Bitcoin Faucet changes

So I've been watching the IP addresses of people getting 5 free bitcoins from the Bitcoin Faucet ( https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/ ).

And I see some... uh, interesting patterns.  Like these successful requests for coins:


My apologies if there actually are a bunch of new bitcoin users using IP addresses in the 79.117 range...  but I'm guessing somebody there is getting more than their fair share of free bitcoins.

There are several suspicious requests from the 192.38.95.* address block, too.

So I've made some changes to the Faucet.  You won't notice them unless you try to cheat; if you do try to cheat, you'll have to solve a CAPTCHA to get coins.

If that doesn't discourage cheating, I'll modify the code so that if it think you're trying to cheat it requires a CAPTCHA and only gives out a bitcoin nickel (0.05 bitcoins)...

"flawed" ??

I've been telling people it is a half-baked, I've-lost-my-friggin-mind idea!

So far, I count it as a big success-- I've learned a lot that will help me with my next Bitcoin-related project, I've made a bunch of people a teeny-tiny bit happier, and I've personally invested just under $1.00 worth of bitcoins over the last two weeks.

I did throw in the towel today and turned on reCAPTCHA for everybody getting bitcoins (it looks like somebody DID bother to write a robot to harvest coins through proxies).  It was fun trying to come up with new, creative ways of detecting cheating, but I have more important things to work on.

Gavin, why don't you just block all served Bitcoin addresses?
Would it be easy to generate them automatically?

Funny how on this forum the same people play both sides of the table--on the one hand, trying to come up with ways to preserve absolute anonymity (e.g. the heroin store thread), and then coming here and trying to do sort of the opposite to protect BTC Faucet. 

I love it