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- This person gave away 19,700 BTC!
This person gave away 19,700 BTC!
How good a man can be?
Meet Gavin Andresen. This person gave away 5 bitcoins to every visitor. In exchange, visitors have to complete a captcha. Like seriously?
In today’s story:
📑The story of giving 5 BTC to every visitor.
❓️Why does he give away Bitcoin to everyone?
🔍️Who is Gavin Andresen?
In This Story 📖
📑The story of giving 5 BTC to every visitor:
5 bitcoins.
Worth of $300k+.
This story happened back in 2010. Gavin Andresen created a Bitcoin Faucet. That gives away free Bitcoin. The faucet is filled with 1,100 bitcoins. Everything is hosted on this domain: “https ://freebitcoins .appspot .com/”.
Then he announced it on the BitcoinTalk forum…
In the early stages, the website gave 5 bitcoins to every visitor. After that, Andresen assigned tasks and debugged some code. Then users have to complete a captcha to get the reward.
Everything is running well. Many people mined Bitcoin from this website. After a few months, the website faucet ran out of stock, so Andresen refilled the faucet with his own Bitcoin. The process of refilling is done multiple times.
In total, Andresen gave away 19,700 bitcoins…
Just imagine what the scenario would be like if it happened today: giving away almost 20k BTC in exchange for nothing.
Guess what?! He can be a billionaire if he keeps those BTC by himself. All the bitcoin he gave away to the visitors is worth $1.2B. Yeap, you heard the right—billion dollars. However, back in 2010, bitcoin cost $0.8.
The craziest thing is that the website still shows that 750 bitcoins are available. Although, the website is now totally dead. You can see the achieved version.
❓️Why does he give away Bitcoin to everyone?
Now, you might be wondering why he gave away Bitcoin to everyone. Are there any unknown reasons here?
Ok, he explained it in his announcement post:
Because 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. It can be frustrating to wait untill your node genarates some coins (and that will get more frustrating in the future), and buying Bitcoins is still a little bit clunky.
🔍️Who is Gavin Andresen?
You have to accept it; a normal person like me will not do this type of crazy thing. Then who is he?
First of all, Andresen is a Bitcoin pioneer. He is one of the few developers who work alongside Satoshi Nakamoto. People called him “The man who built Bitcoin”.
After Satoshi’s departure, he declared himself as the lead developer of the reference implementation for Bitcoin client software. He was also involved in the development of ClearCoin.
Wait, he has one more identity…
He is the founder of the Bitcoin Foundation.
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