Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
47 free Bitcoin trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Bitcoin trivia quiz covers the first decentralised cryptocurrency from the white paper to the strategic reserve. It starts with the precursors (ecash, Hashcash, b-money, bit gold), Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 paper, the genesis block with its Times headline, Hal Finney's first transaction and the 10,000-bitcoin pizzas, then explains how the thing works: blocks every ten minutes, SHA-256, proof of work, difficulty adjustments, the 21 million cap, halvings and satoshis. The second half is the drama: Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht, the Mt. Gox collapse, the Newsweek 'Dorian' fiasco and the Craig Wright judgment, China's bans, SegWit and Bitcoin Cash, El Salvador's Bitcoin Law and its reversal, the spot ETFs of 2024, the first $100,000 print, and what Nobel laureates and Fed chairs have called it. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on Bitcoin, its history and the people and companies around it, and each explanation adds one further fact. Good for crypto newcomers, finance students and quiz nights that want more than 'who created it'.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Under what pseudonym was the Bitcoin white paper published in 2008?
Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi Nakamoto posted 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' to the metzdowd cryptography mailing list on 31 October 2008; the identity behind the name has never been confirmed.
Q 02On what date was the Bitcoin genesis block mined?
3 January 2009
The genesis block was mined on 3 January 2009 with a 50-bitcoin reward that can never be spent; it carried a newspaper headline from that day.
Q 03Which newspaper's headline is embedded in the Bitcoin genesis block?
The Times
The text reads 'Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks', dating the block and hinting at Nakamoto's motives.
Q 04Who received the first bitcoin transaction, ten coins from Nakamoto in January 2009?
Hal Finney
Finney had built the first reusable-proof-of-work currency in 2004 and was the first person besides Nakamoto to run the software.
Q 05In the first known commercial bitcoin purchase (May 2010), what did Laszlo Hanyecz buy for 10,000 BTC?
Two Papa John's pizzas
Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John's pizzas, ordered for him by another forum user, on 22 May 2010; the date is celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Q 06What is the maximum number of bitcoins that will ever be issued?
21 million
Bitcoin's supply is capped at 21 million coins, enforced by the halving schedule written into the protocol; by the April 2024 halving about 19.7 million had already been mined.
Q 07How often does the bitcoin block reward halve?
Every 210,000 blocks
The block reward halves every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years; it fell from 50 bitcoins in 2009 to 3.125 after the April 2024 halving.
Q 08On average, how often is a new bitcoin block created?
Every 10 minutes
Bitcoin targets one block every 10 minutes on average; the difficulty is recalibrated every 2,016 blocks, about two weeks, to hold that pace as mining power changes.
Q 09What is the smallest unit of bitcoin called?
Satoshi
The satoshi is one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin, so a millibitcoin is 100,000 satoshis; the unit is named after the currency's pseudonymous creator.
Q 10Which hashing algorithm does Bitcoin use to chain its blocks?
SHA-256
Bitcoin uses SHA-256: each block header is hashed twice with it, and every header includes the SHA-256 hash of the previous block, chaining them together.
Q 11What is the consensus process by which miners compete to add blocks called?
Proof of work
Bitcoin uses proof of work: miners hunt for a nonce that makes the block hash fall below a difficulty target, a result that is hard to find but easy to verify.
Q 12What is the special transaction called that pays a miner the block reward?
Coinbase
The coinbase transaction is the first in each block and pays the miner the subsidy plus fees; every bitcoin in existence was created this way, and the exchange Coinbase later took the name.
Q 13What block size limit did Nakamoto impose, which later fuelled the scaling wars?
One megabyte
Q 21Which 1997 Adam Back anti-spam scheme became a direct precursor of bitcoin mining?
Hashcash
Adam Back's Hashcash (1997) made senders compute a partial hash collision to deter spam; Nakamoto's white paper cites it as the basis of bitcoin's proof-of-work mining.
Q 22Which dark-web market, launched in 2011, accepted only bitcoin and became its first major use?
Silk Road
Silk Road, launched in February 2011, took only bitcoin; the FBI said it handled about 9.5 million bitcoins in sales before its October 2013 shutdown, run by Ross Ulbricht as 'Dread Pirate Roberts'.
