Surprise, Surprise: After Ex-Fed Chair Janet Yellen, the President of the Hungarian Central Bank Has Some Bitcoins Too

It’s a well-known fact that Janet Yellen, the former Chair of the Federal Reserve, is not a big fan of bitcoin: this is what the owner of Biterica, the Bitcoin gifting platform, set out to change. Raz Suprovici simply decided to send 0.0031642 BTC – around 20 dollars – to Janet Yellen’s university mail account at Berkeley.

And after that, we didn’t want to miss out on the fun either and as it is also the 10-year anniversary of bitcoin, we decided to surprise dr. György Matolcsy, the President of the Hungarian Central Bank, in the same way!

After the idea was formed, we didn’t waste any time and quickly uncovered the official email address of the president.

But back to Janet Yellen for a little bit: just recently, she came out again to say how bitcoin is not a very useful payment method, although even she admits that the blockchain technology is very innovative.

This statement was the one that set Raz Suprovici off and made him decide to surprise Yellen with a bit of bitcoin.

And here at Bitcoin Bázis, we, of course, had to jump on the bandwagon: we decided to gift Mr. Matolcsy with a gift card worth of 0.005 BTC (which is roughly around 30 bucks).

We do hope that because of this little guerrilla marketing Mr. Matolcsy might start to turn his attention towards the new technology and in no time at all, Budapest will become the BTC Capital of Central-Europe (kicking Berlin’s ass).

We also thought it might be a good idea to share the process of Bitcoin gifting with you, in case you took a fancy to sending someone some bitcoin – be it your loved one, your boss, your dog or your neighbour (so you know, they might consider not calling the police on you next time you’re having people over).

• Firstly, after you type in the recipient’s email address, you have to choose the amount of BTC you want to send.

• You can also choose a theme for your gift (we, of course, chose anniversary here).

• In the next step, you can leave a nice little note with your well-wishes or any other messages you’d like to send to the other person. In this section, you also have to type in your own email address, so they can know who sent the surprise for them (never in our life wrote such a candid best wishes letter to anyone as we did for the central bank chairman).

• After clicking the ‘verify’ button, you’ll get an overview of the transaction:

• And after that, the last step is to transfer the given amount of bitcoin to the wallet that appears after the verification. As soon as the transfer goes through, you’ll get a confirmation email that the transaction was indeed successful.

Janet Yellen already confirmed that she had received the bitcoin gift but unfortunately so far she hasn’t had enough time to look at it more thoroughly. We hope that Matolcsy will get his hand on our gift in the very near future (we’ve already completed the transaction, even sent a little bit more than we planned), but of course, we won’t be offended if he’ll choose not to respond to us; after all, we know how incredibly busy he is wasting taxpayer’s money.

After his action, Suprovici told his conclusion to CoinDesk:

“People are afraid of the unknown. I was hoping that when she logged into her bitcoin wallet with her ID and password, she would see it’s just like a typical online bank account. The money she owns is there, in her control, ready to spend … I hope that this sparks her openness to the technology.”

“Maybe we should all send some bitcoin to the decision makers.”

We definitely should. Otherwise they’ll never understand the brave new world to come.