15678 bitcoins: this is the sum that the early adopter Jeff Garzik gave away back in 2010.
Garzik, one of the many reference points for bitcoin, often suspected of being Satoshi Nakamoto, commented on Twitter on a post by another user, Brett Scott, who highlighted some negative aspects of bitcoin.
Scott had in fact criticised the developments of the queen of cryptocurrencies in recent years and how BTC has become an investment asset, and therefore a store of value, rather than a payment method.
It’s certainly a shared downside, especially considering that if everyone owned bitcoin only as a store of value and didn’t use it as a payment system then it would mean that bitcoin would fail in its original intent, which was to replace fiat currencies.
Jeff Garzik and the bitcoin giveaway
Following this logic, it’s understandable why at the beginning of the development of BTC, some personalities from the crypto world would have given out many bitcoins, just like Jeff Garzik did back in 2010.
In essence, as Garzik explains, the reason for these giveaways was precisely to encourage their spread as a payment method.
At the time, the price of bitcoin was certainly very low, it is enough to remember the case of the famous pizzas paid 10000 bitcoin precisely to encourage the spread and circulation.
This giveaway technique can still be found today, both to promote events and to spread a new project, especially new blockchains and their tokens: worth mentioning are the airdrops of the various projects, one recent example is K-tune with its 1 million tokens.Â
Finally, for the record, it is worth noting that those famous 15678 BTC are now worth over $130 million.
