172 addresses - 3 late nights - 1.6151 BTC - 1 transaction
Author: Bitkoinmama
The Milibit Giveaway or 'The First Bitpurse' (literal translation from Polish) was an idea born shortly before my family trip to Poland, during which my sister and I, after not having seen each other for some time, sat down to catch up with and have some coffee together. This was what I heard: How are you doing? Don't talk about bitcoin – I just do not want to hear about it anymore! I should mention that for some eleven months I have been bombarding her with emails with one common denominator. With rather less successful effect as unfortunately my crypto enthusiasm doesn't seem to run in our family. So what else could I have said? Create your first digital wallet, I'll send you some bitcoin and I'll stop talking about it (hahahahaha). To my surprise there was silence, then slight hesitation, and finally the long-awaited questions. On that day my skeptical sister became a Bitcoiner.
I decided that this successfully tested method can help spread the word faster than just talking about it. On 8 March, the International Women's Day, I advertised 'First Bitpurse' on my blog in Polish, which was supposed to be just a short giveaway, in which women would create their first wallets, add the addresses in the comment box and after 24 hours all donated milibits were to be distributed equally to each address in a single transaction. Initially, this project was meant to be only in Polish, but I thought ... Why?
- Bitcoin has no boundaries
- Women represent more than 50 % of the world
- I'll only find more donors if I go international.
The last point proved to be critical. In just 2 hours after an English publication a modern day Robin Hood, Magnus, donated 0.5 BTC! I immediately got goose bumps and an euphoric stomach twist. But hey! We only have two addresses and so much cryptocash that Gośka (the first added address) and Martha (the second one) could have some good fun in Las Vegas. Cool, but it was not the point. What to do? We need to extend the giveaway, I said. And so it happened.
The Milibit Giveaway lasted 22 days, we collected 1.6151 BTC, including 1BTC from an anonymous Polish donor! To verify and prove that I was not going to run away with it I asked my Women in Bitcoin idol The Bitcoin Wife to be my escrow, a trusted (amongst Bitcoin community) third party. I sent Mrs P 3 BTC to secure it for the time of the giveaway and of course I got it back afterwards.
Unfortunately, the technical side of extracting all the addresses to use in a multiple transaction overwhelmed me. I know how to use bitcoin but have got not clue about scripts and coding. Thankfully Alex, my beloved non-hubby was my saviour and a great part of this giveaway. Using a script written by Magnus, he scraped the addresses and made this beautiful transaction.
On 4 April at 5:45 am GMT, each of the 172 addresses from all over the world received exactly 0.00930379 BTC, just above 9 mBTC in under than a minute, which were available to spent within 6 confirmations on Blockchain.info. The cost of this transaction? BTC 0.0007 - at the time of writing, about 30 US Cents. Which bank or a payment processor would be able to do this?
Amongst the total 181 addresses added in the comments, 172 were active, but a complete lack of time did not allow me to thoroughly check the contents of each wallet. The rule that the owner had to be a woman, was virtually impossible to check. Therefore I am aware that some of the addresses may not belong to ladies. Additionally, Jake sponsored two, instead of one gettoknowbitcoin hats that were actually manually picked out of his Bitcoin hat. The first hat goes to Poland and the second address happened to be a cheat, named Alice (if) with over 7000 mBTC! Naughty! Well, another lady is going to be a proud owner of this one.
Well done to all those brave ladies with their first milibits!
