Last Christmas I decided, very last minute, to gift four of my lucky but skeptical and curious friends with 10 thousand satoshi each. Indeed this was a very cheap present (less than $20 in total for the four of them, BCH gift cards included - keep reading!) done right at the beginning of the bull market. Part of this process was free, as I had accumulated enough different tokens and coins, with Coinbase Earn.

From Coinbase to Bitcoin.com wallet(s)

For those who are not familiar with this giant, Coinbase (no affiliate link) is one of the largest crypto exchange and advanced platform in the world. They work poorly with retailers but they are amazing with institutional investors: they managed to help Microstrategy to buy billions worth of Bitcoin without moving the market much. Getting back to me, as a retail investor, I have a personal account (with KYC verification, and so on) and I have been able to become eligible for many of their quizzes, setting aside a bounce of dollars out of the different coins offered by their Earn Quizzes ($CGLD, $ALGO, $MKR, $COMP, $XLM, $BAND, $FIL, and $GRT). After keeping some for other purposes (Stellar $XLM was my winning choice) I swapped everything else right away to Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash. So basically I paid little to none for the Bitcoin I gave away to my friends.

I was able to create four separate wallets and transfer onto each 0.00010000 BTC paying very little commissions - aka miners fees (thank you, Coinbase!). I chose the Bitcoin.com wallet due to the well integrated features for Bitcoin Cash ecosystem, and the possibility to create multiple wallets. So, I saved the 12 words seed phrased for all the wallets and, finally, gave it to my friends at the beginning of the 2021. In case you are wondering, my initial “gift” for them a simple digital leaflet with written that they were given 10000 satoshi. But the actual handover happened weeks after all the celebrations. At the time I transfer the funds, their wallets were worth approximately $2 each, but I wanted to go extra mile. 

One more thing: BCH gift cards

So I created four Bitcoin Cash gift cards at gifts.bitcoin.com for the value of additional $2 each (just to match it with the value of BTC at the given time). This was the reason for which I’ve chosen that specific wallet! So I spent a total of $8 and few pennies with a single BCH transaction, while the system generated four different QR codes. One of the coolest feature they come with, is that they show different nicknames or labels (super handy for not messing around as I had to deliver four of them). The handover process was the most complicated phase for both myself and my friends: the original gift was in fact the BTC wallet itself with a fixed amount of satoshi. I never mentioned them BCH in the beginning. And it took time to instruct them on how to download the wallet, import the seed and sweep the QRs. By preparing the wallets beforehand for the BTC, instead of showing my friends a real time blockchain transaction, I saved up a lot of time in confirmations and a quite decent amount of quids in miners fees.

The most enjoyable part for me has been onboarding them to Bitcoin Cash as well. I just asked them to delete the default empty Bitcoin wallet, just for a simpler visual hygiene, explaining them how to restore it in case of need. This because, by default straight after the download, the Bitcoin.com wallet creates a multi currency (BTC and BCH) wallet, out of the same 12 words seed phrase. This is super handy because my friends had right away two different wallets and they could scan now my QR codes to catch their $2 worth of BCH! 

Conclusions

Despite the inability (at the moment) to move their 10 thousand satoshi (guess why? Because the Bitcoin Core miners fees are higher than the amount itself) I wanted to show my friends the key differences between the real usage of Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash. And I have to say that they were pretty impressed by the latter! At the moment only one friend decided to buy some more Bitcoin BTC and to use the wallet I created for him. This is super neat, because he can now safely transfer all the funds to his personal BTC wallet (by importing the 12 words seed phrase from his Bitcoin Cash wallet) right into the app! And I can finally delete that wallet from my phone. :)

opening image credit: Austin Distel