13 years ago, the BTC faucet had started to give away a total of 19k BTC worth $490M today, just for writing down some letters.

In the very distant past, 13 years ago in 2010 where Bitcoin itself was just about one year old and truly nearly no one, except probably a few hundreds of software developers, knew about Bitcoin at all. Still even in those early days there were thankfully people that were ready to increase some Bitcoin mass adoption with different kind of applications that they developed themselves.

One of them was the much-known Bitcoin faucet, yep just a normal internet faucet where you would type down one word after solving a captcha, but with the twist that you would be getting a free 5 BTC. Back then 5 BTC was literally not even worth a few pennies and that is probably why for most it was just about doing a captcha and receiving literally nothing of visual monetary value.

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Archived picture of BTC faucet, from Pete Rizzo

Now at the end of that cool little project that teached the first few people about Bitcoin, 19k BTC were given away which would result in up to 3.8k users taking part in it, but the real number is probably way lower as a ton of people did it multiple times. That is literally over $490M given away in todays worth.

Now I did not want to cause some crazy hindsight and regret for many people after this, but instead look back at one of the first applications with BTC and that especially teached a ton of people about Bitcoin. A real legend that made this, just as much as the famous pizza guy.