Student who held up 'send Bitcoin' sign during College Game Day TV show gets $24,000 in donations from strangers

Unidentified college student holds a banner to an ESPN camera on Saturday pleading for money from his mother

The sign was embedded with a code that linked to an account at Bitcoin, an online payment network

As pictures on the sign made it to different websites, people started donating money

The total amount received was $24,361.50

It was a money-making opportunity that could have gone either way - and could have only have been pulled off by the most tech-savvy of people.



A college student has somehow been able to amass over $24,000 by waving a sign at a television camera.



The hopeful venture started on Saturday with the ESPN show College GameDay, a football program that is filmed at a different campus each weekend and was in Auburn, Alabama.



The student came armed with a banner that had seemed to plea for money from his mother.



It also included the logo for Bitcoin, a US payment network, and a QR code, which is a scan-sensitive icon used to represent information, according to cryptojunky.com.



Clever currency: A joke by a college student (pictured in yellow), who held up a sign on TV with the details to an online banking network, really paid off - literally - with the guy garnered over $24,000 in donations

Close up: The sign, which was seemingly appealing to the students mother, contained the icon of 'crypto-currency' network Bitcoin (right) and a QR code (left) linking people to his account with the payment-sharing website

QR codes often appear in magazines, allowing readers to link into websites with their phones for the purpose of online shopping and further reading, among other things.



In this case the QR code was for the student's Bitcoin account, which is known as as an online 'wallet'.



Somehow a screen grab of the TV show showing the man holding the sign made its way to social news website Reddit.



Readers were able to enhance the QR to identify the code, allowing them to donate money.



As the story picked up traffic, more people started to give donations.

What started out as a small amounts quickly saw the guy recieve 100 transactions in not time at all.



As it stands the sign holder has received 22 bitcoins, which are worth over $1,100 each.



The value of the received coins comes to a total of $24,361.50.



While Bitcoin makes all donations public, the identity of the people receiving funds are concealed behind their usernames.



The student - has only been identified by his Reddit username, BitcoinPitcher2 - uses the Bitcoin user name '1HiMoMgBaAikFHgAt3M4YJtetp4HrnsiXu'.



The proof is in the coins: A snapshot of the student's Bitcoin account, which is open to the public, shows he was received 22 Bitcoins, worth over $1,100 each. The donation button (bottom right) is what people used to hand over donations. There have recently been calls for the payment network to change their privacy settings to protect users

During the early stages of the incoming transactions, BitcoinPitcher2 said he would be donating the majority of the money to a charitable group called Sean's Outpost, which is a homeless shelter and outreach group located in Pensacola, Florida.



It is not known at present how much of the money will be donated.



The student said the whole instance started as a 'joke'.

He had started a Bitcoin wallet earlier this year by paying $101.

When the amount 'grew rapidly' over the coming months, he decided he would use the sign to see if anyone would donate to help the amount grow.

Bitcoin was launched five years and has come to known as 'crypto-currency'.

Bitcoin supports believe it could one day become the global alternative to cash.



Interestingly, the news comes as members of the finance world call for the privacy settings on Bitcoin to be more stringent to protect users, specifically from the data mining of the US NSA spy agency.