Gavin Andresen and the Bitcoin faucet: free coins, and the developer Satoshi handed Bitcoin to

A website that handed out five bitcoin to anyone who asked

On 11 June 2010 a new member of the Bitcoin forum named Gavin Andresen announced his first project: a web page at freebitcoins.appspot.com that would send “Five ฿ per customer, first come first served.” You solved a captcha, pasted in a receiving address, and five bitcoin arrived. He had stocked it with 1,100 bitcoin. His reasoning was simple: Bitcoin could only succeed if newcomers could easily get a few coins to try it.

A week later Satoshi Nakamoto replied. “Excellent choice of a first project, nice work,” he wrote on 18 June 2010, adding that he had thought about doing the same thing himself. He suggested showing the faucet’s balance to encourage people to top it up, and rotating the donation address. As our wallet dossier on the faucet records, Andresen published a donation address in the thread so recipients could send coins back to the pool.

The faucet ran for about two years. As bitcoin gained value Andresen cut the amount per visitor, and he shut it down in 2012. Estimates of how much it gave away in total vary between secondary sources and this site has not verified them on-chain, so we do not repeat a figure. What is certain is that for a while, the easiest way to get your first bitcoin was to ask politely.

Cheaters arrived within two weeks, and so did Satoshi’s advice

By 23 June 2010 Andresen was back on the forum with a problem. He had been watching the internet addresses of people claiming their five bitcoin and had spotted clusters of requests from the same network ranges, a sign of one person collecting many times over. He added captcha challenges for suspicious requests and floated cutting repeat claimants down to a “bitcoin nickel” of 0.05.

Satoshi replied on 26 June with an engineer’s suggestion: enforce a minimum time between payments to each large block of internet addresses, since big providers tend to hand out addresses from the same range, and if that could not be solved, reduce the amounts while keeping the captcha. It is a small exchange, but it shows the working relationship in miniature: Andresen ships, Satoshi reviews.

“With Satoshi’s blessing”: the developer Satoshi handed the project to

Over the following months Andresen sent Satoshi improvements to the software, and Satoshi liked them enough to make Andresen’s email address the only contact on the project’s homepage. On 19 December 2010 Andresen opened a thread called “Development process straw-man” and wrote that “with Satoshi’s blessing, and with great reluctance,” he would start doing more active project management. He proposed a staging tree on GitHub, pull requests merged on consensus, and regular tested builds.

The handover was completed in private the following spring. The High Court’s 2024 judgment in the Craig Wright case records, as uncontested history, that in around April 2011 Satoshi delegated the role of lead core developer to Andresen and on 26 April 2011 sent him a file containing the network alert key, the one key that could broadcast a warning to every user. Our article on Satoshi’s disappearance tells that side of the story, including Satoshi’s last emails.

Andresen served as core maintainer until April 2014, when Wladimir van der Laan took over the day-to-day job. By then Andresen, working from a home office in Amherst, Massachusetts, was describing the code’s future as a job for caretakers rather than master builders.

The Bitcoin Foundation, and the block size fight

In 2012 Andresen conceived the Bitcoin Foundation, a non-profit that for a few years was the closest thing Bitcoin had to an official body. It paid him to work on the software full time, $209,648 in 2013 according to MIT Technology Review, and his title there was chief scientist. The Foundation gave Bitcoin a public face at a moment when regulators and intelligence agencies wanted someone to explain it, and Andresen was the person they asked.

His most consequential technical position came in 2015. Bitcoin blocks were capped at one megabyte, and Andresen argued that transaction volume would soon hit that ceiling. His Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 101, dated 22 June 2015, proposed replacing the fixed limit with one that grew at a predictable rate: eight million bytes from January 2016, doubling every two years until 2036. The proposal is now marked “Closed.” It was not adopted, but it became a rallying point in a long and bitter dispute. Our block size war dossier covers what happened, and our BIP explainer explains the process a proposal like this goes through.

The Craig Wright episode, and the walk-back

In the spring of 2016 Andresen was approached by Craig Wright, an Australian who claimed to be Satoshi. On 29 March 2016 Andresen sent a list of proofs he wanted, including a message signed with Satoshi’s known PGP key; the court later recorded that Wright gave some reason why he did not have it or it would not be good proof. In early April Wright held a private “proof session” with Andresen in which, on Wright’s account, he demonstrated control of keys tied to early blocks. On 2 May 2016 Andresen published a blog post saying he was convinced Wright was Satoshi, and Wright went public the same day.

The proof did not hold up. Technical commentators pointed out within hours that the signature Wright published had been pulled from an existing transaction on the blockchain, which anyone could copy, and some asked whether Andresen’s account had been hacked. In 2024 the High Court recorded expert agreement that the private sessions, including the one with Andresen, could have been spoofed by straightforward means with no visible warning, and that Wright’s public blog post was “clearly not a genuine proof.” The court declared that Wright is not Satoshi; our article on the COPA ruling has the details.

Andresen did not retract for years. Then, in February 2023, he added a note to the top of his 2016 post. As reported at the time, he said he did not believe in rewriting history, so the post would stay up, but he now knew “it was a mistake to trust Craig Wright” as much as he had, and he regretted getting sucked into the game of guessing who Satoshi is.

What the faucet still teaches

The faucet is remembered as a curiosity: free money handed to strangers. That misses why it mattered. In June 2010 the problem was not that bitcoin was cheap, it was that almost nobody had any, and a currency nobody holds cannot be used. Andresen’s five-coin handouts, and Satoshi’s advice on stopping cheaters, were the project working out distribution in public, one captcha at a time.

It also explains the handover. Satoshi’s successor was the person who showed up with a working project, took feedback, and shipped fixes. Everything that followed, the Foundation, the block size fight, the Wright episode, happened to the same person for the same reason: he was the one who stepped forward. For the on-chain side of the story, the faucet’s donation address is in our wallet library, and the origins dossier puts 2010 in context.