A: It's an online puzzle game with 4 stages and a Bitcoin reward of 0.025 BTC. Only the first person to complete the puzzle and withdraw the Bitcoin from Satoshi's faucet will receive the reward.
A: Proceed through the rooms of the Bitcoin museum. Navigate web links unlocked by objects and information contained within the rooms. Here is a link to enter the museum lobby and start the puzzle.
A: Until solved, hints will be released weekly on Twitter, Mondays at 18:00 UTC.
You've an inquisitive mind so it's quite natural you've been drawn to Bitcoin and the story of its heritage. You've sifted through inflated rumours on Twitter, survived numerous ups and downs of Bitcoin markets and searched the Internet high and low, amidst its numerous claimants, for signs of Bitcoin's long lost creator.
One such rumour that has you puzzled, involves a conversation between one of Bitcoin's earliest developers and Satoshi Nakamoto on bitcointalk.org.
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
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.
As rumour would have it, the reason Gavin's faucet receives small regular deposits—even to this day—is not simply homage to a time in Bitcoin's nascent past when BTC was given out for free, but rather to burn the coins as an effigy to Satoshi—whose hoard of unmoved coins bring value to the Bitcoin network—and thank Satoshi for the free coins they've just liberated from an ancient lost Bitcoin faucet. Believers of this legend argue you can trace the deposits to Gavin's faucet and see the coins are sourced from early blocks dating to the time when Satoshi was a miner.
However, these coins aren't included in blocks generally considered to be mined by Satoshi. Who mined these mysterious early blocks they argue? We know it wasn't Hal Finney because he claimed to have only stayed mining for a few days after Bitcoin's launch:
When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.
Today, Satoshi's true identity has become a mystery [...] [A]fter a few days, bitcoin was running pretty stably, so I left it running. Those were the days when difficulty was 1, and you could find blocks with a CPU, not even a GPU. I mined several blocks over the next days. But I turned it off because it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me. In retrospect, I wish I had kept it up longer, but on the other hand I was extraordinarily lucky to be there at the beginning. It's one of those glass half full half empty things.
Proponents of the "Satoshi's lost faucet" theory argue many coins from ancient mystery blocks have been unlocked throughout the cryptocurrency's fabled history. They say the reason is because Satoshi actually did create a faucet (or faucets) and hid it/them somewhere on the Internet just prior to withdrawing from public life.
While thinking on this you take everything with a grain of salt, operating with casual amusement. Casual, until one day—while tracing the IP address of one of these early transactions—you are led to the physical address of a building where there's supposedly a museum dedicated to Bitcoin's early history. The geographical location is close enough and the coincidences are too amusing not to follow up on them.
You find yourself making a trip to the museum almost against your volition, pulled along as it were, by the force of curiousity.