TIL that the first bitcoin faucet gave 5 BTC per claim

In 2010 Gavin Andresen made the website freebitcoins.appspot.com, where he personally loaded it with 1.1k BTC. Each BTC was about $0.001 at that time so obviously he didn't care. Also, fees were almost non-existent due to very light network usage. In total it dispensed 19.7k BTC which is over $1.2B at BTC's ATH.

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https://preview.redd.it/xyqoxw6gjug71.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=6d50a8ccf060b97ca99a4d0e7ae7fb503efd0aac

Andresen made a bio in 2014 on the Bitcoin subreddit,

I first heard about Bitcoin in a May, 2010 InfoWorld article, and started working on Bitcoin-related projects soon after. I'm proud of my contributions:

I gave away over 10,000 bitcoins through the Bitcoin Faucet

I created the first alt-coin, the Bitcoin Testnet

I've added 62,000 and removed 76,000 lines of code from Bitcoin Core (I like to simplify)

I've written nine BIPS, including multi-signature transaction support and the Payment Protocol

He says he's proud that he had given it away even when BTC was $1k back in 2013. Kudos to him.