Welcome to the NEW Bitcoin Faucet

I, along with donors who want to help, am giving away 0.00002500 BTC (2,500 satoshis) per visitor on April 6. You need to have an X account and will be asked to solve a CAPTCHA to prove you are a person and not a robot.

Get Some Now! Donate to the faucet

What are Bitcoins?

Bitcoins are a new kind of money. They aren't created or controlled by a government (like dollars or euros), they're created and controlled by anybody who wants to be part of the Bitcoin payment network. Visit the Bitcoin.org website for all the details.

How long will the faucet last?

The faucet will run until block 945,000. You can use the block date estimator to estimate what time that height will occur in your time zone.

Wait, so is this like the original Faucet?

Yes. It is inspired by the original 2010 faucet.

The problem: In the original version, Gavin Andresen put up the capital for the faucet. Because Bitcoin is much more expensive now, it is not feasible for me alone to put up the capital to give everyone 2,500 satoshis. So instead, I took a different approach that allows the faucet to be funded by the entire Bitcoin community without having a centralized wallet control the faucet funds.

The idea is this:

1. Someone requests 2,500 satoshis from the faucet. The faucet needs to verify that this is a real user, so we check their X account to see whether it was created over two years ago, which is much harder to fake, and whether it is verified. If both are true, the request is granted.

2. When a request is granted, it is added to a queue of pending faucet withdrawals. This queue is public and includes the X account, so people can verify the validity of a faucet withdrawal themselves.

3. When a donor deposits BTC into their personal donation wallet on this site, which is self-custodial, and enables donations, their browser will construct and submit transactions directly from that donation wallet to queued participants. They can stop at any time. It is fully peer-to-peer. Donors send BTC directly to faucet claimers. There is no centralized wallet.

4. The queue is self-balancing. The requester must come back to the site once every hour during the event to refresh their request. This ensures that if the queue becomes too overloaded and incoming donations cannot keep up, stale requests are canceled, and the X accounts behind them can simply request again later.

My hope:

My hope is that there will be enough motivated donors during the event who want to help recreate the original faucet experience Gavin created back in 2010.

As a donor, can I claim back BTC I sent to my donation wallet before it is fully depleted?

Yes. You can transfer it using this site or the CLI. Before donating, you will be prompted to create a BIP39 mnemonic phrase that controls this donation wallet. You can also import this phrase into any BIP39-compatible wallet to take full control of the address and withdraw funds from it if you wish to use another wallet.

Why do I need an X account?

I think Gavin said it best on the original site:

"Some numbskulls were visiting the faucet over and over and over again, and the old rule of "a few bit-pennies per IP address" wasn't working well enough to keep them from getting more than their fair share. So now I'm letting Google worry about the numbskulls." - Gavin

In our case, we are using X accounts instead of Google accounts.

I don't want you (or anyone) to know my X account and bitcoin address!

TLDR: Use a NEW address for the event

Gavin also said it best:

"I don't really want to know your email address, either. But that's how Google login works. I won't share your email address, and I won't send you any email. A "lightly scrambled" version of your email address will be shown on the "recent sends" page; I rely on volunteers to notice out-of-the-ordinary patterns to help prevent cheating." - gavin

My suggestion: If you do not want to link your X account to a specific Bitcoin address, create a new Bitcoin address to receive the reward from the faucet.

What's the catch?

No catch. :)