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Pineapple Fund's $56M Giving Spree
- headsoup 9y agoGood on him/her/them. It would be really nice if more wealthy people donated to the Open source world, to organisations like the EFF and mental health organisations etc (without strings attached...).
- celticninja 9y agoMost of those wealthy people you mean are older and not as technologically aware, so the charities they fund are ones that they know of (and bring them more social kudos) such as AIDS/Cancer/Human Rights organisations.
- philsnow 9y agoI wonder if this is somebody really being philanthropic, or if they just control a ton of bitcoin that they can't access (for fear of taxation / Questions Being Asked), so they drop it on charities they're sympathetic to...
- celticninja 9y agoThe donor has said/intimated they they have enough money from bitcoin that they own that they really dont need the rest and so it may as well go to good causes. He/She/They can probably expect something of a tax write-off but I imagine that taxes arent really a problem for them either. If you are happy to give away ~$80m then paying ~$10-20m in taxes is not going to phase you.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tehlike 9y agoThey can do a DAF if they are in the us.
- aviv 9y agoOr they feel guilty with how those coins were obtained.
- got2surf 9y agoIsn't it philanthropy regardless? If Pine benefits, it's only because society benefits.
- piracy1 9y agoThey could still obscure its source and exchange it for cash.
- ceejayoz 9y agoObscuring the source won't help if the IRS knows "John Doe at least once controlled the Bitcoins at address foo". At that point, they'll assume you still control them unless you can prove otherwise.
- GeorgeDewar 9y agoUnless the money came from an illicit source (I don't think the source was stated, but making a ton of money from Bitcoin's rise is perfectly legitimate), cashing out would surely be perfectly legitimate as long as one paid the right taxes, which there would hardly be a reason not to.
- ISL 9y agoHigh-profile lavish giving to charities without paying taxes on income is a guaranteed recipe for a bad time. In my mind, this person is simply choosing to be charitable, a wonderful thing.
- craftyguy 9y agoIn the US, there's a limit to how much you can deduct in charitable donations from your tax obligation, and IIRC it's something like up to 20% of your taxable income. So unless PF has a taxable income > $56M * .2 (or whatever the actual amount is), they'd get very little tax benefit to making it rain this much. Assuming, of course, that they're in the US.
- celticninja 9y agoThe donor has submitted patches for one of the open source projects that they have funded. I imagine that it would be possible for someone to identify him and further the source of the coins could be identified if they were, for example, related to a hack or Silk Road, even tumbling them (tricky with such large volumes) would be noticeable. There is a permanent ledger showing where they have been.
- djexns 9y agoI kind of like to think there are people out there that really think and live according to that phrase "because once you have enough money, money doesn't matter". I know I would...
- jadedhacker 9y agoThis is wonderful, but imagine if we harnessed that kind of money in such a care filled way all the time without giving individual wealthy people power over us. Pine didn't deserve that kind of power as I'm sure they would acknowledge. (Otherwise why give it away?) They made money on speculation, not an activity that actually would produce expertise in philanthropy or would produce some other kind of legitimacy. While Pine almost certainly didn't intend to do so, the PR from their gift produces a certain kind of effect. Namely, it provides cover for capitalism. It's a big attention grabbing move that makes it seem as though capitalism has a human face, all for the price of a few tens of millions of dollars in an 18 trillion dollar economy that is dominated by tight fisted oligarchs. We should be routinely taking money from the wealthy and using it to produce results for the mass of people. Nonetheless, thank you Pine for being a good citizen of humanity.
- andruby 9y agoFor people who skip the article and go straight to the comments. This is indeed about the Pineapple fund [0]. [0] https://pineapplefund.org https://pineapplefund.org
- supbitcoin 9y agoI have a question, how can you register a website by being anonymous ? I don't understand, anyone care to explain ? Thanks.
- canadianwriter 9y agoIt's hosted by Github pages which only needs an email address and is free so no billing info. Domain requires payment and stuff but you can easily use whois privacy protection. Looks like they use "Whois Guard Protection". In the end they are relying on both whois guard and the domain registrar to keep their anonymity.
- supbitcoin 9y agoOh thanks! So it means it's not completely anonymous, someone at the registrar can lookup the info if I got this rigth?
- markdown 9y agoThey could have registered the domain in the name of a legal entity registered in a state like Wyoming where company directors can remain anon. Basically shielded behind lawyers and shell corporations.
