A college student quickly made over $24,000 just by waving this sign on TV.
Here's the deal. Yesterday on ESPN's College Gameday show (an ESPN college football show that's filmed at a different college campus each week) some student held the above sign that has both the
A QR code is a visual representation of any kind of information (frequently a URL for a website). In this case, the code represented a Bitcoin wallet.
On Reddit, Bitcoin fans managed to enhance the QR code from the screen in order to identify his wallet, so that people could donate him money.
Here's one enhancement from Redditor DanielTaylor:
That allowed people to figure out his wallet address, which is: 1HiMoMgBaAikFHgAt3M4YJtetp4HrnsiXu.
The image made it onto the front page of Reddit, and quickly spread across the Bitcoin community. And perhaps sensing an opportunity to turn this into a huge publicity stunt and free ad for Bitcoin (with articles like this one!) the community sent him donations.
The guy received 100 transactions totallying over 22 Bitcoins. At current prices above $1100 per Bitcoin, the kid has made over $24000.
A crucial thing about how Bitcoin works is that all transactions are made public, and you can see the number of Bitcoins associated with each wallet. What you can't see, however, is the actual person associated with the wallet.
Needless to say, the Bitcoin community was floored.
Here's some folks on Reddit watching stunned as the kid's wallet swelled with Bitcoins.
(Via CryptoJunky.com)