Bitcoin Trivia
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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 01Which carmaker bought $1.5 billion of bitcoin in 2021 and briefly let buyers pay for cars with it?
Tesla
Tesla stopped accepting bitcoin for cars within two months, citing climate concerns over the fossil fuels burned to mine it.
Q 02What is bitcoin's first block, mined by Nakamoto in January 2009, called?
The genesis block
The genesis block's 50-bitcoin reward can never be spent, because the software skips that block's transactions as a special case.
Q 03Which newspaper's headline did Nakamoto embed in bitcoin's code in January 2009?
The Times
The Times headline said 'Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks', read both as a timestamp and as a jab at unstable banking.
Q 04Who received the first bitcoin transaction, ten coins from Nakamoto in January 2009?
Hal Finney
Hal Finney grabbed the software the day it came out; years later, almost paralysed by ALS, he was still writing code to harden bitcoin wallets.
Q 05In May 2010, what did programmer Laszlo Hanyecz buy for 10,000 bitcoins?
Two Papa John's pizzas
Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoins for two Papa John's pizzas, which another forum user ordered and had delivered to his home.
Q 06What is the maximum number of bitcoins that will ever be issued?
21 million
Only 21 million bitcoins will ever exist, and coins whose private keys are lost can never be spent again, shrinking the usable supply.
Q 07What is the event called when bitcoin's block reward is cut, roughly every four years?
The halving
The halving comes every 210,000 blocks, which is why the last bitcoin is not expected to be mined until around 2140.
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, and because bitcoin's price has soared, such tiny units are needed for small purchases.
Q 10Which hashing algorithm does Bitcoin use to chain its blocks?
SHA-256
SHA-256 links every block to the one before, so tampering with an old block would mean regenerating every block after it.
Q 11What is the consensus process by which miners compete to add blocks called?
Proof of work
Proof of work makes adding a block cost real computing effort, which is hard to produce but easy for everyone else to verify.
Q 12What is the special transaction called that pays a miner the block reward?
Coinbase
The coinbase transaction pays the miner the block reward, and every bitcoin in existence was first created through one.
Q 13What block size limit did Nakamoto impose, which later fuelled the scaling wars?
One megabyte
Nakamoto added the one megabyte limit in 2010, and years later fights over raising it split the community and led to rival forks.
Q 21Which 1997 Adam Back anti-spam scheme became a direct precursor of bitcoin mining?
Hashcash
Adam Back's Hashcash made each email cost a little computing time, trivial for one sender but costly for spammers, and bitcoin mining runs on the same idea.
Q 22Which bitcoin-based dark-web market did the FBI shut down in October 2013?
Silk Road
Silk Road's founder, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested by the FBI in a San Francisco public library.
Q 23What sentence did Ross Ulbricht receive in 2015 for running the dark-web market he founded?
Two life terms, no parole
Two life terms, no parole, plus 40 years was Ross Ulbricht's 2015 sentence, but President Trump pardoned him in January 2025.
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 split from bitcoin in August 2017 when supporters of bigger blocks forked the chain?
Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin Cash split from bitcoin on 1 August 2017, and it later split again itself when Bitcoin SV broke away.
Q 16Which payments company ended bitcoin support in 2018, citing slow transactions?
Stripe
Stripe said slow confirmations let bitcoin's price swing before a payment settled, leaving some payments for the 'wrong' amount.
Q 17Which 2017 ransomware attack, demanding payment in bitcoin, hit hospitals in Britain's National Health Service?
WannaCry
WannaCry was halted when a 22-year-old researcher in England registered a garbled web domain hidden in its code, tripping a kill switch.
Q 18Which magazine named a Japanese-American man in California, whose real name matched the pseudonym, as bitcoin's creator in 2014?
Newsweek
Newsweek's cover story named Dorian Nakamoto, who denied any link to bitcoin, and the story drew heavy criticism.
Q 19Which self-proclaimed Nakamoto was ruled by a London judge in 2024 not to be him?
Craig Wright
Craig Wright had claimed for years to be Nakamoto, but the judge ruled that he had lied extensively to support the claim.
Q 20Which cryptographer proposed 'bit gold', a forerunner of bitcoin, years before Nakamoto's white paper?
Nick Szabo
Nick Szabo is often named as a Nakamoto candidate, but he has repeatedly denied being bitcoin's creator.
Q 24Mt Gox, which collapsed in 2014, was first planned as a site for trading which game's cards?
Magic: The Gathering
Jed McCaleb bought the Mt Gox domain for a Magic: The Gathering card-trading site, then in 2010 turned it into a bitcoin exchange and sold it the next year.
Q 25What brought down Mt Gox, the Tokyo bitcoin exchange that collapsed in 2014?
Hackers stole its bitcoins
Hackers stole its bitcoins, and after Mt Gox halted withdrawals, protesters turned up outside its Tokyo offices.
Q 26Which country became the first to make bitcoin legal tender, in September 2021?
El Salvador
El Salvador paid people to sign up for its Chivo bitcoin wallet, yet usage stayed low and kept falling.
Q 27Which country made bitcoin legal tender alongside the CFA franc in April 2022?
Central African Republic
The Central African Republic did so although few of its people could get online, and using any cryptocurrency needs the internet.
Q 28Which famous investor called bitcoin 'probably rat poison squared' in 2018?
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett said so, yet he also said he would never short it.
Q 29Which social network's celebrity accounts, including Barack Obama's, were hijacked in July 2020 to push a bitcoin scam?
Twitter's hijackers tricked staff into giving them access to internal admin tools, then posted tweets promising to double any bitcoin sent.
Q 30Which SEC chair approved the first US spot bitcoin ETFs?
Gary Gensler
Gary Gensler approved them after an appeals court ruled that the SEC had not adequately explained rejecting Grayscale's bitcoin fund.