I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that the masses were trying their luck to receive stolen coins.
I originally found the bitcointalk thread in question because I was closely following bitfinex's PR guy's reddit posts which responded to a question about the giveaway, to which the PR guy responded that the coins in question were not from the bitfinex hack, but that they are monitoring the situation. The comment that the PR guy responded to had a link to the reddit thread which had a link to the bitcointalk thread. When I looked at the first page of the giveaway, I saw several posts confirming that the signed message did in fact verify, and that the signing address did in fact contain 1,000
BTC, so I decided to post my address. After I posted my address, I noticed a post about the OP of that thread possibly being TF, so I went back to the first page to look at the transaction history of the address, then I went back to the last page of the giveaway thread that is now 2-3 pages ahead of the post about TF. --- tl;dr - it was confirmed that the coins did not belong to bitfinex, and claims that the coins belonged to TF would get very quickly buried.
I think, that after people started sending
BTC to the address that TF posted after his account didn't get hacked shows how greedy people are around here and how much people like to gamble.
It appears that one of the forum's moderators is willing to outright lie in order to have an excuse to keep a few hundred dollars that he exchanged for nothing to receive.
Interestingly, it looks like the OP of that thread was edited to reflect a specific formula for selecting the winner of his giveaway. I am not sure who edited the post though:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/1000-btc-giveaway-from-your-friend-rekcahxfb-1574127[...]
Signature: HItHu5HG+WAsqESx8vA3U7G/OHtTk1Gz9cy2qHmF2hSjI+d71Qs5zNlt1zvB3F/hFBXsy5vAjDFUC3rPQb2QVUY=
HOW TO ENTER GIVEAWAY
I see many repeated messages, and I think this is should be honest lottery so I decide that the winner will be selected from Addresses who sent 0.001 btc to this Address: 1FvCk1jTsy7AvmnpeKnrfHSJnfX7om7fNM
Random winner will be selected 1 week from now.
Winner random calculation:
addresses = list()
grub_addresses(addresses)
winner_index=bytes_to_int(block_424600_hash)%len(addresses) # 400 blocks before bitcoin eater valid
winner= addresses[winner_index]
print(winner)
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