RPOW2 — A Tribute to Hal Finney

The First
54 Days

How a one-afternoon experiment unexpectedly attracted hundreds of thousands of miners.

May 7, 2026 — 10:38 AM

One simple idea:
What if Hal Finney's RPOW
existed in 2026?

A break from a long-term AI project. Open Claude Code. Start typing.

May 7 — 3:20 PM · Launch

Lunch. Claude. DNS. Deploy.
rpow2.com goes live.

No roadmap. No funding. No expectations. Forty minutes later, the first miners appeared.

May 7 — 5:56 PM

The Bitcoin community
notices.

Prominent Bitcoiners begin mining. Tweets spread. The tribute takes on a life of its own.

May 8 – May 13 · The Ecosystem Forms

People wanted to use RPOW,
not just mine it.

  • Longshot — a coin-flip game funded entirely with RPOW
  • Solana bridge — RPOW leaves the website
  • RPOWSwap & RPOWMarket — thousands of OTC trades, no coordination
May 10 – May 13 · Explosive Growth
50K
Users · May 10
100K
Users · May 12 (5 days)
200K
Users · May 13 (6 days)

Servers struggle. Cloudflare deployed. The first real scaling crisis — and it kept climbing.

May 18 – June 30 · Learning & Adapting

Not every experiment
succeeds.

  • Chat rooms & the free lottery — removed
  • Round-trip bridge — SRPOW unwraps back to RPOW
  • The bots arrive — and anti-bot tech makes mining fun again
Today · Where We Are
333,449
miners — all from an idea that started over lunch
By the Numbers
15.4M
RPOW mined
16.6M
Transfers
5.9M
Wrapped

27-bit difficulty. One of the largest proof-of-work experiments on the web.

Lessons
  • The internet still loves Proof of Work
  • People enjoy earning scarce digital objects
  • Communities form around open experiments
  • Sometimes the smallest side projects become the biggest surprises
2004 → 2026

Thank you, Hal.

Great ideas don't disappear. Sometimes they just wait for someone to rebuild them.

Twenty-two years later, people are still mining Reusable Proofs of Work.
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