You know you have done it, you have signed up and rolled a faucet and collected your free crypto.  Most of us after awhile learned this was no way to get rich. On the popular Cointiply website, you can a faucet roll every hour, and after four hours, you will have between one and two pennies worth of crypto. That low payout  doesn't mean there is an interesting history to the crypto faucet.  

So, what was the first faucet, and how much did it pay. We have to go back to June 2010 when Gavin Andresen first launched the so-called Bitcoin faucet website. Using the domain “freebitcoins.appspot.com,” Andresen gave visitors the opportunity to earn 5 BTC per day just by solving a captcha.

To fuel the first faucet, Andresen loaded it with 1,100 BTC of his own. After these were given away, the faucet was reloaded, with early bitcoin miners and whales also donating coins. The faucet’s creator announced his idea of giving away free BTC on the now infamous Bitcointalk forum in a post that appeared on June 11, 2010. His motivation: “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.”

Although the Bitcoin faucet website is no longer functioning, a screengrab of the domain’s homepage revealed a very basic setup where users can earn BTC and set up their digital wallet. The Bitcoin faucet reportedly gave away 19,700 BTC to users just for solving a captcha. Those BTC are worth almost $1.2 billion at today’s prices.