The developer wants to reopen the faucet
In a post on X on Sunday, a Bitcoin developer named Charlie Shrem claimed that he was working on a "reference" website to distribute BTC supposedly for the sole purpose of promoting wider adoption.
Shrem is known for his role as co-founder of BitInstant and the Bitcoin Foundation. He served a year in prison in 2015 for a money laundering charge related to allegations that BitInstant facilitated allegedly illegal activities on Silk Road. After his release in 2016, Shrem returned to the cryptocurrency world and founded Druid Ventures, a venture capital fund specializing in cryptocurrencies. He also launched a podcast.
Called faucets, like the one created by Gavin Andresen in 2010, drove the adoption of BTC in its early days, as Cointelegraph noted. "Faucets encouraged the creation of wallets and transactions, which contributed to the expansion of Bitcoin's user base and network activity," Cointelegraph stated.
Andresen's Bitcoin Faucet page, in what is the most well-known example, delivered nearly 20,000 coins (now worth around 2 billion dollars) for solving "CAPTCHA" tasks (commonly used to distinguish humans from machines).
Other websites began to offer similar services. However, Cointelegraph stated that as the price of BTC and transaction fees rose in the middle of the last decade, the model became unsustainable.
