Bitcoin gifts: 0.002 BTC to 100 people for €3 in fees

A hundred Bitcoin Epiphany gifts with three euros in fees

On January 6, 2017, a hundred people around the world received the same amount in their digital wallets: 0.002 bitcoins each. There was no bank behind it, no payroll, no commercial promotion. An anonymous investor decided that others would write his letter to the Three Wise Men and peine a public giveaway: whoever left their wallet address in time would get paid. The extraordinary thing was not the amount, but the logistics. Moving money to a hundred different recipients, without knowing them and without sharing a single personal detail, cost, according to the calculation that circulated in the thread itself, 0.0036 BTC, a little over three euros in fees.

The experiment ended up leaving an uncomfortable lesson about custody, taxation and what a financial system without intermediaries really costs.

What was given away and where the money came from

The initial announcement spoke of 100 gifts of 0.001 BTC, with a limit of 0.1 BTC in total and a warning that sounded like a wink: the donor described himself as a capitalist and a bit of a cheapskate. Days later, a second investor announced he was coming "from the East" with another 0.1 BTC, and the figure doubled. The 0.002 BTC per person would be delivered on Epiphany.

The mechanics were simple and messy in equal parts. Each interested party pasted their address in the message, protected in a code block so the system would not truncate the string. Some wrote the wallet identifier instead of the address, some left it unformatted, and some rewrote the same text three times until they got it right. The deadline to correct errors closed at five in the afternoon on January 5.

How much did it cost to send bitcoin to a hundred people in 2017?

Less than a coffee. The calculation that circulated in the conversation itself put the fee for the whole operation at 0.0036 BTC, just over three euros, for a transaction with a hundred different outputs. With a traditional bank transfer, the same giveaway would have required a hundred operations, a hundred fees and a hundred beneficiaries identified with name, surname and account.

The transaction was recorded on the blockchain and is verifiable by anyone. That is the detail that surprised the participants themselves: privacy between sender and receivers, public traceability of the movement and a ridiculous cost. The shipment was made from a desktop wallet, with the fee the program proposed by default.

The flaw nobody saw coming: the wallet you don't control

Two of the addresses on the list belonged, as was pointed out in the thread, to a custody platform. Shortly afterwards, it was verified that the funds had left those addresses for two other accounts, without their owners having lifted a finger. According to the explanation given, it was not a theft: it was the operation of a service that pools its clients' balances and moves them for its own purposes.

The conclusion repeated in the subsequent analysis was blunt: if you don't own the private keys, you don't own the bitcoins. Receiving a gift at someone else's address is like keeping it in someone else's drawer. The anecdote served to make more than one person move their funds to their own wallet, although the process frightened newcomers.

Caution, terminals and emergency purchases

The giveaway sparked curiosity. Several recipients tried to buy their first bitcoins and ran into a market with wild prices depending on the payment method. The ads consulted those days offered the same bitcoin at 1,050 euros if paid with a digital wallet, at 908 euros by transfer, at 900 euros from a specific seller and at 816 euros from another. According to the explanation given, the surcharge was not a whim: reversible payment methods carry more risk of fraud and the market charges for it.

Technical doubts also appeared. One user spent the afternoon waiting for his program to download more than 200,000 blocks before showing him anything; another changed wallets mid-process because he did not trust the one he had used. None of this was a network failure. It was the reality of a technology that in 2017 still demanded patience and a certain fondness for details.

Do you have to declare bitcoin gains?

The answer given then remains the reference: selling a currency, a share or an asset generates capital gains and those gains are taxed. If someone buys bitcoin at 1,000 euros and sells it at 10,000, the 9,000 gain goes through the tax office. The grey area appears when you don't sell, but spend: buying with bitcoins does not turn the operation into a sale of euros, and whoever does it does not see fiat money pass through their account.

Some warned that banks have their own anti-money laundering protocols and that a large deposit without justifying the origin raises suspicions. The practical recommendation repeated: be able to justify the origin of each deposit.

How the party ended: seven years later

The final balance came with the price skyrocketing. One participant calculated at 5,817 dollars what was given away on Epiphany that day, an amount that at the January 2017 exchange rate seemed like pocket change and that years later was enough for more than a whim. Another found the forgotten wallet after seven years and got a shock when checking the value of those cents.

The flip side of the experiment was also written: a recipient checked his wallet after seven years and found it empty, without a single transaction recorded. He calculated that, had he kept the keys, the balance would be around 200 euros.