15 ms·

Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

430 points by apo 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
chejazi 9y ago
People spend their entire lives focused on wealth accumulation. Bitcoin has endowed many people with financial means in a way completely orthogonal to their day-to-day work. Say what you will about bubbles, but this "fund manager's" perspective is healthy check on reality.
- mikepurvis 9y ago
  While true, as someone with a number of friends just now "getting into" bitcoin, I find the zero sum aspect of it troubling. Assuming a crash/correction is coming, most of the wealth that accrued to the early adopters will be at the expense of these later, less-informed "investors" who bought in thinking it was a no fail quick buck.
  - nihonde 9y ago
    That’s how markets work. Early adopters take risks that pay off when late-comers try to bet on a proven winner.
    - ISL 9y ago
      It doesn't have to be a "bet" on a proven winner. Later investors can simply accept lower returns from a proven winner.
    - frozenport 9y ago
      Another view is that markets are not about gambling but rather investing? For example, index matched funds grow because the economy of the world, as a whole, is growing.
      - randoramax 9y ago
        That is the theory. The practice is that markets crash and people cannot retire anymore. A lot like gambling
        imtringued 9y ago
        Markets can recover. If you invest in stock you have to consider that you may not be able to liquidate it within the next 10 years. What if the markets don't recover? If they don't recover you will have far larger problems than your stock portfolio being in the red. The machines and people don't just disappear unless there is a war. Even if you fail to do that as long as you have started investing sufficiently early enough - let's say 30 years before retirement (around 35 years old) - you probably have experienced at least one recession and recovery until retirement. If suddenly markets crash during retirement by 50% on an asset that is up by 150% does it matter? You still got away with a profit. And nobody forces you to liquidate everything at once. So sure if you plan to draw out 4% of your stocks you will have decreased your portfolio by 8% every year.
      - nihonde 9y ago
        Index funds are pegged to a lot of activities that look like gambling, but the risks are somewhat hedged by a limited kind of diversification. It’s like betting every blackjack hand in the house at once (setting aside the house’s favorable odds).
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        greglindahl 9y ago
        Huh? If I have an S&P 500 Index fund, how is that an activity that looks like gambling, or has a limited kind of diversification? It's narrow index funds that are gambling. Not all index funds.
    - thkim 9y ago
      no, it is not how normal markets work. a stock, bond, real estate "generates income". that's why it has value. bitcoin does not.
      - ravingraven 9y ago
        A) Bitoin is not a stock, it's a currency. It'ss value lies in its utility. B) There are (a lot of) stocks that do not pay dividends and never will. There are a lot of stocks that were issued by companies that never made a profit. Both of those categories are traded with a value above zero, how do you explain that?
        glastra 9y ago
        Bitcoin has absolutely no utility as a currency. Look at the current mempool [0] to see why. People then switch to arguing that it's a great store of value. Given its volatility this makes no sense. [0]: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h
        ravingraven 9y ago
        To clarify: Bitcoin is deeply flawed, and I agree with you that Bitcoin is probably worth less than many people speculate it is worth (but not zero). Cryptocurrencies in general have a lot of utility and solve real problems.
        Cthulhu_ 9y ago
        And yet they introduce a lot of new problems too - problems that have been solved by traditional currencies a while ago. Problems like exchange security and protection to citizens. If my bank goes bankrupt for whatever reason, the government has an insurance for up to 100K for me. When mtgox went down, everyone lost their money.
        Lunar_Lamp 9y ago
        I'm not sure I agree here. Those are definitely real issues that you've highlighted, but they're not because of crypto currency. There's no reason that a crypto-exchange cannot be as secure as a bank (or more), and that governments cannot insure crypto deposits up to some value. Those are purely problems for regulators/governments, which have been relatively slow to adapt legislation. The problems you highlight are real, and can be good reasons to favour traditional currencies, but they're also easy problems to solve - the thinking has already been done once for traditional currencies and the solutions for crypto are mostly identical.
    - cryptodogemoon 9y ago
      Not with Bitcoin. Satoshi designed the supply to rapidly mint the majority of coins to the smallest group of users for the least amount of effort/capital/work input. It's designed to manipulate any user who joins the system after you. Satoshi could easily have chosen a linear curve to align with time, user growth, and increase in work input yet instead the manipulative log curve was chosen. Old users are now incentived to attempt to psychologically exploit new people by selling the asset for far more than the cost of production or acquisition.
      - celticninja 9y ago
        You bring this up in every crypto thread. Do you have an alternative suggestion as to how it should work that could actually be implemented now in a new crypto?
        mikepurvis 9y ago
        Isn't it fundamentally a bootstrapping problem? A state can reasonably presume to sell a new currency in exchange for older (or foreign) currency— this is similar to issuing a bond or whatever else to raise money. And there's a guarantee of value in the sense that the state will accept the currency later on as your taxes. The Bitcoin network/ecosystem has nothing to offer in this sense— there's no plausible reason for it to be "raising" money by direct sales, and no one owes it taxes. So the initial tokens were distributed based on the fact that they were mined by early adopters before the difficulty got to be too great. There is indeed a basic unfairness in this, but it's not obvious to me how to resolve it for future projects of this kind.
        cryptodogemoon 9y ago
        A linear distribution curve that matches work/watt input. This modestly levels the playing field, although it simply allows existing capital to match the input/output. Satoshi style curves are both capital dependent and skewed disproportionately to the first to arrive within the tiny timeframe. Anti-sybil attacks would be immensely beneficial. Encouragement of honest economic activity. Scaling of bandwidth and fees. The ideal solution is a PoW that is computationally useful and desirable, BOINC, folding@home. Ethereum almost does this, but PoW algos as they exist now are anti-scale by design, where increasing computational power does not improve the network at all. The foreseeable longevity of PoW is ungodly waste, when a world wide distributed computing network has potential far far beyond brute force hash puzzles.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - EmielMols 9y ago
    This a 100 times. The crypto currency hype only (or at least mainly) redistributes wealth, in my eyes to (tech savvy) people-with-means-already. Yes there might be empowering stories of "smart single moms" making serious money by betting on Bitcoin, but as a whole it only enlarges income equality between people, arguably one of the issues of our time.
    - etoir 9y ago
      But who does it redistribute the wealth from? Is it broke people, people working several jobs on minimum wage, people who have to use food pantries, people trapped in debt? Not at all. It's people who already have a bunch of liquid assets to play with. People who have earned decent money, saved it and previously were invested in the stock market, gold, savings accounts. Not necessarily rich people (not just rich people), but well-off people who have money they don't need sitting around. I am young, have a high income and a tiny net worth. I got lucky by buying a tiny amount of bitcoin a few years ago purely because I was interested in the tech. There's lots of things about my situation, and the situation of other people in my society which are unfair. But baby-boomers with nest eggs cashing me out because they feel entitled to make an easy buck and are buying something they don't understand doesn't seem like the most important injustice.
      - EmielMols 9y ago
        > Is it broke people, people working several jobs on minimum wage, ... people trapped in debt? At least in Europe, it is not uncommon that bank/pension/state funds (in effect: everybody's money) buy in latest to these stocks. Allocating resources in society is a hard problem, and capital markets overall provide a valuable service in deciding where resources should go. But when some of these markets function more or less like a lottery (or ponzi scheme), I don't see why a society should support (or even worse: idolize) its participants.
      - rootlocus 9y ago
        > But baby-boomers with nest eggs cashing me out because they feel entitled to make an easy buck and are buying something they don't understand doesn't seem like the most important injustice. That's condescending, hypocritical bullshit. Why do you feel entitled to "cashing out" on their savings because you're tech savvy? > Not necessarily rich people (not just rich people), but well-off people who have money they don't need sitting around. This is straight up delusional. I'm appalled that you would spend so much time describing who you think invests in cryptocurrencies, just to justify yourself profiting off them. Actually, most people who invest in the stock market know better than to get involved with bitcoin. Most people who hyped its value lately are the kind of people who have no idea what's about, invest poorly and have fewer funds. [1] So yes, most likely your profit came from "broke people, people working several jobs on minimum wage, people who have to use food pantries, people trapped in debt". At least don't try to pretend it's otherwise. [1] https://www.engadget.com/amp/2017/12/12/bitcoin-mania-mortage-house-investors/ https://www.engadget.com/amp/2017/12/12/bitcoin-mania-mortag...
  - Tepix 9y ago
    "no fail quick buck"? If you listen to mass media for the last several years whenever they mention bitcoin they tell you it's an incredibly risky investment.
    - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
      Yes, but at the same time you hear 30-100% gains in the span of one day and people going "I just bought a lamborghini" - survivorship bias and all that.
      - Tepix 9y ago
        I don't know - whenever I read about bitcoin rising it is immediately followed by something like "last thursday bitcon went down by 20%" so people who only read that will get the impression that it's dangerous to invest.
  - PineappleFund 9y ago
    Hi, creator of the Pineapple Fund here (pineapplefund.org/verification.txt) I am actually quite sad to see the current state of the cryptocurrency community, and how people in it these days widely misrepresent the risk and intricacies of bitcoin/crypto. When I first got into bitcoin, most people were there because they were fascinated in building a decentralized currency. Profit seeking was always a part, but not the predominant part. I'm a little bit sad to see where crypto is today. But I think the original faction is still alive.
    - rootlocus 9y ago
      Not everyone will be able to profit off of bitcoin. Worse, those who will, will do so at the expense of everyone else. There's only two ways this bubble will burst: 1. Inflation: the value of fiat currencies drops to match the supposed value of bitcoin, which negatively affects everyone 2. Only the first people to cash out actually turn a profit. Every other person who invested will lose everything. Either way, the money you now made from bitcoin, came from people who will probably lose their savings contributing to the bubble.
    - pretentiousPear 9y ago
      How do you see the current risks present in bitcoin/crypto? How should it be represented? Genuine question.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- thkim 9y ago
  bitcoin is just extortion on craze of the crowd. if no income is been generated by it, then its value is arbitrary. an investment asset needs a cash flow to repay investment and then some. bitcoin has none. i admit bitcoin is not the only asset that has this characteristic.
egwor 9y ago
I hope that the charity looks to sell or hedge some of this....
- TuringNYC 9y ago
  Well, now that we have a futures market...
focal 9y ago
I love that its anonymous and simple and the donations are transparent. Does anyone by chance know if there are restrictions on charities receiving anonymous bitcoin donations?
bennettfeely 9y ago
I'd love to know what the Electronic Frontier Foundation does exactly with millions and millions of dollars in donations. Based on Wikipedia it awards money to rich people with powerful computers for finding new prime numbers. But it seems to me the other charities are much more deserving.
- devindotcom 9y ago
  It's not some big secret. They're a major advocacy organization. https://www.eff.org/cases https://www.eff.org/cases
- whamlastxmas 9y ago
  They're like the ACLU for technology topics
- sinak 9y ago
  There are three general buckets of work that EFF does. All three are focussed on protecting user's online rights to free speech, security, and privacy - but each achieves that result in a different way: * Legal: Taking on precedent-setting cases (e.g. establishing code as a form of speech, overturning Betamax Doctrine, challenging censorship laws). Full list is here: https://www.eff.org/victories https://www.eff.org/victories * Technology: Helping launch projects like LetsEncrypt (now its own org), Privacy Badger, Certbot, Panopticlick, Democracy.io, HTTPS Everywhere. * Advocacy/activism: Pushing state & federal legislatures in the US and around the world to pass laws that protect user's rights, and not to pass laws that would harm them. Also to push regulatory bodies (e.g. FCC) similarly. (I'm a Tech Fellow at EFF but not speaking for the org in any capacity)
- dannyobrien 9y ago
  (Full disclosure: I'm EFF's International Director) Probably the two fastest ways to find out what we do (and how we're funded) is to: * Read our annual report: https://www.eff.org/files/annual-report/2016/index.html https://www.eff.org/files/annual-report/2016/index.html (our reporting year is from June-July, so this is up to this summer). * Read some of the stories from Hacker News -- our work is often covered here, because the topics we defend with our lawyers, activists and technologists are often close to people here. So, for instance, working to stop controls on crypto, the fight for net neutrality, defending people who are creating or innovating new tech, stopping the worst effects of DRM, tracking the consequences of AI, challenging mass surveillance in the courts, founding and supporting Let's Encrypt, etc. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=eff.org&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=eff.org&sort=byDate&prefix&pag... We've been around for over 27 years now, so some of the stuff you might discover online about us might not look so relevant now, but helped set the groundwork for the modern Net. So, it's now (almost exactly!) 20 years since the Internet censorship provisions of the Communications Decency Act was declared unconstitutional, but you still sometimes find GIFs of the Blue Ribbon Campaign EFF worked on to raise awareness of that issue on the early Internet. And the project you mentioned -- the Cooperative Computing Award -- is one of these earlier initiatives. It was fully funded in 1999 by a generous single benefactor, in order to encourage distributed computing in a period where it was felt that the incentives were more strongly aligned to centralise processing power. We've given out two of these prizes over the last 18 years, with two more to go. Of course, distributed computing -- including platforms like Ethereum and concepts like blockchain validation -- is more established now than it was in 1999. Our budget for all of our work is in the order of $10 million, a large proportion of which comes from individual members' donations. To give hopefully relevant comparisons, the MPAA took $76 million in 2015; the 2016 budget for the ACLU was $138 million. We try to remain agile with what we have, but where new technology and civil liberties meet, there's always new things to do.
QML 9y ago
Speaking of charities, are most of them transparent and accountable with the funds they receive? I’d like to see a ledger of where every cent given to charity was used / spent.
- focal 9y ago
  If it is a US based charity or foundation you can look at their IRS Form 990 to see sources and uses of funds. http://990finder.foundationcenter.org/ http://990finder.foundationcenter.org/
- loceng 9y ago
  That'd be silly to tie such an obligation to support one of the purported most valued parts of blockchain..
- fossuser 9y ago
  This is often a difficult question to find an answer for and a lot of the other metrics for determining charity effectiveness are pretty limited. Give well is a meta-charity that tries to find out which charities maximize donation effectiveness and might be a good place to start looking. https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/
- philipwhiuk 9y ago
  Not that it's not a noble objective. But the accountability stuff costs money which could otherwise be spent on the core purpose.
  - ForrestN 9y ago
    This. I run a small non-profit. We would love to be hyper-transparent, but there are three of us working full time just to do the work that donors are supporting. We'd need to spend a lot of time and effort to release and contextualize all of that information, make sure it's current, and respond to the inevitable feedback and conversation that would be generated from releasing that information. Everything that sounds like it would be quick and easy, well, isn't.
almostApatriot1 9y ago
It'd be nice if some of the money were used to make it easier for charities to convert to cash as quickly as possible. Bitcoin pointlessly consumes so much dirty energy, I imagine many environmental charities see bitcoin akin to blood money.
- antipodes12 9y ago
  https://blog.bitcoin.org.hk/bitcoin-mining-and-energy-consumption-4526d4b56186 https://blog.bitcoin.org.hk/bitcoin-mining-and-energy-consum... While some coal in landlocked and inaccessible locations is fired up in an environmentally unfriendly process to mine Bitcoins, most miners are powered by hydrogen dams, geysers and other geothermal energy sources that cannot be transported or stored.
  - s0rce 9y ago
    I think you mean hydroelectric dams.
- drcross 9y ago
  This meme needs to die. Keeping the lights on tens of thousands of banks and keeping hundred of thousands of servers running transaction processing cost a lot of electricity too. Efforts are underway to get rid of dirty energy because the costs of renewable and battery storage are so much cheaper that this is a non-issue.
  - harryh 9y ago
    Efforts are underway to get rid of dirty energy because the costs of renewable and battery storage are so much cheaper that this is a non-issue. Um what? Certainly we have made great progress as a civilization switching to cleaner forms of energy production but calling greenhouse pollution a "non issue" at this point is pretty nuts!
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      Install clean energy sources then. Charge for it, I don't care. Don't blame bitcoin because of cheap energy.
obiefernandez 9y ago
An individual whose BTC holdings (that they are willing to give away) are worth almost 100 million. Mind blown...
- ttul 9y ago
  Back in early 2011 when I started looking at Bitcoin, they were worth 0.70 each. I talked to people who had 100,000 BTC that they’d mined in the early days on their CPU. For kicks. Some of them are still holding it.
  - tehlike 9y ago
    crazy pills. I hope they at least cashed out some.
  - hindsightRegret 9y ago
    Wait, you're trying to tell me you knew people who were paper (ledger?) billionaires and were willing to disclose that? Nuts
    - ttul 9y ago
      They were not billionaires when the price was 0.70
  - Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y ago
    Even in the CPU mining days, 100,000 was a lot. I think this is typical of many embellished Bitcoin stories. Several times I've had people tell me they 'should have bought at $#.##", so I ask them how they heard about Bitcoin. It's usually the "10,000 BTC Pizza" or a news story about Silk Road, or even the Nov 2013 bubble. At any rate, the actual price when they first heard about Bitcoin is often very different from what they remembered. It's very likely there are fewer than a dozen people that have ever held >100,000 Bitcoins. That would take two weeks of mining every single block in the days of 50BTC coinbase rewards. Reasonable estimations of Satoshi's mining vs. others in the pre-GPU days makes 100,000 very tight for more than a few individuals. This would also require continuous mining for several months unless you were the only person mining (which isn't the case for anyone but Satoshi). Hardly 'for kicks'. If you look in old forum threads, you'll see that many people mining in 2009 and 2010 mined several blocks over few days or weeks of mining. That would net a few hundred coins, and sometimes a few thousand. The majority of mining was done this way. The opportunity for many individuals to mine 100,000 simply was not there. If you actually talked to more than one individual who did this, you probably met 2 out of the 3 biggest Bitcoin miners ever.
