While most of the world was in shock at the 109 yard failed field goal return by Auburn cornerback Chris Davis, in accordance with NCAA rules he won’t receive any money for his Iron Bowl performance. However, the student holding up the sign in the picture above used the Iron Bowl to make $25,000 via BitCoin.

ESPN’s Game Day college football program was set up in the parking lot of Jordan Hare stadium for this past weekend’s Iron Bowl. Typically, college football fans do their best to make the most topical and creative signs so that they can have their 15 seconds of fame on ESPN beamed to millions of people at home and on their mobile devices.

While the motivation of this young man is unclear, in fact he could have just been asking mom to send him some money, people quickly took it up as a use case for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a privatized or anonymized digital currency that has taken off over the past year. It’s incredibly unstable, but at the time this sign was shown on ESPN and then picked up on Reddit, Bitcoins were worth over $1,000 each.

One important thing about Bitcoin is that the amount of Bitcoins in one’s wallet can be viewed by the public. What can’t be seen is who that Bitcoin wallet actually belongs too.  That’s what made Saturday’s sign such a big deal on Reddit.

As the post went semi-viral people noticed that this person was making more and more money. It began with just a few hundred dollars but by the time Business Insider picked up this story on Sunday morning he had made over $24,000. By the time we had written this story it was over $25,000.  A year of tuition at Auburn University runs around $25,000.

More here