Your ultimate resource for everything Bitcoin when trivia night comes around.

N.B. All of this relates to Bitcoin (BTC). If this triggers you and you want something about Bitcoin Cash (BCH) or one of the many Bitcoin spin-offs, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

1) Who invented Bitcoin? Satoshi Nakamoto

2) Based on projections, approximately when will the last Bitcoin be mined?

A) 2060                        B) 2100                        C) 2140                        D) 2200

Source: https://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com/

3) When was Bitcoin launched? (January) 2009

4) How often are new BTC created?

A) Every five minutes B) Every 10 minutes    C) Every 20 minutes    D) Every hour

5) How often does Bitcoin have a halving event? I.e., How many blocks? Every…210,000 blocks           

6) Which was the first country to accept Bitcoin as legal tender? El Salvador

7) Bitcoin Pizza Day marks one of the first-known transactions involving BTC buying goods. How many Bitcoins were spent to buy two pizzas back in 2010?

A) 500 BTC                   B) 5,000 BTC                C) 10,000 BTC              D) 13,000 BTC

7B (Bonus question): Who spent 10,000 BTC on these? Laszlo Hanyecz

8) How long has BTC held the top spot in terms of circulating market cap?

A) Since it launched    B) 10 years                 C) Seven years             D) Five years

9) What is Bitcoin’s all-time high (at the time of writing)? I’ve used rounding for simplicity.

A) $73,000                  B) $84,000                   C) $125,000                 D) $150,000

10) How many transactions per second can Bitcoin handle on its main blockchain (on average)?

A) Two                         B) Seven                      C) Thirty                      D) Two hundred

Source: https://www.bitdegree.org/crypto/learn/crypto-terms/what-is-transactions-per-second-tps

11) What is the name of a popular solution to help Bitcoin significantly improve its scalability (i.e., to handle many more TPS)?

A) Beacon Chain          B) Pegasus                  C) Mimblewimble       D) Lighting Network

12) What is Bitcoin’s max supply (in BTC)? 21 million

13) What type of hardware is used to mine BTC?

A) CPU                         B) GPU                         C) ASIC                        D) A motherboard

Sidenote: Before 2014, it was possible to mine BTC with a conventional computer, using a CPU or GPU. However, now that the network has grown exponentially, its computing (hashing) power is significantly higher than in its early days. Nowadays, BTC can only be mined with ASIC miners (shown below).

ASIC miners on shelves. Image by afina_baikalskaya at Shutterstock.

14) Which company currently holds the highest amount of BTC?

A) MicroStrategy         B) Tesla           C) Fidelity                    D) BlackRock

Source: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-market-news-today:-blackrocks-ishares-etf-surpasses-microstrategy-in-bitcoin  

15) How many Bitcoins does the US Government hold (as of April 2024)?

A) 50,000                     B) 150,000                   C) 210,000                   D) 400,000

Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/governments-hold-surprising-amount-bitcoin-125711893.html

16) How many BTC are left to mine?

A) 500,000                   B) 1.3 million               C) 3 million                D) 6 million

17) What was the name of the once-popular Bitcoin exchange that lost over 650,000 BTC between 2011 and 2014? Mt Gox                   

Citations: 

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/bitcoin-gox/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox#cite_note-warnock2014-69

18) How many BTC does Satoshi reportedly own (across multiple wallets)?

A) 10,000                    B) 200,000                   C) 500,000                   D) 1,100,000 (1.1 million)

Sources:

https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/767190

https://coincheckup.com/blog/satoshi-nakamoto-wallet-address/ Figure could range between 600,000 and 1.1 million, according to this website.

19) In 2014, British man James Howells lost 8,000 BTC. How did this occur?

A) His (former) partner threw out a hard drive with the private keys to his BTC wallet  
B) A thief stole the computer containing the private keys
C) He formatted his hard drive and lost the recovery seed
D) His hardware wallet containing the BTC was damaged in a flooding event

Story: His ex-partner threw out a black bin bag containing the hard drive with his Bitcoins. Howells has repeatedly pleaded with his local council/municipality, which runs the waste management facility, for permission to excavate the site in the hopes of retrieving the hard drive, but to no avail.
8,000 BTC are currently worth ~$536 million.

Source: https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/man-who-threw-away-bitcoin-28833001

20) One Bitcoin equals how many satoshis (a.k.a. sats)? 100 million

21) Which famous American politician purchased 14 BTC in 2023 for their children?

A) Donald Trump
B) Marco Rubio
C) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
D) Chuck Schumer

Article: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/07/26/rfk-jr-confirms-bitcoin-purchases/

22) Which of these Bitcoin/crypto personalities is not involved in Bitcoin’s development?

A) Michael Saylor
B) Jack Dorsey
C) Andreas Antonopoulos
D) Charles Hoskinson

Hoskinson is the CEO of Input Output Global (IOG)—formerly IOHK—and a key spokesperson for Cardano.

23) Which Bitcoin enthusiast purchased a football/soccer club at the grassroots level to make “the Bitcoin club” eventually reach the English Premier League?

A) Peter McCormack
B) Anthony Pompliano
C) Jack Dorsey
D) Eric Voorhees

N.B. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have invested $4.5 million in the club, and their crypto exchange, Gemini, is a major sponsor.

https://www.realbedford.com/news/winklevoss-twins-to-invest-45m-into-real-bedford-football-club

23B) Bonus question: What is the name of this club? Real Bedford (est. Block 712003)

24) What was BTC’s all-time low? Rounded prices used

A) One cent
B) Five cents
C) One dollar
D) Ten dollars

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/
https://www.statmuse.com/money/ask/bitcoin-price-all-time-low

25) Which country has the highest share of Bitcoin mining hash rate? The USA

Optional question: Why is it a potential issue for one country to have a large share of Bitcoin mining activity?

In the event of widespread power outages, it would negatively impact network security (as the hash rate is directly tied to this) and overall decentralisation.

Remember that Bitcoin miners not only create new BTC, but they are also responsible for validating transactions.

Harder questions

26) Which hashing and digital signature algorithms currently run Bitcoin’s network?

Hashing: Secure Hashing Algorithm 256 (SHA-256)
Digital signature: Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA)

27) What is a 51% attack?

When an individual actor (or single group) obtains majority control of a network’s hashing (mining) power.

Sidenote: A higher hash rate is a good sign (but not the only one) of a robust Bitcoin blockchain, even though this translates to greater energy consumption to run its network.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html#alltime

28) How many reachable nodes help secure Bitcoin’s blockchain? Rounded to the nearest thousand.

A) 5,000                       B) 12,000                     C) 16,000                     D) 19,000

29) What is an inscription (on Bitcoin’s blockchain)?

These refer to satoshis inscribed with metadata, such as transaction data and other information about the digital entries linked to that satoshi, NFT, security tokens (BRC-20 tokens that utilise the Ordinals protocol on Bitcoin) and more.

This term is sometimes used interchangeably with ordinals, a numbering system for satoshis (i.e., 1/100,000,000th of a BTC) to track them in real-time. The name relates to ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.).

30) What has Bitcoin’s uptime been since the beginning? To the nearest 0.1%. 99.99%

https://bitcoinuptime.com/
https://bitcoinuptime.org/

Thanks for checking this out! If you enjoyed this, you might also like the crypto pub trivia instalment and my other posts on Medium.

The information is correct at the time of writing (June 2024).

Featured Image by thuynhungle99 at Freepik