londons_explore 9y ago
It's hard to sell large amounts of bitcoin. Most banks, when they see an incoming wire transfer for $10M marked "bitcoin" will run a mile and close down your account. Hopefully by 'donating' it to these charities, who will probably choose to sell slowly over time or hold it, that alleviates the problem.
- cessna-v 9y ago
  [citation needed]
  - mhluongo 9y ago
    Can confirm first hand this is a serious issue in the industry. There are finally a couple crypto-friendly banks making it easier for holders and businesses. Source- have run a BTC co since 2014.
    - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
      your mistake was calling it a BTC co. talking with bankers is an art. I have plenty of "software services" that primarily transact in bitcoin and cash out to bank accounts from bitcoin exchanges.
      - londons_explore 9y ago
        How much do you exchange though? There seems to be some kind of hard wall at £100k in the UK, and anything more than that seems to get a personal call from a fraud investigator who demands documents proving what money was moved, where it came from, where it is going to, who it is for, and what was bought or sold with receipts etc. Do 10 payments for £10k each, and you'll usually get the same call. If the word bitcoin is mentioned, even once, then you'll get a letter saying "Dear Mrs X, We are withdrawing financial services from you, and your account is now closed". This even happened on two so called "bitcoin friendly" banks...
        9y ago
loceng 9y ago
I'm curious - is this making charitable donations in lieu of taxes on the gains?
- natalyarostova 9y ago
  I think you should do a little research on how cap gains taxes interact with charity, it's not how you think.
  - loceng 9y ago
    Do you know differently or it's different in your area - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15919075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15919075 ?
- dba7dba 9y ago
  I am not curious. One could be buying up through bred horses or $$$ paintings to avoid tax. I much prefer this kind of financial maneuvering to avoid paying tax. Well done.
  - TomVDB 9y ago
    How would you avoid tax by buying horses or paintings?
    - garmaine 9y ago
      You don’t. Those are considered collectible items and actually get taxed at a higher rate than other property.
    - AgentME 9y ago
      I think I remember hearing about a common trick of buying a painting, holding it for a while, getting it appraised by someone who deems that the value has gone up to a bigger amount, donating the painting, and then you get tax breaks based on the appraised value, even if that appraised value is much higher than anyone else is actually interested in paying. Granted, I can't remember if you're supposed to actually be able to turn a profit by doing this trick, or if it just makes it a little cheaper for rich people who want to temporarily own fancy things.
chrishacken 9y ago
This looks sketchy as hell. No personal information attached at all and the domain has who-is protection. How do we know this is legit? (Edit: nvm, misinterpreted the website)
- ryanlol 9y ago
  It does irrefutably link a very large amount of bitcoins with the site. https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c7652311f0a23aafa8e54d7db0911a2c7b5bc20ff988/ https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c765...
  - harryh 9y ago
    He also links to a couple of completed donations. The first is a transfer of of 64.77BTC (approx $1M) to address 1AttfyuVVVpsJ6FzBcJMqkFrPRzFiQoRb6 which is definitely Watsi's BTC address: https://twitter.com/watsi/status/938241988121583616 https://twitter.com/watsi/status/938241988121583616 I'm having a bit of trouble connecting this transfer back to address 3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5zMAKG8FK3kJM4rjt which currently holds the coins that he says will be donated. If true this should be possible though... EDIT: Oh wait, here is the connection: https://blockchain.info/tx/d290acbfa7c619ad4215537ae83bfe165902b1c232fda1a360edaf1428acd80a https://blockchain.info/tx/d290acbfa7c619ad4215537ae83bfe165... I have to say, I'm generally pretty skeptical of stuff like this but there is evidence here that this is legit. EDIT2: They also encoded "pineapplefund.org" in a NULL transaction. Even more reason to believe. https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c7652311f0a23aafa8e54d7db0911a2c7b5bc20ff988/ https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c765...
- tylersmith 9y ago
  AFAICT he's only giving money away, not asking any. What's sketchy about anonymous donations?
  - chrishacken 9y ago
    I was confused by the "4,894 BTC ~$84 million USD remaining" on the site. It initially appeared as if he/she was asking for donations. I guess that's actually the amount of money yet to be distributed.
atrain714 9y ago
This seems so fake. If its too good to be true...
- CLGrimes 9y ago
  The address checks out: https://blockchain.info/address/3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5zMAKG8FK3kJM4rjt https://blockchain.info/address/3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5zMAKG8FK3k...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - harryh 9y ago
    And a NULL transaction to/from that address encoded the string "pineapplefund.org" https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c7652311f0a23aafa8e54d7db0911a2c7b5bc20ff988/ https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c765...
    - Tepix 9y ago
      That transaction cost 20€. Ouch.
      - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
        Spare change if you've got $100 million to throw around. Or whatever the current btc price is.
- gabcoh 9y ago
  They did send 60 bitcoins to watsi's adress, so it seems pretty legit [1] https://watsi.org/faq#does-watsi-accept-bitcoin-donations https://watsi.org/faq#does-watsi-accept-bitcoin-donations [2] https://blockchain.info/tx/d290acbfa7c619ad4215537ae83bfe165902b1c232fda1a360edaf1428acd80a https://blockchain.info/tx/d290acbfa7c619ad4215537ae83bfe165...
- chaseadam17 9y ago
lobo_tuerto 9y ago
I think a clearer—or at least a less click-baity—title would be something like: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86 million USD in/through BTC to charity. I think the current one makes it sound like they are donating 86M BTC. I know that's above the theoretical maximum, but that's not the point.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  It clearly has $ in the HN post, and the actual site. And you even know thats above the maximum so your concerns should have been disregarded as erroneous stimuli as the rest of our brains are already programmed to do.
  - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    He just wanted to show off that he knew the "theoretical maximum" amount of Bitcoins.
    - ethftw 9y ago
      Enough of the ad homenium
natch 9y ago
To the person running this, if you really want to remain anonymous, be careful not to write too much. You can be outed by textual stylometrics.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  That's only assuming that they have a corpus of other writing out there on the internet which is linkable to their real life identity.
  - natch 9y ago
    That would help for sure, but it need not be assumed. There are other collections of text besides the public internet. Some of which are only accessible by certain entities and certain of their employees, to be sure, but still extant. Email, for example. Note I’m not implying the person has done anything wrong... on the contrary. But someone with a large quantity of BTC has reasons to be wary of rogue actors.
    - oh_sigh 9y ago
      What's the play here? Let's assume the NSA or CIA has archives of everyones emails. Would the IRS troll that to try to find out who has all this money so they can properly tax it?
- joshumax 9y ago
  That's always why I have a good laugh when someone comes out claiming to be Satoshi when they end their sentences with only a single space after a period. If you wanted to come out as Bitcoin's creator, you'd have used 2 spaces...
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    I think that just shows the age of the person. I learned how to type correctly on a typewriter, and that is the way that we learned. It means, for me, that SN, like me, was educated in the 70's and 80's, and formally learned how to type. Disclosure : Am not satoshi.
senatorobama 9y ago
Does anyone know people who are absurdly wealthy in BTC but only average (i.e software eng)? What's their game plan ?
- funnelsgun 9y ago
  A couple of the folks I know are just HODLing until BTC hits $150,000. Most of them bought Bitcoin when it was a couple of $, haven’t bought Bitcoin since and are just waiting it out to see what happens.
  - bringtheaction 9y ago
    Why $150,000 exactly? Because of what the market cap will be then?
    - funnelsgun 9y ago
      Good question! I don’t think it’s a scientific number, but rather based on the current price (approx. $15,000 at the time of writing) to represent a 10x increase in Bitcoin’s valuation.
    - loceng 9y ago
      There's no risk to not selling - so it's more the question of why not hold? The reason why to hold is because these crypto-assets are fragile and they know if too many people try to liquidate before more people jump onto this global Ponzi scheme then the price will crash. But they know it's a matter of time before people who already made tons of money will start to slowly re-inject money, buying to move the price up again - each new buyer supporting each other - until a flood of the general public (or new big time investors) pump money into the ecosystem.
    - cableshaft 9y ago
      Yeah, more or less. Basically if Bitcoin is ever going to get to the same market cap of the stock market or the gold market, it's going to have to get up to a certain price, and there are quite a few people that are fairly confident it will get there. It's gone up well over 10x just this year alone, it's not too crazy to believe that it could go up another 10x in the next 1-5 years (I would have said 5-10 years six months ago).