Q 23What sentence did Ross Ulbricht receive in 2015 for running the dark-web market he founded?
Two life terms, no parole
Nakamoto quietly added a one megabyte block size limit in 2010 as an anti-spam measure; by 2015–17 the cap was at the heart of the 'block size wars' over how to scale.
Q 14Which 2017 upgrade aimed to support second-layer payment channels and improve scalability?
SegWit
Segregated Witness (SegWit) activated in August 2017, moving signature data out of the base block to fix transaction malleability and raise effective capacity, which made payment channels practical.
Q 15Which coin, forked off in August 2017 by supporters of bigger blocks, is the best-known hard fork?
Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin Cash split from Bitcoin on 1 August 2017 with an 8 MB block limit, backed by big-block supporters such as Roger Ver; Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin SV followed as further forks.
Q 16Roughly how many bitcoins do blockchain analysts estimate Nakamoto mined before disappearing in 2010?
About one million
Analyses of early mining patterns, notably Sergio Lerner's 'Patoshi' study published in 2013, suggest Nakamoto mined about one million bitcoins in 2009–10.
Q 17On his P2P Foundation profile, Nakamoto claimed to be a man of what age living in Japan?
37
The profile described a 37-year-old man living in Japan with a birthday of 5 April 1975, read by some as a nod to the 5 April 1933 US gold-ownership ban and its 1975 repeal.
Q 18Which magazine wrongly identified a Japanese-American man in California, whose real name matched the pseudonym, as Bitcoin's creator in 2014?
Newsweek
Newsweek's March 2014 cover story by Leah McGrath Goodman named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto of Temple City, California; the dormant P2P Foundation account then posted 'I am not Dorian Nakamoto'.
Q 19Which self-proclaimed Nakamoto was ruled by a London judge in 2024 not to be him?
Craig Wright
Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist, was ruled not to be Nakamoto by Mr Justice Mellor at the High Court in March 2024; Wired had floated his name in December 2015 as 'either the inventor or a brilliant hoaxer'.
Q 20Which reclusive 'bit gold' creator did the New York Times call the most convincing Nakamoto candidate in 2015?
Nick Szabo
Wei Dai's b-money and Szabo's bit gold were the first proposals for distributed digital scarcity, both in 1998.
In May 2015 Ulbricht was given two life terms plus 40 years with no possibility of parole; President Trump granted him a full pardon on 21 January 2025.
Q 24Mt. Gox, which collapsed in 2014, was originally set up to trade cards from which game?
Magic: The Gathering
The name is short for 'Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange'; Jed McCaleb sold it to Mark Karpeles in 2011.
Q 25What share of global bitcoin trades did Mt. Gox handle in early 2014, just before it collapsed?
Over 70%
A leaked crisis document said 744,408 bitcoins had been stolen in a theft that went undetected for years.
Q 26Which country made bitcoin legal tender in September 2021, then reversed the obligation in 2025 for the IMF?
El Salvador
El Salvador's Bitcoin Law, pushed by President Nayib Bukele, took effect on 7 September 2021; in January 2025 the assembly made acceptance voluntary to secure a $1.4 billion IMF loan.
Q 27Which other country adopted bitcoin as legal tender in April 2022, only to repeal it a year later?
Central African Republic
The Central African Republic made bitcoin legal tender alongside the CFA franc in April 2022 under President Touadéra, but repealed the law in March 2023 under pressure from the regional central bank BEAC.
Q 28In which month and year did bitcoin's market capitalisation first reach $1 trillion?
February 2021
Bitcoin's market capitalisation first topped $1 trillion on 19 February 2021, when the price passed roughly $53,000; the rally was fuelled by Tesla's $1.5 billion purchase disclosed that month.
Q 29In which month did the bitcoin price first hit $100,000?
December 2024
Bitcoin first crossed $100,000 on 5 December 2024, weeks after Donald Trump's election win and hours after he named crypto-friendly Paul Atkins to lead the SEC.
Q 30How many US spot bitcoin ETFs began trading in January 2024?
11
The SEC approved 11 spot bitcoin ETFs on 10 January 2024, including BlackRock's IBIT and Grayscale's converted GBTC, and they began trading the next day; ProShares' BITO futures ETF had launched in October 2021.