Watch Hackers Send Snowden Bitcoin Through a Series of Tubes

​Sending someone bitcoin is a relatively painless process nowadays—a few clicks and pokes at your keyboard, nothing more. But despite efforts to improve Bitcoi​n security, sending and receiving the digital currency isn't always as discreet as some would like.

If someone were to send bitcoin to a conspicuous recipient like, say, Edward Snowden, it wouldn't be all that difficult for that person to be identified via their IP address. To remedy this—and perhaps, to inject a bit of old-fashioned romanticism into the process—a group of international hackers developed an analog system for transferring Bitcoins using a series of pneumatic tubes.

Attendees at the Chaos Communication Congr​ess, an annual hacker conference in Germany, successfully transferred bitcoin to Snowden's legal defense fund using an old-fashioned pneumatic tube system. The Seidenstraße or "Silk Road" (not that S​ilk Road) was installed at the conference location by a group of artists—and hackers, of course, re-appropriated the tubes to discreetly send bitcoin back and forth.

The process was pretty simple. The senders created a signed Bitcoin transaction to the desired recipient online and then printed it off as a QR code on a piece of paper. They rolled up the paper, fired it through the tubes, and the recipient—in this case, British journalist Sarah Har​rison—scanned and received the funds on the other end.

Of course, this was merely an example run and the tube system was limited to a single building in Hamburg, Germany, and has since been dismantled. So, it's not likely to take over as the predominant way to transfer the digital currency. But if you're in need of a highly-secure system of sending bitcoin—or you just have a fetish for early 20th century office technology—the world's hackers seemingly have a solution.