bevan 9y ago
Dear Rich Pineapple: Congrats on your huge BTC surplus! To make the biggest difference, consider looking into Effective Altruism[1] (an idea, not a charity) if you haven't already. Their motto is “using reason and evidence to do the most good”. Perhaps do away with the charity proposal form, and instead choose one or several of the most effective charities as ranked by GiveWell.org[2] (who do rigorous effectiveness analysis). OpenPhilanthropy[3] is a charity that takes the EA perspective. Unfortunately, seemingly worthy charities are often orders of magnitude less effective than the few most effective causes. Charity evaluators like GiveWell help us find the gems that can leverage our money many times more effectively. For more info about Effective Altruism, listen to Tim Ferriss[4] and Sam Harris[5] interview the co-founder of Effective Altruism, check out this NYT piece[6], or read Doing Good Better[7]. [1] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ [2] https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/ [3] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/ https://www.openphilanthropy.org/ [4] http://tim.blog/2015/11/22/will-macaskill/ http://tim.blog/2015/11/22/will-macaskill/ [5] https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/being-good-and-doing-good https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/being-good-and-doing-... [6] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/upshot/effective-altruism-where-charity-and-rationality-meet.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/upshot/effective-altruism... [7] https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Good-Better-Effective-Altruism/dp/1592409660/ https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Good-Better-Effective-Altruism/...
- pfd1986 9y ago
  Agreed. With the enourmous cuts in science funds nowadays one can make a big difference by, for instance, fueling cash into research in virtually any area. The achievements can still be watched within a lifetime.
- justonepost 9y ago
  I think he needs charities that are willing to take BTC.
  - celticninja 9y ago
    Bitpay will act as a middleman for charities.
chaseadam17 9y ago
Watsi cofounder here. We're extremely grateful for this support. It's going to enable us to help a lot of patients access healthcare. I also think it's great for the crypto community as a whole. Thank you, Pineapple!
- giarc 9y ago
  Do you immediately convert to USD (or whatever currency) and spend, or do you hold as an investment?
  - runeks 9y ago
    Holding for a charitable organization would not be an investment, but speculation, and would be irresponsible, in my humble opinion (because you’re gambling with donations). The people who choose to donate should get full value from their donation. So, until one can buy goods with bitcoin and pay omes employees with it, holding it when you have an obligation to buy something with it amounts to speculation.
    - mpfundstein 9y ago
      You can do all of these things already. In Europe at least. I have a TenX debit card that I can use everywhere VISA is accepted! Bought iphone and car with it
      - usaphp 9y ago
        I guess spending $84 mln is quite different from just buying an iPhone
        anonymous5133 9y ago
        What he is saying is you can hold BTC and then when you spend it, the BTC gets converted to fiat at the time you spend it. In other words, you can save in BTC instead of immediately converting to fiat. This allows you to take advantage of BTC's deflationary attributes.
ericfrederich 9y ago
Can someone explain this to me? Where did this BTC come from? There was a single deposit on 12/8 of like 5k BTC. Since then there have been withdrawls from that address. https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5zMAKG8FK3kJM4rjt https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5...
- JauntyHatAngle 9y ago
  I'm not sure I understand your question, but there are multiple addresses for the 5K btc transaction to that address.
staunch 9y ago
At least one important thing will happen as a result of this person's effort. Probably many great things no one expected. The world needs a lot more people like this. The example being set here should be emulated by many others.
gdoypoll 9y ago
Most charities are scam. These days people make business of anything. Watsi is frontrunner in charity thugs.
elephant_burger 9y ago
Wow is this for real?
bobsgame 9y ago
I believe the Gates Foundation has already put an enormous amount of thinking and research into determining the most effective use of a large amount of funds to improve the overall state of the world. My opinion is that you would probably rationally be better off investing that money or building a corporation to try and turn it into billions and then donate that to Gates.
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  The donation to Watsi will provide life-changing surgeries in the near future, and will potentially save hundreds or thousands of lives. You might be able to do more good in the future with a larger sum of money, but if you made this choice, you are condemning the smaller group of people to suffering and death. If you met with the smaller group of people and learned all of their names and faces, you probably wouldn't want to let them die. If you could somehow travel to the future and meet with the larger group of people, you might decide to sacrifice the smaller group in order to save millions of lives instead of hundreds. You could also try to find a balance between the two extremes. I guess this is a variation of the Trolley problem [1]. However, there's a few additional variables that are very important. 1. The price of Bitcoin may fall dramatically, or your business and investments might fail. Now you can't help anyone. 2. By saving the smaller group of people, you will alter the course of history. Some of the people in the larger group might never experience the disease or accident that required medical intervention. Some of them will never even be born. I think it's better to choose the predictable outcome that is guaranteed to ease suffering, instead of gambling with people's lives. P.S. I just finished watching the first episode of 11.22.63 [2] a few minutes ago. (It was incredibly good!) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2879552/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2879552/
bootsz 9y ago
Congrats on your fortune. This is a very honorable thing to do. But my real question is: How on earth did you manage to resist selling your holdings for such a long time after you crossed the $1MM mark? That's some superhuman level of self control.
- scotty79 9y ago
  It's pretty much in the (sub)title of the page: "Because once you have enough money, money doesn't matter."
  - bootsz 9y ago
    Yes but you can only really "have enough" once you've cashed out into a medium that has a negligible risk of being worth nothing. It still takes major cojones to leave that much in BTC for so long, thus my kudos
    - scotty79 9y ago
      You can cash out half when it's enough and let the other half grow thousand times or go to 0 without caring. I have no idea if that happened here.
sauravt 9y ago
I think this is one of the greatest example of effective altruism, the world has seen to date. As a student of this subject, I would like to suggest a minor improvement in this project, an image of pineapple for the favicon. http://www.favicon.cc/?action=search&keywords=pineapple http://www.favicon.cc/?action=search&keywords=pineapple
- kaicianflone 9y ago
  Haha I was just about to suggest that!
- chadkruse 9y ago
  Who is going to be the first to submit the Pull Request? :) https://github.com/PineappleFund/pineapplefund.github.io https://github.com/PineappleFund/pineapplefund.github.io
techupcian 9y ago
If you have lost bitcoins and wallet weather saved online or not I have the processes and I will help you recover all the BTC back, I worked with many profiteers and many investors bitcoins. So if you need this services you can contact him via hackerdanielssmith@gmail.com Good luck
mrweasel 9y ago
Apparently the Pineapple Fund has also donated $50.000 to the OpenBSD Foundation: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7jj0oa/im_donating_5057_btc_to_charitable_causes/dr6q6tj/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7jj0oa/im_donating...
- frut 9y ago
  I don't follow bitcoin much, but shouldn't every popular community project be essentially swimming with cash (or at least bitcoin) these days? On the other hand I guess the same could be said about the tech boom.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  I thought the Pineapple Fund donated bitcoin, not dollars? Same criticism to the headline of this thing - it's an X amount of bitcoin, not a dollar amount which will be outdated within the hour.
grimmfang 9y ago
The Free Software Foundation needs some donations right now. I hope they get a little help.
1ba9115454 9y ago
The brilliance of this is not just that he's donating to charity which is great of course but that he managed to hold for so long.
throwaway31231 9y ago
This is so inspiring. Thank you.
sigenc 9y ago
You need to Support CopperheadOS. It's something really important for freedom and safety
agotterer 9y ago
What are the tax implications for something like this? I assume some or all of the donation itself could be a write off, but isn’t he subject to income tax on the initial gains?
Jasmine83 9y ago
hello, I have a problem few months ago I had an accident because of drivers of trucks, and I had surgery on the spine, but the doctors say we need to do the surgery but I have no money to pay for operations, 75000 $ https://goo.gl/g7bj5U https://goo.gl/g7bj5U and can not decide -- https://prnt.sc/hn57gv- https://prnt.sc/hn57gv-, I got into an accident and after operations could not walk, and I asked the doctors to have an operation again on a spine that I would go as before, but the doctors require 75,000 dollars that is 5 btc ,this my video and photos before the crashes https://youtu.be/ZtWKigANVxs https://youtu.be/ZtWKigANVxs -- https://prnt.sc/hn5g6w-- https://prnt.sc/hn5g6w-- https://prnt.sc/hn5ge0--https://prnt.sc/hn5hfe https://prnt.sc/hn5ge0--https://prnt.sc/hn5hfe ,,, I have no hope left but found you and now I have the last hope or God sent you to Christmas, sorry if you do not understand me, I used the translator google, I muslim in Kazakhstan live, help if can, and if you do not want to help at least answer me to me luysta, I'm waiting for your answer, thank you good people and good luck in your life and your children, thank you bitcoin address 18Fgt1N2oePgtBaD5s7B8mjXUkCpyshjRZ

