Gavin Andresen - 2011-03-01 18:28:00

Thanks for the donations, everybody!

Catching up on questions:

Is the faucet supported entirely by donations?  Not entirely-- the captchas have generated about $100, which will go into refilling it.  It looks like captcha revenue is only covering about 1/4 of the cost of the coins, although the company that does the money-for-captchas is a startup looking for more advertisers.  Actually, if you want to advertise a bitcoin-related business you should talk to them... (they're adscaptcha.com)

Was somebody abusing the faucet?   Yep, somebody was exploiting a weakness in my IPv6-handling code.  I've fixed the weakness (the faucet is now much stricter about what it considers "different" IPv6 addresses), but I think I'm fighting a losing battle-- the next step will be to require you to login with a valid google account to get coins.  I hate to add another hoop to jump through...

Is it time to reduce the payout?  Maybe soon, but I'd rather wait until the next release is out and then reduce the payouts another factor of 10 (so 'standard' payout if balance was above 500BTC would be 0.05BTC, and 0.005 when it was running low).

Can I add a link to bitcoinmonitor.com?   Done.