Get 5 free bitcoins from freebitcoins.appspot.com
For my first Bitcoin coding project, I decided to do something that sounds really dumb: I created a web site that gives away Bitcoins. It is at: https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/
Five ฿ per customer, first come first served, I’ve stocked it with ฿1,100 to start. I’ll add more once I’m sure it is working properly.
Why? 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 until your node generates some coins (and that will get more frustrating in the future), and buying Bitcoins is still a little bit clunky.
Please try it out and get some free coins, even if you already have more Bitcoins than you know what to do with. You can get some and then donate them right back; the address is: 15VjRaDX9zpbA8LVnbrCAFzrVzN7ixHNsC
Thanks, lachesis— 50 to you for finding that bug!
I’ve changed the key and turned off debugging; I’ll tighten up its security a little more tomorrow when I’m more awake.
And wobber: no, I didn’t send you leet
The Bitcoin Faucet now shows how many coins it has available to give out (on the left-hand side of the page). The number is only moderately accurate— donations will take 5 or 10 minutes to show up in the balance.
I also implemented another anti-cheating measure that should make casual cheating a little harder (which I don’t want to say too much about because that would make it easy for cheaters to know what to do).
I’m very pleasantly surprised at how well freebitcoins is working so far; thanks again to everybody who tried it out and who donated bitcoins to it!
Excellent choice of a first project, nice work. I had planned to do this exact thing if someone else didn’t do it, so when it gets too hard for mortals to generate 50BTC, new users could get some coins to play with right away. Donations should be able to keep it filled. The display showing the balance in the dispenser encourages people to top it up.
You should put a donation bitcoin address on the page for those who want to add funds to it, which ideally should update to a new address whenever it receives something.
Thanks! I’ll add the donation address to the bottom of the page.
I’m thinking of keeping the donation address the same, so donations to the Faucet are transparent to anybody who wants to see. I WANT donations to, and payments from, the Bitcoin Faucet to be NON-anonymous, so anybody can audit that address and see the flow of bitcoins through the Faucet.
(by the way, if anybody is looking for an interesting bitcoin-related coding project I think a website where you enter a Bitcoin address and it shows you a visualization of all the transactions that went to/from that address would be cool… extra credit if it let you browse the web of transactions… I’d be really curious to see what percentage of bitcoins withdrawn from the Faucet end up donated right back into it…)
Hi Gavin,
nice service, but there was a problem with my first attempt to get the coins: “invalid BC address”. So the first address generated by the bitcoin program didn’t work - 1Dn51Rn2tmvARcsYkPe7Aw1sCAXw5oKnR
Why?
nice service, but there was a problem with my first attempt to get the coins: “invalid BC address”. So the first address generated by the bitcoin program didn’t work - 1Dn51Rn2tmvARcsYkPe7Aw1sCAXw5oKnR
That’s caused by a bug in one of the technologies I’m using behind the scenes (Google’s App Engine). If you try again the problem should go away.
I’ve got a couple of ideas on how to make it more reliable, but I’m still hoping Google finds and fixes the underlying problem…