430 points by apo 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

People spend their entire lives focused on wealth accumulation. Bitcoin has endowed many people with financial means in a way completely orthogonal to their day-to-day work. Say what you will about bubbles, but this "fund manager's" perspective is healthy check on reality.

mikepurvis 9y ago
While true, as someone with a number of friends just now "getting into" bitcoin, I find the zero sum aspect of it troubling. Assuming a crash/correction is coming, most of the wealth that accrued to the early adopters will be at the expense of these later, less-informed "investors" who bought in thinking it was a no fail quick buck.
- nihonde 9y ago
  That’s how markets work. Early adopters take risks that pay off when late-comers try to bet on a proven winner.
  - ISL 9y ago
    It doesn't have to be a "bet" on a proven winner. Later investors can simply accept lower returns from a proven winner.
  - frozenport 9y ago
    Another view is that markets are not about gambling but rather investing? For example, index matched funds grow because the economy of the world, as a whole, is growing.
    - randoramax 9y ago
      That is the theory. The practice is that markets crash and people cannot retire anymore. A lot like gambling
      - imtringued 9y ago
        Markets can recover. If you invest in stock you have to consider that you may not be able to liquidate it within the next 10 years. What if the markets don't recover? If they don't recover you will have far larger problems than your stock portfolio being in the red. The machines and people don't just disappear unless there is a war. Even if you fail to do that as long as you have started investing sufficiently early enough - let's say 30 years before retirement (around 35 years old) - you probably have experienced at least one recession and recovery until retirement. If suddenly markets crash during retirement by 50% on an asset that is up by 150% does it matter? You still got away with a profit. And nobody forces you to liquidate everything at once. So sure if you plan to draw out 4% of your stocks you will have decreased your portfolio by 8% every year.
    - nihonde 9y ago
      Index funds are pegged to a lot of activities that look like gambling, but the risks are somewhat hedged by a limited kind of diversification. It’s like betting every blackjack hand in the house at once (setting aside the house’s favorable odds).
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - greglindahl 9y ago
        Huh? If I have an S&P 500 Index fund, how is that an activity that looks like gambling, or has a limited kind of diversification? It's narrow index funds that are gambling. Not all index funds.
  - thkim 9y ago
    no, it is not how normal markets work. a stock, bond, real estate "generates income". that's why it has value. bitcoin does not.
    - ravingraven 9y ago
      A) Bitoin is not a stock, it's a currency. It'ss value lies in its utility. B) There are (a lot of) stocks that do not pay dividends and never will. There are a lot of stocks that were issued by companies that never made a profit. Both of those categories are traded with a value above zero, how do you explain that?
      - glastra 9y ago
        Bitcoin has absolutely no utility as a currency. Look at the current mempool [0] to see why. People then switch to arguing that it's a great store of value. Given its volatility this makes no sense. [0]: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h
        ravingraven 9y ago
        To clarify: Bitcoin is deeply flawed, and I agree with you that Bitcoin is probably worth less than many people speculate it is worth (but not zero). Cryptocurrencies in general have a lot of utility and solve real problems.
        Cthulhu_ 9y ago
        And yet they introduce a lot of new problems too - problems that have been solved by traditional currencies a while ago. Problems like exchange security and protection to citizens. If my bank goes bankrupt for whatever reason, the government has an insurance for up to 100K for me. When mtgox went down, everyone lost their money.
        Lunar_Lamp 9y ago
        I'm not sure I agree here. Those are definitely real issues that you've highlighted, but they're not because of crypto currency. There's no reason that a crypto-exchange cannot be as secure as a bank (or more), and that governments cannot insure crypto deposits up to some value. Those are purely problems for regulators/governments, which have been relatively slow to adapt legislation. The problems you highlight are real, and can be good reasons to favour traditional currencies, but they're also easy problems to solve - the thinking has already been done once for traditional currencies and the solutions for crypto are mostly identical.
  - cryptodogemoon 9y ago
    Not with Bitcoin. Satoshi designed the supply to rapidly mint the majority of coins to the smallest group of users for the least amount of effort/capital/work input. It's designed to manipulate any user who joins the system after you. Satoshi could easily have chosen a linear curve to align with time, user growth, and increase in work input yet instead the manipulative log curve was chosen. Old users are now incentived to attempt to psychologically exploit new people by selling the asset for far more than the cost of production or acquisition.
    - celticninja 9y ago
      You bring this up in every crypto thread. Do you have an alternative suggestion as to how it should work that could actually be implemented now in a new crypto?
      - mikepurvis 9y ago
        Isn't it fundamentally a bootstrapping problem? A state can reasonably presume to sell a new currency in exchange for older (or foreign) currency— this is similar to issuing a bond or whatever else to raise money. And there's a guarantee of value in the sense that the state will accept the currency later on as your taxes. The Bitcoin network/ecosystem has nothing to offer in this sense— there's no plausible reason for it to be "raising" money by direct sales, and no one owes it taxes. So the initial tokens were distributed based on the fact that they were mined by early adopters before the difficulty got to be too great. There is indeed a basic unfairness in this, but it's not obvious to me how to resolve it for future projects of this kind.
      - cryptodogemoon 9y ago
        A linear distribution curve that matches work/watt input. This modestly levels the playing field, although it simply allows existing capital to match the input/output. Satoshi style curves are both capital dependent and skewed disproportionately to the first to arrive within the tiny timeframe. Anti-sybil attacks would be immensely beneficial. Encouragement of honest economic activity. Scaling of bandwidth and fees. The ideal solution is a PoW that is computationally useful and desirable, BOINC, folding@home. Ethereum almost does this, but PoW algos as they exist now are anti-scale by design, where increasing computational power does not improve the network at all. The foreseeable longevity of PoW is ungodly waste, when a world wide distributed computing network has potential far far beyond brute force hash puzzles.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- EmielMols 9y ago
  This a 100 times. The crypto currency hype only (or at least mainly) redistributes wealth, in my eyes to (tech savvy) people-with-means-already. Yes there might be empowering stories of "smart single moms" making serious money by betting on Bitcoin, but as a whole it only enlarges income equality between people, arguably one of the issues of our time.
  - etoir 9y ago
    But who does it redistribute the wealth from? Is it broke people, people working several jobs on minimum wage, people who have to use food pantries, people trapped in debt? Not at all. It's people who already have a bunch of liquid assets to play with. People who have earned decent money, saved it and previously were invested in the stock market, gold, savings accounts. Not necessarily rich people (not just rich people), but well-off people who have money they don't need sitting around. I am young, have a high income and a tiny net worth. I got lucky by buying a tiny amount of bitcoin a few years ago purely because I was interested in the tech. There's lots of things about my situation, and the situation of other people in my society which are unfair. But baby-boomers with nest eggs cashing me out because they feel entitled to make an easy buck and are buying something they don't understand doesn't seem like the most important injustice.
    - EmielMols 9y ago
      > Is it broke people, people working several jobs on minimum wage, ... people trapped in debt? At least in Europe, it is not uncommon that bank/pension/state funds (in effect: everybody's money) buy in latest to these stocks. Allocating resources in society is a hard problem, and capital markets overall provide a valuable service in deciding where resources should go. But when some of these markets function more or less like a lottery (or ponzi scheme), I don't see why a society should support (or even worse: idolize) its participants.
    - rootlocus 9y ago
      > But baby-boomers with nest eggs cashing me out because they feel entitled to make an easy buck and are buying something they don't understand doesn't seem like the most important injustice. That's condescending, hypocritical bullshit. Why do you feel entitled to "cashing out" on their savings because you're tech savvy? > Not necessarily rich people (not just rich people), but well-off people who have money they don't need sitting around. This is straight up delusional. I'm appalled that you would spend so much time describing who you think invests in cryptocurrencies, just to justify yourself profiting off them. Actually, most people who invest in the stock market know better than to get involved with bitcoin. Most people who hyped its value lately are the kind of people who have no idea what's about, invest poorly and have fewer funds. [1] So yes, most likely your profit came from "broke people, people working several jobs on minimum wage, people who have to use food pantries, people trapped in debt". At least don't try to pretend it's otherwise. [1] https://www.engadget.com/amp/2017/12/12/bitcoin-mania-mortage-house-investors/ https://www.engadget.com/amp/2017/12/12/bitcoin-mania-mortag...
- Tepix 9y ago
  "no fail quick buck"? If you listen to mass media for the last several years whenever they mention bitcoin they tell you it's an incredibly risky investment.
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    Yes, but at the same time you hear 30-100% gains in the span of one day and people going "I just bought a lamborghini" - survivorship bias and all that.
    - Tepix 9y ago
      I don't know - whenever I read about bitcoin rising it is immediately followed by something like "last thursday bitcon went down by 20%" so people who only read that will get the impression that it's dangerous to invest.
- PineappleFund 9y ago
  Hi, creator of the Pineapple Fund here (pineapplefund.org/verification.txt) I am actually quite sad to see the current state of the cryptocurrency community, and how people in it these days widely misrepresent the risk and intricacies of bitcoin/crypto. When I first got into bitcoin, most people were there because they were fascinated in building a decentralized currency. Profit seeking was always a part, but not the predominant part. I'm a little bit sad to see where crypto is today. But I think the original faction is still alive.
  - rootlocus 9y ago
    Not everyone will be able to profit off of bitcoin. Worse, those who will, will do so at the expense of everyone else. There's only two ways this bubble will burst: 1. Inflation: the value of fiat currencies drops to match the supposed value of bitcoin, which negatively affects everyone 2. Only the first people to cash out actually turn a profit. Every other person who invested will lose everything. Either way, the money you now made from bitcoin, came from people who will probably lose their savings contributing to the bubble.
  - pretentiousPear 9y ago
    How do you see the current risks present in bitcoin/crypto? How should it be represented? Genuine question.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
thkim 9y ago
bitcoin is just extortion on craze of the crowd. if no income is been generated by it, then its value is arbitrary. an investment asset needs a cash flow to repay investment and then some. bitcoin has none. i admit bitcoin is not the only asset that has this characteristic.

