An interesting fact from the posting history of satoshi

[BitcoinFX]

...snip...

What happened to Gavin's faucet? (Is there any archived info about that)

Gavin was giving away 5 bitcoins at the beginning. The earliest achieves date back to July 2010 when that offer was still available.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100703032414/https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

As the value of Bitcoin increased, Gavin naturally lowered to faucet amounts. In August of the same year it was down to 0.05 bitcoins.  
http://web.archive.org/web/20100805002250/https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

This was later lowered to 0.005 bitcoin and I think the last faucet drops were 0.001 bitcoin. Somewhere towards the end of 2012 the faucet no longer gave out any more bitcoins. I think I read somewhere that Gavin gave away over 20.000 bitcoins through his faucet in the early days. He was instrumental in fueling the early adoption.  

If you want to research the faucet transactions you might follow my donation to it using a block explorer ...

...snip...

My 500 BTC donation to Gavin's Original Bitcoin Faucet is from this wallet ...
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183.msg7536#msg7536

Date: 04/08/2010 18:27
To: 15VjRaDX9zpbA8LVnbrCAFzrVzN7ixHNsC
Debit: -500.00000000 BTC
Net amount: -500.00000000 BTC
Transaction ID: 92435cc4da7808976aa6d3d9c8fb02e7fe23a48b9f9c73145ef738b0d8d977e2
Transaction total size: 1135 bytes
Transaction virtual size: 1135 bytes
Output index: 0

Satoshi ...
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183.msg1620#msg1620



...snip...

[Prince Malik]

It is a pity that sites like that are just left to die..... take Freebitco.in as an example.... it was one of the early faucets and it had to adapt when Ad companies stopped paying for faucet traffic. (turning it self into a more gambling orientated site to survive)

It is absolutely crazy that you had to pay a fee for a wallet service back then... (if I understood it correctly, you pay for the web hosting and the wallet account...right?)

What happened to Gavin's faucet? (Is there any archived info about that)

I agree with you...people just cant understund how freebitcoin give to people when the bitcoin wss cheap...the early claimers from this faucet are rich now if they hold theire satoshis that they claimed daily...freebitcoin must be one of the bitcoin simbols but many butcoiners dont care about it

[Pmalek]

If you want to research the faucet transactions you might follow my donation to it using a block explorer ...

Incredible contribution BitcoinFX. I might use this as an example for a thread I am thinking of writing soon. It doesn't really fit the main topic, but I will see if I can make it work. It's always great to see how the early members helped out the community when help was needed!

[pawanjain]

In the meantime, sites like vekja.net and www.mybitcoin.com have been experimenting with account-based sites.  You create an account on a website and hold your bitcoins on account there and transfer in and out.  Creating an account on a website is a lot easier than installing and learning to use software, and a more familiar way of doing it for most people.  The only disadvantage is that you have to trust the site, but that's fine for pocket change amounts for micropayments and misc expenses.  It's an easy way to get started and if you get larger amounts then you can upgrade to the actual bitcoin software.

Was the creator of bitcoin suggesting that online custodial wallets were a good alternative, especially for smaller amounts?
 

Isn't he probably right ? I mean, instead of setting up a full node can't we just use the most trusted online website for smaller amounts of bitcoin ?
I know there's no point of holding bitcoins if we don't own the private keys but people are doing it already.
Thousands if not millions of traders are holding their bitcoins on exchanges. If not major chunks of bitcoin but still small to medium amount of their portfolio will still be on exchanges for active trading.

May be this is what Satoshi meant.

[Pmalek]

Isn't he probably right ? I mean, instead of setting up a full node can't we just use the most trusted online website for smaller amounts of bitcoin ?

He WAS right when he said it because back in those days there was a very limited offer on wallets. You had Bitcoin Core that required the download of the entire blockchain. Some people didn't want to do that, because they either didn't care too much about bitcoin at the time, they simply didn't want to, or they didn't have or were prepared to make available the storage capacities to host full nodes. Since light wallets were nonexistent, you only had a chice between exchanges - web wallets - Bitcoin Core.  

[Pmalek]

There are really a lot of interesting facts, but some of them are fake.

Feel free to share your findings and give more details about what you think is fake. You can see from satoshi's quote that I shared in the opening post that he specifically mentioned two sites. He talked about how it is much easier to create an account on such sites than to work with unknown software (satoshi's bitcoin client at that time). It's faster and doesn't require the user to download the entire blockchain.     

[Pmalek]

Bump