50 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Under what pseudonym was the Bitcoin white paper published in 2008?
Satoshi Nakamoto
The paper, 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System', was posted to a cryptography mailing list on 31 October 2008 and was initially ignored by academics.
Q 02On what date was the Bitcoin genesis block mined?
3 January 2009
The block carried a reward of 50 bitcoins and a hidden message quoting that day's Times headline.
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
The date is now celebrated every year as Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Q 06What is the maximum number of bitcoins that will ever be issued?
21 million
The last coin is expected around the year 2140, after which miners will earn only transaction fees.
Q 07How often does the bitcoin block reward halve?
Every 210,000 blocks
At ten minutes per block that works out to roughly every four years; the genesis-era reward was 50 bitcoins.
Q 08On average, how often is a new bitcoin block created?
Every 10 minutes
The difficulty target is recalibrated every 2,016 blocks, about two weeks, to keep that pace as mining power changes.
Q 09What is the smallest unit of bitcoin called?
Satoshi
It is one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin; a millibitcoin is 100,000 of them.
Q 10To how many decimal places is one bitcoin divisible?
Eight
That is why the smallest unit, the satoshi, is 0.00000001 BTC.
Q 11Which hashing algorithm does Bitcoin use to chain its blocks?
SHA-256
Each block header is hashed twice, and each block includes the hash of the one before it.
Q 12What is the consensus process by which miners compete to add blocks called?
Proof of work
Miners hunt for a nonce that makes the block hash fall below a difficulty target, which is easy to verify but hard to find.
Q 13What is the special transaction called that pays a miner the block reward?
Coinbase
Every bitcoin in existence was created through one of these; the exchange company later took the name.
Q 21Which 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.
Q 22Which 1997 Adam Back anti-spam scheme became a direct precursor of bitcoin mining?
Hashcash
David Chaum's ecash of the 1980s needed central control, and Hashcash had no defence against double-spending.
Q 23Which dark-web market, launched in 2011, accepted only bitcoin and became its first major use?
Silk Road
It transacted 9.9 million bitcoins in 30 months; founder Ross Ulbricht ran it as 'Dread Pirate Roberts'.
Q 14What block size limit did Nakamoto impose, which later fuelled the scaling wars?
One megabyte
Supporters of bigger blocks forked off in 2017 to create Bitcoin Cash after the SegWit upgrade went through.
Q 15Which 2017 upgrade aimed to support second-layer payment channels and improve scalability?
SegWit
Taproot followed in November 2021, adding Schnorr signatures; ordinals (NFTs on bitcoin) arrived in 2023.
Q 16Which coin, forked off in August 2017 by supporters of bigger blocks, is the best-known hard fork?
Bitcoin Cash
It is one of many forks; Bitcoin Unlimited is a fork of the Bitcoin Core client software.
Q 17Roughly how many bitcoins do blockchain analysts estimate Nakamoto mined before disappearing in 2010?
About one million
He handed the alert key and code repository to Gavin Andresen, later lead developer at the Bitcoin Foundation.
Q 18On his P2P Foundation profile, Nakamoto claimed to be a man of what age living in Japan?
37
He gave his birthday as 5 April 1975, which some read as a nod to the US gold-ownership ban of 1933 and its 1975 repeal.
Q 19Which magazine wrongly identified a Japanese-American man in California, whose real name matched the pseudonym, as Bitcoin's creator in 2014?
Newsweek
Journalist Leah McGrath Goodman's story prompted the real Nakamoto's account to post 'I am not Dorian Nakamoto'.
Q 20Which Australian academic, who claimed to be Nakamoto, was ruled by a London judge in 2024 not to be him?
Craig Wright
Wired had first floated his name in December 2015 as either the inventor or 'a brilliant hoaxer'.
Q 24What sentence did Ross Ulbricht receive in 2015 for running the dark-web market he founded?
Two life terms, no parole
He was pardoned by President Trump in 2025.
Q 25Mt. 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 26What 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 27Which country made bitcoin legal tender in September 2021, then reversed the obligation in 2025 for the IMF?
El Salvador
President Nayib Bukele's Bitcoin Law passed on 8 June 2021; by 2022, 80% of Salvadoran businesses still refused to accept it.
Q 28Which other country adopted bitcoin as legal tender in April 2022, only to repeal it a year later?
Central African Republic
It ran alongside the CFA franc; Iran, meanwhile, makes its miners sell coins to the central bank to fund imports.
Q 29In which month and year did bitcoin's market capitalisation first reach $1 trillion?
February 2021
The first US spot bitcoin ETFs did not start trading until January 2024.
Q 30In which month did the bitcoin price first hit $100,000?
December 2024
It coincided with president-elect Trump promising to make the US the 'crypto capital of the planet'.