egwor 9y ago

I hope that the charity looks to sell or hedge some of this....

TuringNYC 9y ago
Well, now that we have a futures market...

focal 9y ago

I love that its anonymous and simple and the donations are transparent. Does anyone by chance know if there are restrictions on charities receiving anonymous bitcoin donations?

bennettfeely 9y ago

I'd love to know what the Electronic Frontier Foundation does exactly with millions and millions of dollars in donations. Based on Wikipedia it awards money to rich people with powerful computers for finding new prime numbers. But it seems to me the other charities are much more deserving.

devindotcom 9y ago
It's not some big secret. They're a major advocacy organization. https://www.eff.org/cases https://www.eff.org/cases
whamlastxmas 9y ago
They're like the ACLU for technology topics
sinak 9y ago
There are three general buckets of work that EFF does. All three are focussed on protecting user's online rights to free speech, security, and privacy - but each achieves that result in a different way: * Legal: Taking on precedent-setting cases (e.g. establishing code as a form of speech, overturning Betamax Doctrine, challenging censorship laws). Full list is here: https://www.eff.org/victories https://www.eff.org/victories * Technology: Helping launch projects like LetsEncrypt (now its own org), Privacy Badger, Certbot, Panopticlick, Democracy.io, HTTPS Everywhere. * Advocacy/activism: Pushing state & federal legislatures in the US and around the world to pass laws that protect user's rights, and not to pass laws that would harm them. Also to push regulatory bodies (e.g. FCC) similarly. (I'm a Tech Fellow at EFF but not speaking for the org in any capacity)
dannyobrien 9y ago
(Full disclosure: I'm EFF's International Director) Probably the two fastest ways to find out what we do (and how we're funded) is to: * Read our annual report: https://www.eff.org/files/annual-report/2016/index.html https://www.eff.org/files/annual-report/2016/index.html (our reporting year is from June-July, so this is up to this summer). * Read some of the stories from Hacker News -- our work is often covered here, because the topics we defend with our lawyers, activists and technologists are often close to people here. So, for instance, working to stop controls on crypto, the fight for net neutrality, defending people who are creating or innovating new tech, stopping the worst effects of DRM, tracking the consequences of AI, challenging mass surveillance in the courts, founding and supporting Let's Encrypt, etc. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=eff.org&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=eff.org&sort=byDate&prefix&pag... We've been around for over 27 years now, so some of the stuff you might discover online about us might not look so relevant now, but helped set the groundwork for the modern Net. So, it's now (almost exactly!) 20 years since the Internet censorship provisions of the Communications Decency Act was declared unconstitutional, but you still sometimes find GIFs of the Blue Ribbon Campaign EFF worked on to raise awareness of that issue on the early Internet. And the project you mentioned -- the Cooperative Computing Award -- is one of these earlier initiatives. It was fully funded in 1999 by a generous single benefactor, in order to encourage distributed computing in a period where it was felt that the incentives were more strongly aligned to centralise processing power. We've given out two of these prizes over the last 18 years, with two more to go. Of course, distributed computing -- including platforms like Ethereum and concepts like blockchain validation -- is more established now than it was in 1999. Our budget for all of our work is in the order of $10 million, a large proportion of which comes from individual members' donations. To give hopefully relevant comparisons, the MPAA took $76 million in 2015; the 2016 budget for the ACLU was $138 million. We try to remain agile with what we have, but where new technology and civil liberties meet, there's always new things to do.

QML 9y ago

Speaking of charities, are most of them transparent and accountable with the funds they receive? I’d like to see a ledger of where every cent given to charity was used / spent.

focal 9y ago
If it is a US based charity or foundation you can look at their IRS Form 990 to see sources and uses of funds. http://990finder.foundationcenter.org/ http://990finder.foundationcenter.org/
loceng 9y ago
That'd be silly to tie such an obligation to support one of the purported most valued parts of blockchain..
fossuser 9y ago
This is often a difficult question to find an answer for and a lot of the other metrics for determining charity effectiveness are pretty limited. Give well is a meta-charity that tries to find out which charities maximize donation effectiveness and might be a good place to start looking. https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/
philipwhiuk 9y ago
Not that it's not a noble objective. But the accountability stuff costs money which could otherwise be spent on the core purpose.
- ForrestN 9y ago
  This. I run a small non-profit. We would love to be hyper-transparent, but there are three of us working full time just to do the work that donors are supporting. We'd need to spend a lot of time and effort to release and contextualize all of that information, make sure it's current, and respond to the inevitable feedback and conversation that would be generated from releasing that information. Everything that sounds like it would be quick and easy, well, isn't.

almostApatriot1 9y ago

It'd be nice if some of the money were used to make it easier for charities to convert to cash as quickly as possible. Bitcoin pointlessly consumes so much dirty energy, I imagine many environmental charities see bitcoin akin to blood money.

antipodes12 9y ago
https://blog.bitcoin.org.hk/bitcoin-mining-and-energy-consumption-4526d4b56186 https://blog.bitcoin.org.hk/bitcoin-mining-and-energy-consum... While some coal in landlocked and inaccessible locations is fired up in an environmentally unfriendly process to mine Bitcoins, most miners are powered by hydrogen dams, geysers and other geothermal energy sources that cannot be transported or stored.
- s0rce 9y ago
  I think you mean hydroelectric dams.
drcross 9y ago
This meme needs to die. Keeping the lights on tens of thousands of banks and keeping hundred of thousands of servers running transaction processing cost a lot of electricity too. Efforts are underway to get rid of dirty energy because the costs of renewable and battery storage are so much cheaper that this is a non-issue.
- harryh 9y ago
  Efforts are underway to get rid of dirty energy because the costs of renewable and battery storage are so much cheaper that this is a non-issue. Um what? Certainly we have made great progress as a civilization switching to cleaner forms of energy production but calling greenhouse pollution a "non issue" at this point is pretty nuts!
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    Install clean energy sources then. Charge for it, I don't care. Don't blame bitcoin because of cheap energy.

obiefernandez 9y ago

An individual whose BTC holdings (that they are willing to give away) are worth almost 100 million. Mind blown...

ttul 9y ago
Back in early 2011 when I started looking at Bitcoin, they were worth 0.70 each. I talked to people who had 100,000 BTC that they’d mined in the early days on their CPU. For kicks. Some of them are still holding it.
- tehlike 9y ago
  crazy pills. I hope they at least cashed out some.
- hindsightRegret 9y ago
  Wait, you're trying to tell me you knew people who were paper (ledger?) billionaires and were willing to disclose that? Nuts
  - ttul 9y ago
    They were not billionaires when the price was 0.70
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y ago
  Even in the CPU mining days, 100,000 was a lot. I think this is typical of many embellished Bitcoin stories. Several times I've had people tell me they 'should have bought at $#.##", so I ask them how they heard about Bitcoin. It's usually the "10,000 BTC Pizza" or a news story about Silk Road, or even the Nov 2013 bubble. At any rate, the actual price when they first heard about Bitcoin is often very different from what they remembered. It's very likely there are fewer than a dozen people that have ever held >100,000 Bitcoins. That would take two weeks of mining every single block in the days of 50BTC coinbase rewards. Reasonable estimations of Satoshi's mining vs. others in the pre-GPU days makes 100,000 very tight for more than a few individuals. This would also require continuous mining for several months unless you were the only person mining (which isn't the case for anyone but Satoshi). Hardly 'for kicks'. If you look in old forum threads, you'll see that many people mining in 2009 and 2010 mined several blocks over few days or weeks of mining. That would net a few hundred coins, and sometimes a few thousand. The majority of mining was done this way. The opportunity for many individuals to mine 100,000 simply was not there. If you actually talked to more than one individual who did this, you probably met 2 out of the 3 biggest Bitcoin miners ever.

