A clever college student managed to raise what is likely enough to cover a full year’s worth of tuition in 24 hours time thanks to the power of the Internet. And it all started with a well-placed advertisement on a Saturday morning college football show.
College football fans reading this story are no doubt familiar with ESPN’s College GameDay, a football show hosted on a different college campus each week. It’s not uncommon for those in the crowd to hold up clever signs in support of their favorite team or even funny ones against their biggest rivals.
On this weekend’s edition, one member of the crowd held up a sign asking his mother to send Bitcoin. Said audience member also included the Bitcoin logo and a QR code that linked to his Bitcoin wallet. Members of Reddit were able to enhance the on-screen image to identify his wallet.
The image found its way to the front page of Reddit and soon after, the donations came pouring in. As of writing, the wallet contains more than 22 Bitcoins from 103 transactions which at the current rate is worth nearly $19,000. As you can imagine, people on Reddit were absolutely floored by the amount of donations the wallet (and its owner) managed to generate in such a short period of time.
We are able to determine how many coins were donated due to the way Bitcoin works as all transactions are made public via the Blockchain (Bitcoin’s ledger). This allows anyone to view the balance of any Bitcoin wallet although the person associated with the wallet isn’t revealed.
