'The Bitcoin Billionaire' Randomly Giving Out Thousands Of Dollars

Adam Taylor at Business Insider has the story:

Today, something pretty strange happened.

Someone gave away over $13,000 worth of Bitcoins to complete strangers on Reddit.

Some context: For the last few months, Reddit users have been able to "tip" each other with Bitcoins. Basically, the user sets up a "Bitcointip" account. They are then able to tip other users using simple commands within Reddit.

For example, typing "+bitcointip @Username $1usd" will tip that username the Bitcoin equivalent of $1. The recipient of the tip can then export their tip to a Bitcoin wallet (in this case, BlockWallet.info).

(For more information, try reading Bitcointip's help page here).

As the Bitcointip account writes a message whenever a tip is verified, you can see how people are using it. It appears most people use this feature for comical effect — of the most recent tips, most are below $5[...] That first tip was apparently worth $4,680.

Over the day, Bitcoinbillionaire gave out 11 tips, some of which were thousands of dollars. By Business Insider's calculation, he or she gave away $13,627.69896 worth of Bitcoins.

Most of the time, the tip seemed almost arbitrary. Redditors observing the transactions were left stunned

Read the full story here.