- supbitcoin 9y agoThanks.
- celticninja 9y agoYou could pay in bitcoin and give fake details too, however if you get your domain stolen proving your ownership becomes difficult.
- lucbocahut 9y agoThe source of the funds should be a concern for the charities involved in my opinion. I find the recipients a little quick to praise the donor with little being said about how the bitcoins were obtained. Maybe this information was simply not made public, and that would be fine if there was due diligence. However the fact more established institutions did not receive gifts is an eyebrow raiser: it is more likely these larger institutions would have taken steps to ensure the funds were legit to start with.
- garmaine 9y agoHonest question: why should they care?
- lucbocahut 9y agoEthics: if the money comes from theft, child pornography or selling crack cocaine (extreme examples, not saying this is the case here), you can hardly say you are making the world a better place.
- mLuby 9y agoEhhh that reasoning feels backwards. It's not like people get into those activities in the hope of being able to donate to charity.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- BugsJustFindMe 9y agoIf someone tells you that they personally dug up some gold in a mountain in Colorado, how exactly would you go about verifying their claim?
- lucbocahut 9y agoMining rights, proper registration and certification of the gold nugget, etc., etc. It’s fairly common in the financial industry to check where funds come from (“know your customer”). It’s done to prevent money laundering and make illicit activity harder.
- bradhe 9y agoNoob question here: You receive $1mil in bitcoin as someone who knows nothing about bitcoin...then what? Do you sell it? Do you need to go find someone to sell it to? I'd imagine you can't just go to an exchange and unload $1mil in bitcoin as most exchanges have limits on how much you can trade at once without more advanced accounts?
- justboxing 9y agoI think you can open an Institutional account at one of the exchanges like Gemini or Kraken and have them unload it for you slowly. https://gemini.com/institutions/ https://gemini.com/institutions/
- eshyong 9y agoFrom the article: "...bitcoin deposits were usually handled by outside agencies, such as BitPay, which then transferred cash to the charity’s bank account."
- Noos 9y agoThese are cryptocurrency gifts, right? How would the recipients realize the money from them, or would they treat them as assets to hold?
- BugsJustFindMe 9y agoI believe that many/most organizations have policies to convert unstable assets asap.
- BugsJustFindMe 9y agoHow does taxation/deduction work on bitcoins which were not a taxable asset when originated but are maybe sort of an asset now that they're being given away? Is this donation of magic beans deductible now that the IRS has maybe started to notice? I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't have been deductible a year ago.
- anythingnonidin 9y agoReally great to see MDMA research (MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) get funded by Pine. MDMA seems to be a high potential therapy. I hope the next crypto philanthropist funds other psychedelic research, e.g. Heffter Research. https://heffter.org/ https://heffter.org/ Psilocybin and classic psychedelics also seems to be very high potential - e.g. for addiction [0], problem solving/creativity [1], and for depression/anxiety [2]. [0]: https://hub.jhu.edu/2014/09/11/magic-mushrooms-smoking/ https://hub.jhu.edu/2014/09/11/magic-mushrooms-smoking/ [1]: https://thethirdwave.co/psychedelics-creativity/ https://thethirdwave.co/psychedelics-creativity/ [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/health/hallucinogenic-mushrooms-psilocybin-cancer-anxiety-depression.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/health/hallucinogenic-mus...
- anythingnonidin 9y agoLooks like Pineapple Fund donated some to http://csp.org/psilocybin/ http://csp.org/psilocybin/, awesome!
- jcsnv 9y agoHas the wallet (or wallets) they have been sending from been revealed? Edit: They link to the transactions on the pineapple fund site
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- postit 9y agoLoosing access to a 69 BTC PK from 2012 still gives me nightmares, but I feel happy for the ones who made enough money to spread good will.
- eganist 9y ago> OpenMRS said Pine had contributed software patches to the effort previously. Philanthropy.com did this person a grave disservice. This drastically narrows the donor pool and is quite in violation of their earlier statement: > Pine agreed to a phone interview with the Chronicle on the condition that the article include no identifying information.
- BugsJustFindMe 9y agoIt's third-hand reporting. OpenMRS has it on their website.
- lambdadmitry 9y agoNot sure how to feel about that. Given that bitcoin is a strictly negative-sum game now, all that money came from greater fools in the end (they just don't know it yet). It's somewhat Robin Hood-esque (except that a majority of bag holders will be poor people duped into buying btc) and the morality of it is… complicated.