  This paper describes a basic model of a gift economy in the shape of a Giving
Game and reveals the fundamental structure of such a game. Main result is that
the game shows a community effect in that a small subgroup of players
eventually keeps all circulating goods for themselves. Example applications are
where computers are sharing processing power for complex calculations, or when
commodity traders are making transactions in some professional community. The
Giving Game may equally well be viewed as a basic model of clientelism or
corruption. Keywords in this paper are giving, gift economy, community effect,
stabilization, computational complexity, corruption, micro-economics, game
theory, stock trading, distributed computing, crypto currency, blockchain.
