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The Pineapple Fund donated $55M in nonprofit Bitcoin grants
- bdcravens 7y agoThe article says it's from 5 days ago, but according to the article: > Bitcoin is currently valued at around $8,250. The price hasn't been that high for over a month.
- sodafountan 7y agoMaybe just a typo? It's valued around $7,250 dollars currently
- sbierwagen 7y agoBlog posts, especially very long blog posts, are not written instantly.
- bdcravens 7y agoYes, that's the problem with quoting prices. Most articles I see written about publicly traded stocks at least pull a current price. With something as volatile as Bitcoin, this becomes even more important.
- electic 7y agoThis is a huge problem and most sites that do report the price often report it wrong. If you are interested here is the realtime price segmented via a streaming pool of reputable exchanges that stream their trades directly for tally vs. tickers. So the accuracy is high and by the minute. API is also available. [1] [1] https://blockmodo.com/quotes/BTC https://blockmodo.com/quotes/BTC
- iudqnolq 7y agoHow do you solve new data no longer showing point reflected by surrounding text? Sounds like you'd need data->article to do that well (and not just add a disclaimer or something)
- rolltiide 7y agoJust imagine it said at time of writing or time of draft, and move on
- bdcravens 7y agoOf course. I suspect if it had said $8250 and the price was $12250 your typical Bitcoiner would do the same :-)
- oefrha 7y agoBtw, anyone remember the Unknown Fund from just slightly over a month ago? https://www.unknown.fund/press-release https://www.unknown.fund/press-release https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21538748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21538748 https://web.archive.org/web/20191114165212/https://www.unknown.fund/press-release https://web.archive.org/web/20191114165212/https://www.unkno... Visit unknown.fund now and all you get is a Squarespace "website expired"... Bonus: The Squarespace "website expired" page loads 9.22 MiB of assets (2.29 MiB gzipped) in order to display <20 words in total (not a thing is rendered until that 9.22 MiB are fully loaded). Including this 6.29MiB script: https://assets.squarespace.com/universal/scripts-compressed/dialog-61e0209d15f6bfd4ce10f-min.en-US.js https://assets.squarespace.com/universal/scripts-compressed/...
- forgotmypw 7y ago>Bonus: The Squarespace "website expired" page loads 9.22 MiB of assets (2.29 MiB gzipped) in order to display <20 words in total (not a thing is rendered until that 9.22 MiB are fully loaded). Including this 6.29MiB script: Only if you have JS enabled.
- solotronics 7y agoThey achieved perfect anonymity.
- api 7y agoIt was probably some kind of scam. Either that or the funders backed out or never had the funds to begin with.
- foobiekr 7y agoThe brief mention of the recipient which, in response to a one-time boon, scaled up significantly is a little saddening. That’s a very common failure mode.
- nerdponx 7y agoIt seems like in many of these cases The organization why did the scale up anyway, but never had the capital to make the required infrastructure/technology/manpower investments. At least one of them said scaled up significantly and as a result attracted a new class of donors.
- comicjk 7y agoPicking charities, much like picking stocks, is not for amateurs. Now I just give to GiveWell and let them handle it.
- Proven 7y agoGood reminder why government shouldn't be in charge of wealth redistribution and charity activities.
- ethbro 7y agoI think of charities like Etsy shops. Their primary business is not keeping recordings and publishing neatly organized transparency records. Because (a) it's not what the people working for them are interested in, (b) they're heavily volunteer supported, & (c) they don't / can't spend the money to hire someone to do that work. In the same way someone on Etsy wants to make jewelry, not run a C-corp. End result... good charities look a lot like bad charities, with limited ability for bystanders to distinguish. In fact, possibly negatively, as actively malicious charities can spend time and money optimizing for externally visible attributes. The solution is, as you noted, to lean on someone who does have the time to externally audit various charities.
- taxidump 7y agoWhile a charity must supply tax documents to anyone who wants them, an Etsy store does not.
- marczellm 7y agoThis website started doing something heavily CPU bound on my machine.
