.

Great thread, thanks for referring to it Dave1!

If you just solve it once and are given 5 BTC as stated, then you will really be a millionaire only if you hold it until now. For sure, there are only a few that have held bitcoin since that year until now, or there are none since they encountered a lot of temptation to sell it in the past years unless they just forgot it. Also, when they had accumulated bitcoin that year, they would have sold it so that they could buy things at the time, as money is always necessary and they mostly don't trust bitcoin on that time. 

A complementary thread to the one you reference in your post, is this one regarding a Spanish bloke (presumably as per his IPs) that kept on cheating the faucet: Who's the Spanish jerk draining the Faucet? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=704.0)

I figure that it was rare to see on the logs IPs from Spain getting their spill from the faucet every minute or two, and he therefore presumed it was the same person changing IPs for each pull (and bitcoin address) from the faucet.

The said incident led to some brainstorming on how to avoid the doings, and ultimately led to pondering taking the faucet down from 5 BTCs to 0,5 BTCs, with Satoshi agreeing to the idea (not sure if it was eventually carried out before closing the faucet (*)).

(*) Yep, but down to 0,05 (variable over time, depending on the amount of BTCs in the faucet):
(August 2010) https://web.archive.org/web/20100805002250/http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/
(December 2010) https://web.archive.org/web/20101230165628/http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

Or you could have downloaded Core and ran the miner...

Point is, even if you had 1000 BTC, would you have kept it 10+ years? Or would you have sold when it hit $1, $10, $100, $1000...?

I read some of these replies and I learnt so much from the thread. It was great to see how Bitcoin was cheaply given as gifts and how some of the receivers were selfless enough to return some the coins they trickily got by using Tor browser. The simplicity of getting 5BTC for just solving captcha would have made me think it was a scam. I am sure I would have refused to join such activity and it would have been my greatest regret. Considering the price of Bitcoin today I would have been the richest in my family and one of the richest in my area. I am sure most of the people that took this uncommon opportunity are millionaires. I learnt that it is still possible to get something of value free.  


It might be difficult to keep hodling your coin when it gets to $1000 because people might believe that it would be the highest price it would ever get to. It would only take a strong believer of Bitcoin to hodl for ten years because the coin was not very popular then.

Aside from just claiming coins from faucet, you'd have to also not lose your keys for 12 years and resist the temptation to sell your coins at previous price levels. When it hit $100 it looked like a miracle and people who made thousands of percents in gains cashed out, because the risk of losing this profit seemed greater than the risk of losing even higher potential profits. Same goes for the next tops like $1,300 or $20,000.

In reality, it isn't the faucet that would make you a millionaire; it is the willingness to HODL. To those who were able to make use of that faucet, are they millionaires now? There were those who got more than 50BTC, more than a hundred even, or even more than a thousand. Do they still have their coins? Did they HODL through $10, $50, $100, $5,000, $20,000, $50,000? Many probably didn't. Laszlo's case isn't probably weird back in the days. It was only celebrated because it was the first time Bitcoin was traded with some real world goods.

Amazing, 5 bitcoins per visitor once you solve the captcha, I worked on bitcoin faucets as early as approx 2015 but I didn't know about this site, it might have closed at that time.

The faucets I worked on gave around 10-20k satoshis, so I managed to collect a lot in that time but I sold them for a very low price.

This does not matter now, we have to focus on the reality today and benefit from the mistakes of the past.

It's good to remember stories like this in these times of the market when people's spirits are low because of the price.

In the future people can get rich by simply buying and holding at these prices and waiting, although it is logical that future returns will not be like those of the first cycles, and that seems to be confirmed in this one.

Besides, we should not only look at the "being a millionaire" of the title. The fact that with Bitcoin you can transfer wealth without depending on the approval of a centralized intermediary, or that you can move from one country to another and take a large amount with you without any problems, is something we should value.

