Fan holding up sign on ESPN racks up over $24,000 in Bitcoin donations

By Mike Flacy Published December 3, 2013

Exploding in popularity on Reddit over the weekend, an Auburn college student attending ESPN’s live College Gameday broadcast at the Alabama-Auburn game used a QR code printed on a large sign to score a huge amount of Bitcoin donations from the online community. The sign read “Hi Mom, Send” and included the iconic Bitcoin symbol as well as a giant QR code. A Reddit user was able to enhance the QR code taken from a picture of the broadcast and donations immediately started to flow into the student’s account.

According to Blockchain, the account had received a total of 23 Bitcoins as of earlier today. At a rate of $1050 per Bitcoin, that’s approximately $24,000 in total donations to the account.

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Mentioned on Reddit and detailed within recent activity on the Bitcoin account, the Auburn student has made a donation of 11 BTC (approximately $11,700) to a non-profit organization in Florida called Sean’s Outpost. That charitable organization works to feed homeless in the state of Florida and has been funded through Bitcoin donations in the past. Detailed on the Sean’s Outpost Facebook page, the founders claim to have fed 22,000 homeless people from Bitcoin donations alone.

According to the student’s Reddit account, he also plans on donating a portion of the Bitcoins to the Reddit user that provided the clean QR code scan to the community. Obtaining Bitcoin donations using QR codes is a standard practice on the Web, but this is definitely one of the first times that someone has garnered Bitcoin donations using a combination of television and QR codes. It’s also likely that other Bitcoin users will attempt to imitate this practice at live events in the future such as sporting events and news broadcasts.

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