londons_explore 9y ago

It's hard to sell large amounts of bitcoin. Most banks, when they see an incoming wire transfer for $10M marked "bitcoin" will run a mile and close down your account. Hopefully by 'donating' it to these charities, who will probably choose to sell slowly over time or hold it, that alleviates the problem.

cessna-v 9y ago
[citation needed]
- mhluongo 9y ago
  Can confirm first hand this is a serious issue in the industry. There are finally a couple crypto-friendly banks making it easier for holders and businesses. Source- have run a BTC co since 2014.
  - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
    your mistake was calling it a BTC co. talking with bankers is an art. I have plenty of "software services" that primarily transact in bitcoin and cash out to bank accounts from bitcoin exchanges.
    - londons_explore 9y ago
      How much do you exchange though? There seems to be some kind of hard wall at £100k in the UK, and anything more than that seems to get a personal call from a fraud investigator who demands documents proving what money was moved, where it came from, where it is going to, who it is for, and what was bought or sold with receipts etc. Do 10 payments for £10k each, and you'll usually get the same call. If the word bitcoin is mentioned, even once, then you'll get a letter saying "Dear Mrs X, We are withdrawing financial services from you, and your account is now closed". This even happened on two so called "bitcoin friendly" banks...
      - 9y ago

loceng 9y ago

I'm curious - is this making charitable donations in lieu of taxes on the gains?

natalyarostova 9y ago
I think you should do a little research on how cap gains taxes interact with charity, it's not how you think.
- loceng 9y ago
  Do you know differently or it's different in your area - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15919075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15919075 ?
dba7dba 9y ago
I am not curious. One could be buying up through bred horses or $$$ paintings to avoid tax. I much prefer this kind of financial maneuvering to avoid paying tax. Well done.
- TomVDB 9y ago
  How would you avoid tax by buying horses or paintings?
  - garmaine 9y ago
    You don’t. Those are considered collectible items and actually get taxed at a higher rate than other property.
  - AgentME 9y ago
    I think I remember hearing about a common trick of buying a painting, holding it for a while, getting it appraised by someone who deems that the value has gone up to a bigger amount, donating the painting, and then you get tax breaks based on the appraised value, even if that appraised value is much higher than anyone else is actually interested in paying. Granted, I can't remember if you're supposed to actually be able to turn a profit by doing this trick, or if it just makes it a little cheaper for rich people who want to temporarily own fancy things.

chrishacken 9y ago

This looks sketchy as hell. No personal information attached at all and the domain has who-is protection. How do we know this is legit? (Edit: nvm, misinterpreted the website)

ryanlol 9y ago
It does irrefutably link a very large amount of bitcoins with the site. https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c7652311f0a23aafa8e54d7db0911a2c7b5bc20ff988/ https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c765...
- harryh 9y ago
  He also links to a couple of completed donations. The first is a transfer of of 64.77BTC (approx $1M) to address 1AttfyuVVVpsJ6FzBcJMqkFrPRzFiQoRb6 which is definitely Watsi's BTC address: https://twitter.com/watsi/status/938241988121583616 https://twitter.com/watsi/status/938241988121583616 I'm having a bit of trouble connecting this transfer back to address 3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5zMAKG8FK3kJM4rjt which currently holds the coins that he says will be donated. If true this should be possible though... EDIT: Oh wait, here is the connection: https://blockchain.info/tx/d290acbfa7c619ad4215537ae83bfe165902b1c232fda1a360edaf1428acd80a https://blockchain.info/tx/d290acbfa7c619ad4215537ae83bfe165... I have to say, I'm generally pretty skeptical of stuff like this but there is evidence here that this is legit. EDIT2: They also encoded "pineapplefund.org" in a NULL transaction. Even more reason to believe. https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c7652311f0a23aafa8e54d7db0911a2c7b5bc20ff988/ https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c765...
tylersmith 9y ago
AFAICT he's only giving money away, not asking any. What's sketchy about anonymous donations?
- chrishacken 9y ago
  I was confused by the "4,894 BTC ~$84 million USD remaining" on the site. It initially appeared as if he/she was asking for donations. I guess that's actually the amount of money yet to be distributed.

atrain714 9y ago

This seems so fake. If its too good to be true...

CLGrimes 9y ago
The address checks out: https://blockchain.info/address/3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5zMAKG8FK3kJM4rjt https://blockchain.info/address/3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5zMAKG8FK3k...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- harryh 9y ago
  And a NULL transaction to/from that address encoded the string "pineapplefund.org" https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c7652311f0a23aafa8e54d7db0911a2c7b5bc20ff988/ https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c765...
  - Tepix 9y ago
    That transaction cost 20€. Ouch.
    - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
      Spare change if you've got $100 million to throw around. Or whatever the current btc price is.
gabcoh 9y ago
They did send 60 bitcoins to watsi's adress, so it seems pretty legit [1] https://watsi.org/faq#does-watsi-accept-bitcoin-donations https://watsi.org/faq#does-watsi-accept-bitcoin-donations [2] https://blockchain.info/tx/d290acbfa7c619ad4215537ae83bfe165902b1c232fda1a360edaf1428acd80a https://blockchain.info/tx/d290acbfa7c619ad4215537ae83bfe165...
chaseadam17 9y ago

lobo_tuerto 9y ago

I think a clearer—or at least a less click-baity—title would be something like: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86 million USD in/through BTC to charity. I think the current one makes it sound like they are donating 86M BTC. I know that's above the theoretical maximum, but that's not the point.

ringaroundthetx 9y ago
It clearly has $ in the HN post, and the actual site. And you even know thats above the maximum so your concerns should have been disregarded as erroneous stimuli as the rest of our brains are already programmed to do.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  He just wanted to show off that he knew the "theoretical maximum" amount of Bitcoins.
  - ethftw 9y ago
    Enough of the ad homenium

natch 9y ago

To the person running this, if you really want to remain anonymous, be careful not to write too much. You can be outed by textual stylometrics.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
oh_sigh 9y ago
That's only assuming that they have a corpus of other writing out there on the internet which is linkable to their real life identity.
- natch 9y ago
  That would help for sure, but it need not be assumed. There are other collections of text besides the public internet. Some of which are only accessible by certain entities and certain of their employees, to be sure, but still extant. Email, for example. Note I’m not implying the person has done anything wrong... on the contrary. But someone with a large quantity of BTC has reasons to be wary of rogue actors.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    What's the play here? Let's assume the NSA or CIA has archives of everyones emails. Would the IRS troll that to try to find out who has all this money so they can properly tax it?
joshumax 9y ago
That's always why I have a good laugh when someone comes out claiming to be Satoshi when they end their sentences with only a single space after a period. If you wanted to come out as Bitcoin's creator, you'd have used 2 spaces...
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  I think that just shows the age of the person. I learned how to type correctly on a typewriter, and that is the way that we learned. It means, for me, that SN, like me, was educated in the 70's and 80's, and formally learned how to type. Disclosure : Am not satoshi.

senatorobama 9y ago

Does anyone know people who are absurdly wealthy in BTC but only average (i.e software eng)? What's their game plan ?

funnelsgun 9y ago
A couple of the folks I know are just HODLing until BTC hits $150,000. Most of them bought Bitcoin when it was a couple of $, haven’t bought Bitcoin since and are just waiting it out to see what happens.
- bringtheaction 9y ago
  Why $150,000 exactly? Because of what the market cap will be then?
  - funnelsgun 9y ago
    Good question! I don’t think it’s a scientific number, but rather based on the current price (approx. $15,000 at the time of writing) to represent a 10x increase in Bitcoin’s valuation.
  - loceng 9y ago
    There's no risk to not selling - so it's more the question of why not hold? The reason why to hold is because these crypto-assets are fragile and they know if too many people try to liquidate before more people jump onto this global Ponzi scheme then the price will crash. But they know it's a matter of time before people who already made tons of money will start to slowly re-inject money, buying to move the price up again - each new buyer supporting each other - until a flood of the general public (or new big time investors) pump money into the ecosystem.
  - cableshaft 9y ago
    Yeah, more or less. Basically if Bitcoin is ever going to get to the same market cap of the stock market or the gold market, it's going to have to get up to a certain price, and there are quite a few people that are fairly confident it will get there. It's gone up well over 10x just this year alone, it's not too crazy to believe that it could go up another 10x in the next 1-5 years (I would have said 5-10 years six months ago).