Yes, the ability to hold even when it rose 10x, 100x or more is something few had. They were the true believers in this technology and they got rightfully rewarded for this.

If I had known that earlier, I would have spent all of my time accumulating tons of bitcoins and holding them to this day. But unfortunately, I didn't know about it at all and after bitcoin started going up to $200-$300, I just found out about bitcoin. One of my regrets in the past was that I didn't find out more about bitcoin, but I guess there hasn't been much more information about it than now.

But that's in the past and I still have an opportunity today to collect bitcoins, even if the returns won't be as big as they used to be. Especially now, faucets can no longer provide big rewards like a few years ago. But we can still look for other ways to get bitcoins.

I do not think that it is end of the day. There are still new opportunities waiting for us. Even bitcoin has lot of potential for future.

Gone are the days where earning from faucets are profitable. Or if they have earned a decade ago, they might have at least lose today because bitcoin’s value has seen more dropping than seeing it surging high and reach an all time high, that will cause them panic and would end up deciding to sell their coins. However, if you want to be a millionaire, then you should focus on maximizing your bitcoin accumulation and only sell them when bitcoin price is already on its top of its ATH.

You cannot expect to end up a millionaire today by simply doing what is just working in the past and not anymore significant in the present. It’s like believing from a very impossible thing. But there might be millionaires today who are really earning from bitcoin and that they also have taken calculated risks, and not just by doing things that would not require to get out from their comfort zones.

Who thought that those bitcoins would turn into gold someday? Feels like I missed something very big not to know about Bitcoin then. I have heard a lot about these sites where bitcoin was used for the reward for a smaller task like captcha solving but never knew the amount.

By the way- What about that Gavin guy? Does he holds any bitcoins or spends all for rewarding his traffic? I am just curious.


As a tenth grader at that time I would've sold them at 1$ for 1000$  ;D. Damn, I don't have to blame myself for selling my bitcoins at 1$, that's a relief.

Living rich and affluent is not really my goal these days with bitcoin, ^{[although it is possible]} but I am definitely getting the benefit. In the 14 years since it was introduced by Satoshi bitcoin has grown and is used by quite a lot of people around the world. 770,539 blocks have been mined, and the number of circulation 19,253,340 bitcoin at 324.532 billionUSD. Yes it is one of the greatest currencies in its history, and we truly hope that everyone will benefit from it regardless of whether they get rich or live simply.

$100 might buy 2000 bitcoin in the early years, but I don't know of any other way than mining in those days. I'm new to bitcoin in the last few years so obviously there's a lot of information I've been missing. Let's think about the future, how much can we make $100 of bitcoin today in the first 20 years of bitcoin.

Even if awareness is there, but the fact that what matters now is your present potentials and capacity, then considering the past is not relevant anymore. What is more important these days especially that we are having a bearish market is that we were able to to maximize bitcoin accumulation and trade them when they are already highly profitable. Faucets are not profitable anymore, just like how they used to be in the past.

It is always difficult to look back on missed opportunities, but it is important to remember that we can not change the past and can only move forward :)

Perhaps this experience can serve as a reminder for all of us about to stay vigilant and seize opportunities as they present themselves in the future  ;)

Yes, you are right because, at this time, we should be grateful that we are still allowed to invest in bitcoin because this situation allows us to start buying bitcoin at the current price. And because of bitcoin's potential, we must be able to take advantage of the opportunities that exist before everything changes and we will find it difficult to buy bitcoins in the future. Many people are still buying bitcoin at the current price and if the price goes down again, they will be very happy to be able to buy more bitcoin.

It was a great event of history when Bitcoin was created & we must celebrate its birthday with family and friends because it created many millionaires who believed in this Block chain technology and invested in it at the right time. Unfortunately, this great opportunity to earn Bitcoin by simply solving captcha was missed, but we should not live bin past and look forward to avail current opportunity & accumulate Bitcoin which is available at very attractive price.