- throwawaymath 7y agoIt doesn't really function without JavaScript enabled, either. The page loads, but the article is cut off, and graphics/logos don't seem to load completely. There is evidently a lot of JavaScript doing the heavy lifting to display ordinarily static content here. Not that this is uncommon, as we approach 2020...
- sml156 7y agoHad no effect on Firefox for me, I opened Firefox's task manager and it said the site was using very little resources. My mileage may vary from yours since I use Ublock and uMatrix and I also block add sites with my own DNS server.
- danans 7y ago> "My aims, goals, and motivations in life have nothing to do with [. . .] being [. . .] mega rich. So I'm doing something else: donating the majority of my bitcoins to charitable causes.” The very act of large scale giving is an act of power which uniquely characterizes the mega rich. Such giving invariably has an agenda attached, whether it's one that you like or dislike. That's the case for mega rich donors as seemingly disparate as the Gates Foundation or th DeVos foundation. In the case of this fund, the agenda appears to be to push Bitcoin. Otherwise they could have just liquidated the Bitcoin to legal tender before donating thereby relieving the recipient institutions of the challenges associated with it. Having spoken people at one of these organizations, they had zero desire to hold Bitcoin, as they need cash for day to day operations.
- goldcd 7y agoI do partially agree. My riposte would be that $1M donations aren't uncommon - but million-dollars-in-bitcoins-from-mysterious-person are, they're interesting, we write this thread about them. Additionally it emphasizes where the money came from - this isn't a million shaved off a few billion of MS company stock. It's come from somebody who took a punt and it paid off handsomely. Equivalent to a lottery win. Finally he gave it to smaller charities and asked them to do something significant with it. I'm not in the least religious, but taps into the tropes about reaping, sowing, sharing, blah blah - and as the article points out, it inspired others to do the same.
- peter422 7y agoFrom a tax perspective donating an asset is much better than liquidating it and donating the cash. Charities don’t have to pay capital gains, you do, even if the money is eventually going to a charity.
- klipt 7y agoYou could open a Donor Advised Fund with e.g. Fidelity, donate your bitcoin to your fund, and have the fund send normal cash checks to the charities you choose. That way only Fidelity has to deal with bitcoin instead of N charities.
- dang 7y agoRelated from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17038553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17038553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16487159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16487159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16121306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16121306 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15917598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15917598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15995391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15995391
- curiousgal 7y ago>One of our struggles as a female-led organization is securing large investments in our work. Huh? Men are better than us even at begging for money? Come on..
- joshspankit 7y agoThat line read to me more as “[we have found that] donors are reluctant to donate large amounts to female-led organizations”, but I am also hesitant to accept that at face value
- curiousgal 7y agoEither ways why bring gender into it at all? Most of the charities mentionned in the article were struggling as well. They make it seem as if male-led organizations are flourishing.
- cortesoft 7y agoYou don't think there might be any merit to the idea that women/led charities have more difficulty getting large donations?
- zaphirplane 7y agoA woman runs the American red cross with 1.4 billion in donations last financial year
- curiousgal 7y agoNo I don't, in fact I think, as a woman, that it's the other way around. Either ways it doesn't matter as most charities are struggling. You can't just blame it on sexism.
- onion2k 7y agoSecuring investment, as a non-profit or a profit-based company, is not "begging for money."
- tmporter 7y ago> magical internet money we know as Bitcoin
- trollied 7y agoJust an aside - how do you go about liquidating a fairly large amount of bitcoin into cash legally?
- aprao 7y agoThe OTC markets
- PeterisP 7y agoSell it on any above-board exchange, wire the money to your bank account, if there's any income (either when receiving these coins for something, or capital gains due to them appreciating in value), file the appropriate documentation with IRS or whatever your local tax authority is. If the income is substantial, then (just as with any less common substantial income) a tax lawyer might be helpful.
- TaylorGood 7y agoHow great to have adopted cryptocurrency/in something early enough where you're able to give back in such a substantial way. That feeling they have must be deeply rewarding.