bevan 9y ago

Dear Rich Pineapple: Congrats on your huge BTC surplus! To make the biggest difference, consider looking into Effective Altruism[1] (an idea, not a charity) if you haven't already. Their motto is “using reason and evidence to do the most good”. Perhaps do away with the charity proposal form, and instead choose one or several of the most effective charities as ranked by GiveWell.org[2] (who do rigorous effectiveness analysis). OpenPhilanthropy[3] is a charity that takes the EA perspective. Unfortunately, seemingly worthy charities are often orders of magnitude less effective than the few most effective causes. Charity evaluators like GiveWell help us find the gems that can leverage our money many times more effectively. For more info about Effective Altruism, listen to Tim Ferriss[4] and Sam Harris[5] interview the co-founder of Effective Altruism, check out this NYT piece[6], or read Doing Good Better[7]. [1] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ [2] https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/ [3] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/ https://www.openphilanthropy.org/ [4] http://tim.blog/2015/11/22/will-macaskill/ http://tim.blog/2015/11/22/will-macaskill/ [5] https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/being-good-and-doing-good https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/being-good-and-doing-... [6] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/upshot/effective-altruism-where-charity-and-rationality-meet.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/upshot/effective-altruism... [7] https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Good-Better-Effective-Altruism/dp/1592409660/ https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Good-Better-Effective-Altruism/...

pfd1986 9y ago
Agreed. With the enourmous cuts in science funds nowadays one can make a big difference by, for instance, fueling cash into research in virtually any area. The achievements can still be watched within a lifetime.
justonepost 9y ago
I think he needs charities that are willing to take BTC.
- celticninja 9y ago
  Bitpay will act as a middleman for charities.

chaseadam17 9y ago

Watsi cofounder here. We're extremely grateful for this support. It's going to enable us to help a lot of patients access healthcare. I also think it's great for the crypto community as a whole. Thank you, Pineapple!

giarc 9y ago
Do you immediately convert to USD (or whatever currency) and spend, or do you hold as an investment?
- runeks 9y ago
  Holding for a charitable organization would not be an investment, but speculation, and would be irresponsible, in my humble opinion (because you’re gambling with donations). The people who choose to donate should get full value from their donation. So, until one can buy goods with bitcoin and pay omes employees with it, holding it when you have an obligation to buy something with it amounts to speculation.
  - mpfundstein 9y ago
    You can do all of these things already. In Europe at least. I have a TenX debit card that I can use everywhere VISA is accepted! Bought iphone and car with it
    - usaphp 9y ago
      I guess spending $84 mln is quite different from just buying an iPhone
      - anonymous5133 9y ago
        What he is saying is you can hold BTC and then when you spend it, the BTC gets converted to fiat at the time you spend it. In other words, you can save in BTC instead of immediately converting to fiat. This allows you to take advantage of BTC's deflationary attributes.

ericfrederich 9y ago

Can someone explain this to me? Where did this BTC come from? There was a single deposit on 12/8 of like 5k BTC. Since then there have been withdrawls from that address. https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5zMAKG8FK3kJM4rjt https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5...

JauntyHatAngle 9y ago
I'm not sure I understand your question, but there are multiple addresses for the 5K btc transaction to that address.

staunch 9y ago

At least one important thing will happen as a result of this person's effort. Probably many great things no one expected. The world needs a lot more people like this. The example being set here should be emulated by many others.

gdoypoll 9y ago

Most charities are scam. These days people make business of anything. Watsi is frontrunner in charity thugs.

elephant_burger 9y ago

Wow is this for real?

bobsgame 9y ago

I believe the Gates Foundation has already put an enormous amount of thinking and research into determining the most effective use of a large amount of funds to improve the overall state of the world. My opinion is that you would probably rationally be better off investing that money or building a corporation to try and turn it into billions and then donate that to Gates.

nathan_f77 9y ago
The donation to Watsi will provide life-changing surgeries in the near future, and will potentially save hundreds or thousands of lives. You might be able to do more good in the future with a larger sum of money, but if you made this choice, you are condemning the smaller group of people to suffering and death. If you met with the smaller group of people and learned all of their names and faces, you probably wouldn't want to let them die. If you could somehow travel to the future and meet with the larger group of people, you might decide to sacrifice the smaller group in order to save millions of lives instead of hundreds. You could also try to find a balance between the two extremes. I guess this is a variation of the Trolley problem [1]. However, there's a few additional variables that are very important. 1. The price of Bitcoin may fall dramatically, or your business and investments might fail. Now you can't help anyone. 2. By saving the smaller group of people, you will alter the course of history. Some of the people in the larger group might never experience the disease or accident that required medical intervention. Some of them will never even be born. I think it's better to choose the predictable outcome that is guaranteed to ease suffering, instead of gambling with people's lives. P.S. I just finished watching the first episode of 11.22.63 [2] a few minutes ago. (It was incredibly good!) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2879552/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2879552/

bootsz 9y ago

Congrats on your fortune. This is a very honorable thing to do. But my real question is: How on earth did you manage to resist selling your holdings for such a long time after you crossed the $1MM mark? That's some superhuman level of self control.

scotty79 9y ago
It's pretty much in the (sub)title of the page: "Because once you have enough money, money doesn't matter."
- bootsz 9y ago
  Yes but you can only really "have enough" once you've cashed out into a medium that has a negligible risk of being worth nothing. It still takes major cojones to leave that much in BTC for so long, thus my kudos
  - scotty79 9y ago
    You can cash out half when it's enough and let the other half grow thousand times or go to 0 without caring. I have no idea if that happened here.

sauravt 9y ago

I think this is one of the greatest example of effective altruism, the world has seen to date. As a student of this subject, I would like to suggest a minor improvement in this project, an image of pineapple for the favicon. http://www.favicon.cc/?action=search&keywords=pineapple http://www.favicon.cc/?action=search&keywords=pineapple

kaicianflone 9y ago
Haha I was just about to suggest that!
chadkruse 9y ago
Who is going to be the first to submit the Pull Request? :) https://github.com/PineappleFund/pineapplefund.github.io https://github.com/PineappleFund/pineapplefund.github.io

techupcian 9y ago

If you have lost bitcoins and wallet weather saved online or not I have the processes and I will help you recover all the BTC back, I worked with many profiteers and many investors bitcoins. So if you need this services you can contact him via hackerdanielssmith@gmail.com Good luck

mrweasel 9y ago

Apparently the Pineapple Fund has also donated $50.000 to the OpenBSD Foundation: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7jj0oa/im_donating_5057_btc_to_charitable_causes/dr6q6tj/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7jj0oa/im_donating...

frut 9y ago
I don't follow bitcoin much, but shouldn't every popular community project be essentially swimming with cash (or at least bitcoin) these days? On the other hand I guess the same could be said about the tech boom.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
I thought the Pineapple Fund donated bitcoin, not dollars? Same criticism to the headline of this thing - it's an X amount of bitcoin, not a dollar amount which will be outdated within the hour.

grimmfang 9y ago

The Free Software Foundation needs some donations right now. I hope they get a little help.

1ba9115454 9y ago

The brilliance of this is not just that he's donating to charity which is great of course but that he managed to hold for so long.

throwaway31231 9y ago

This is so inspiring. Thank you.

sigenc 9y ago

You need to Support CopperheadOS. It's something really important for freedom and safety

agotterer 9y ago

What are the tax implications for something like this? I assume some or all of the donation itself could be a write off, but isn’t he subject to income tax on the initial gains?

Jasmine83 9y ago

hello, I have a problem few months ago I had an accident because of drivers of trucks, and I had surgery on the spine, but the doctors say we need to do the surgery but I have no money to pay for operations, 75000 $ https://goo.gl/g7bj5U https://goo.gl/g7bj5U and can not decide -- https://prnt.sc/hn57gv- https://prnt.sc/hn57gv-, I got into an accident and after operations could not walk, and I asked the doctors to have an operation again on a spine that I would go as before, but the doctors require 75,000 dollars that is 5 btc ,this my video and photos before the crashes https://youtu.be/ZtWKigANVxs https://youtu.be/ZtWKigANVxs -- https://prnt.sc/hn5g6w-- https://prnt.sc/hn5g6w-- https://prnt.sc/hn5ge0--https://prnt.sc/hn5hfe https://prnt.sc/hn5ge0--https://prnt.sc/hn5hfe ,,, I have no hope left but found you and now I have the last hope or God sent you to Christmas, sorry if you do not understand me, I used the translator google, I muslim in Kazakhstan live, help if can, and if you do not want to help at least answer me to me luysta, I'm waiting for your answer, thank you good people and good luck in your life and your children, thank you bitcoin address 18Fgt1N2oePgtBaD5s7B8mjXUkCpyshjRZ