Bitcoin Forum

http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/ (http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/) nothing left. Just to draw everyone's attention to this, if you have a spare coin or two, why not top it up.

I just sent 10BTC. Maybe it's time for Gavin to lower the payout to 0.03 BTC.

I just sent 25. LET'S DO THIS!

Heh, I used the fact that the Faucet was running dry to convince my best friend to finally get bitcoins.

I'm looking at this as a good thing.

It means a lot of new people (or Gavin j/k) are signing up and finding out about bitcoins.

I'm going to go ahead and put some more back though.

Or somebody have access to hundreds google accounts...

Hundreds of google accounts AND hundreds of IP addresses (the Faucet does still check IP address).  And the patience to solve hundreds of CAPTCHAs...

I'm pretty sure almost all of the bitcoins going out of the Faucet are new people trying out Bitcoin.  We're getting between 500 and 1,000 downloads of bitcoin binaries from the SourceForge site per day (stats here (http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=244765&ugn=bitcoin)).

PS: Thanks again to everybody who donates to keep the Faucet running!

Also, the amount of work this requires for the sake of 0.05 makes it totally unfeasible (at least at the current Bitcoin rate).

based on download stats etc I doubt it's getting ripped off.
If you go to that effort then I'm impressed.
I guess you could pay someone to solve capchas and you'd break even maybe if you're lucky.
Really I think if you're sophisticated enough to bot and proxy and all that you could probably make better money somewhere else.
That's why I said it's a good sign the faucet is running low and I'm sure it will get refilled  ;D

Here's a thought.

Basically a lot of new bitcoiners are using the faucet to just 'see that it works' incoming to their account ... they put in a request for coins and out some pops in their local account. I don't think they really care too much that they just got ahead by BTC 0.05.

So in that vein, could we not set something up so that they can then immediately, and easily, just send some BTC back to the faucet (probably those same BTC 0.05 that they just got, so that they can 'see that it works' going the other way, i.e., outgoing from their account?

And then have some kind of confirmation at bitcoin faucet site for them that it was their BTC that just went through back the other way?

It would be closer to a net zero sum game for bitcoin faucet.

Good idea and it wouldn't be that hard to implement with block explorer even just putting a link to a sub page that described it all and gave a link to watch it should be enough.

google account: pretty easy to get, especially if you do youtube services
ip: proxy lists
captcha: decaptcher

But if you had a botnet of zombies doing that  would it really be worth the relatively small amount of BTC that the Faucet consists of?
I don't believe so.

Also figure in that most people that know about it really support it so that lowers the chance a little they'd rip it off.
I know only takes one but if I had to pick between ripping the faucet off or ripping off someone's grandma I'd pick grandma.

Point of curiosity: why are we getting way more downloads than page views? Is someone somewhere direct linking to the binary? Where's all that traffic coming from?

The bitcoin.org frontpage links directly to the sourceforge binary, which almost certainly accounts for that.

Thank you for this; you tipped the scale for me actually getting into BitCoins.  When I have finished downloading the chain and receive my 0.05, I'm definitely recirculating it back to the Faucet.

i know a great way to get more donations to the faucet: allow donators to leave a short piece of text.  since the bitcoin faucet is such a popular url, donators could leave a link to their website or company, acting as an advertisement.  public pilanthopy to new bitcoin users as a way to promote your company/brand image...

Good idea! I'm for that! It's similar idea as milion dollar page :).

This would be cool. The order should be [amount donated/minutes since donation] in descending order. Display top 10 on main page and have a page with the full list.

Damn that is a good idea not sure how easy it is to implement with btc, shouldn't be hard for a guy like Gavin and with as much love as the Faucet gets.

Neat idea-- I've been thinking about how to let people/companies sponsor the Faucet.

The next couple of things on my TODO list are getting the 0.3.21 bitcoin release process started and an API for ClearCoin, but I might tackle Faucet donations after those are done.

bitcoin@gulag:~ bin/bitcoind sendtoaddress 15VjRaDX9zpbA8LVnbrCAFzrVzN7ixHNsC 10
sent


10 more!

Haha, "gulag" what a nice name for a host!