If I told you I was going to take my own cash and hand it out to neighbors on the street, you’d probably think I was crazy—but you’d likely think the “hard” part is parting with the money, not the act of giving it away.
I have been doing this for eight years. I can tell you with full responsibility that the reality is: losing the money is hard, but giving it away is even harder.
Imagine this: if I pulled out 100 one-dollar bills on the street and tried to hand one to every passerby, what do you think would happen? I bet a “barrier” would form within a two-meter radius around me, and people would avoid me like the plague. Giving away money is, surprisingly, harder than handing out worthless flyers.
If “real money” from the U.S. is treated this way, distributing cryptocurrency is a hundred times more difficult. Last week, I used Fluidkey to send out 188 Red Packets worth a total of 228 USD. They were claimed almost instantly. While this might seem to contradict my point, it was actually the result of a massive cumulative effort: from the evolution of Bitcoin to Ethereum, over a dozen network upgrades, the emergence of stablecoins, the ongoing battle with the traditional system, the development of Fluidkey, and the hundreds of educational articles published by DHK Newsletters over the years. Without any single one of these links, we could never have achieved the smooth distribution we saw last week.
In addition to the Red Packets sponsored by Fluidkey for DHK Newsletter, I also funded several others out of my own pocket. Among them, one of the four “Opening Day” packets for Just Books went unclaimed by a volunteer. Furthermore, Just Books distributed 100 USD to the public; although it was eventually claimed after a few days, there is a story behind that which I’ll save for another time.
I also distributed Red Packets to other groups to promote cryptocurrency. In one group filled with scholars, journalists, and writers, I sent out ten packets and provided background info to “incite” participation. Only one person claimed it. Though this was expected, it reminded me of my essay in Moneyverse titled “When it Comes to Money, Everyone is pro-establishment.” Feel free to read the book for more; I won’t repeat it here, but the title says it all. Even public intellectuals find it difficult to imagine money outside of the established system, let alone practice it.
To give away Red Packets via cryptocurrency, at least four major hurdles must be overcome:
1. The Consensus of Money
This is the most basic, yet most overlooked point.
You might argue that the example of giving away 1 USD at the start of this article is only hard because the amount is too low. In reality, even giving away 100 USD per person isn’t necessarily easy. When the amount is low, people find it bothersome; when it’s high, they suspect a scam—thinking it’s too good to be true.
The most extreme and interesting example is from 2010, when Bitcoin core developer Gavin Andresen created the “Bitcoin Faucet,” giving away 5 BTC for simply completing a CAPTCHA. If that service existed today (though 5 BTC should be called a “Bitcoin Flood” rather than a faucet), the budget would be drained instantly regardless of size. Back then, however, it took a year and a half to give away 19,715 BTC—averaging only seven to eight claims per day. The reason was simple: the world didn’t believe what you were giving away was “money.” They either ignored you, labeled you a scammer, or thought you were a lunatic. Most people simply wouldn’t take it.
From Bitcoin to Ether, and from Ether to stablecoins, getting people to recognize that what is being sent is “money”—or an asset with strong “moneyness”—was not an overnight achievement. This single step took the blockchain community sixteen years.
2. Wallet Management
Even if society agrees that cryptocurrency is money, the public needs to own a wallet or be able to open one easily to receive it. This is the second threshold.
I’ve worked on LikeCoin for eight years. All these years, I’ve spent far more time educating people on how to open and manage wallets than I have discussing the philosophy of LikeCoin or decentralized publishing itself. It’s frustrating, but unavoidable. Unless you treat crypto solely as an investment tool and are happy with custodial services, you must master wallet management to achieve true self-sovereignty over your assets and data. There are no shortcuts here.
Fortunately, in the past year, embedded wallets and Passkeys have matured, making wallet creation much simpler. With the gradual implementation of “Account Abstraction” on Ethereum, I believe we will soon say goodbye to the era of “mnemonic phrases.” Managing a crypto account will feel almost identical to managing a Web2 service account.
The irony is that while registering for Web3 services like Fluidkey, Ether.Fi, or 3ook.com has become as easy as traditional services, I’ve found it harder to make users understand that—even if the experience is similar—self-management is fundamentally different from a custodial service. Perhaps this isn’t a problem; maybe users don’t need to know. Perhaps I’m just confusing my roles as an educator and a product designer. I don’t have the answer yet.
3. Payment of Gas Fees
Solving the first two problems only gets the money into their hands. How the recipient spends that money is another issue.
Unless you are sending Bitcoin or Ether directly, sending an ERC-20 token on Ethereum presents a problem: while receiving is free, the recipient cannot move the tokens without having ETH to pay for gas fees. Without ETH, the gift is useless—it’s just a digital souvenir.
The first time I widely distributed crypto Red Packets was in mid-February 2018. LikeCoin had just been minted on Ethereum earlier that month. To coincide with the Lunar New Year, we faced these two hurdles by sending out large numbers of “8 LIKE” packets. Those interested in “archaeology” can still find the old tutorials from that year.
Regarding the gas fee issue, we developed “Ethereum Token Payment Delegation,” which we shared at Open Source Developer Meetups. This technology later evolved into “sponsored transactions” and “paymasters.” This is why today I can send out USDC packets, and the recipient can spend that USDC by using the USDC itself for fees, without needing any ETH.
However, less than six months after we “solved” the gas fee problem, Ethereum became extremely congested, and fees skyrocketed. Since “sponsored transactions” meant we were footing the bill, we simply didn’t have the capital to sustain it. We were forced to stop the sponsorship and accelerate the development of the LikeCoin chain. That led to the story of LikeCoin v2.
Fun fact: To this day, there are still 6,726 wallets on the Ethereum mainnet holding 8 LIKE. They are most likely recipients of Red Packets in 2018. It shows just how much effort we put into promoting self-managed wallets, and how much of that effort ultimately resulted in “useless” digital artifacts.
4. Privacy for Both Parties
I have often emphasized that while cryptocurrency is very secure, it is not private. Even if you solve all the above issues, if the distribution mechanism isn’t handled correctly, the whole world can easily track the entire transaction history of both the sender and receiver. The simplest solution is to just not treat it as a problem—and honestly, that has been most people’s “solution” until now.
That is why I chose Fluidkey for my Red Packets this year. It wasn’t (just) that I was eyeing the sponsorship; it’s because it generates Stealth Addresses to decouple real identities, providing a level of privacy for both the sender and the receiver. Explaining the mechanics and usage of Fluidkey would require a full newsletter in itself, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
If you’ve read this far, I believe you’ll agree: giving away money is much more difficult than it looks.
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