Wednesday, April 10, 2013

'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.

6 comments:

  1. LOL - Bitcoin is laughable at this point.

    A failure waiting to happen. New money just dumping out worthless crypto-credits to strangers.

    BUBBLE behavior.

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  2. Bitcoin seems to be crashing big time:

    http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-plunges-2013-4

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  3. BITCOIN JUST POPPED:

    http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-plunges-2013-4

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  4. Seems to put recent wallet-service hacks into context, doesn't it. Theory: Someone (?) steals some BTC, then Someone (?) very publicly spreads it around. That'll startle the herd a bit. And wouldn't ya know - this very day over at LRC Paul Rosenberg has penned "Bitcoin should get ready for an attack" (http://bit.ly/14aiSBj). Quite timely.

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  5. I wonder if Tucker was "all in" on Bitcoin...

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  6. Fascinating! BTC dropped from $266 all the way down to $107 earlier today. And now it has bounced back to $197.

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