10 ms·

An anonymous donor just sent 299 Ether (equivalent to 393k USD) to redox_OS

145 points by padraic7a 4y ago

padraic7a 4y ago
A nice problem to have. What would HN readers spend such a windfall on? Contracting developers to work on the project seems like the obvious choice.
- arghwhat 4y ago
  I imagine it's a horribly stressful problem to have with significant taxation and legal work to follow to figure out what to do with it, if anything at all...
  - kordlessagain 4y ago
    Like a job?
  - traceroute66 4y ago
    > I imagine it's a horribly stressful problem to have with significant taxation and legal work Absolutely this ! In this day and age, the last thing you want is a large chunk of money turning up on your doorstep whose origins you cannot account for. Its bad enough when you can prove the origins and you have to provide all the audit trail documentation. Ask anyone in the financial sector who has had to deal with compliance questions landing in their Inbox about a client's source of wealth. When you can't prove the origins, well, "not a good look" as the old saying goes.
    - exikyut 4y ago
      Hmm, the sad aspect of ownerless currency. In these kinds of situations you need to be able to prove the funds didn't fall off the back of a truck, both in order to be able to use them in the present, and to viably tie them into the timeline in the long term. :/
    - SkyBelow 4y ago
      Maybe I'm being naïve and idealistic, but I would think an open source project would have a much easier time of navigating this than a private individual. Open source projects are built off of donations of both money and time. As for what is being returned, the project itself existing helps enable many businesses leading to many people becoming rich. As for expenditures, large open source projects are open with how they spend their money, so where the money ends up going is easy to see as well. There is far less ability for something nefarious to be going on for why a person is being paid.
      - msh 4y ago
        Banks want KYC information, even for donations, esp when its in these amounts.
        nerf0 4y ago
        I don't see a problem. Of course banks want KYC, but that doesn't stop you from selling the crypto on e.g. Coinbase (also KYC'ed) and sending to your bank.
        jon-wood 4y ago
        If you deposit a quarter million dollars into your bank account out of the blue the bank are absolutely going to ask you where it came from, and "don't worry yourself with that", or even "I sold some crypto" are unlikely to be sufficient answer to avoid your account being frozen and a note sent to the relevant authorities.
        prvit 4y ago
        >or even "I sold some crypto" are unlikely to be sufficient answer to avoid your account being frozen For 99% of banks, you'd be totally wrong about that. > a note sent to the relevant authorities. This, of course, means literally nothing. Banks will "send a note" for just about any reason. This results in said authorities drowning under a mountain of millions of pointless suspicious activity reports.
    - jaywalk 4y ago
      > In this day and age, the last thing you want is a large chunk of money turning up on your doorstep whose origins you cannot account for. If it was physical cash turning up on my physical doorstep, I certainly wouldn't mind :)
      - noirbot 4y ago
        I dunno, I feel like if I walked outside and there was just a bag of cash out there, I'd be pretty hesitant to touch it. People generally don't just "lose" large amounts of cash, and may want it back. This is almost literally the plot of the movie A Simple Plan, amusingly, and many of the same stresses apply.
  - duxup 4y ago
    Yeah I can imagine how a team suddenly has to deal with money issues and the potential emotional responses/ maybe expectations or disagreements. That’s a big change for some teams possibly?
  - cge 4y ago
    If this is indeed from Tornado Cash, which is OFAC-designated, to an individual in the US, as seems to be the case, then the tax implications seem like the smaller legal problem. It would appear that even if the developer doesn't touch the funds, they need to make a report within 10 days to OFAC. Honestly, this seems quite a bit like someone is trying to donate dirty money after being unable to launder it for their own use.
    - prvit 4y ago
      You believe that it is illegal to merely accept money from someone you believe to be a sanctions violator? Could you expand on that theory? It is not illegal to sell a house to a known drug dealer, and neither is it illegal to accept a donation from a drug dealer. Why do you think this situation would be different?
      - PeterisP 4y ago
        If it's interpreted as accepting money for some implied services (future or past), then that could be an issue if the law prohibits people under US jurisdiction to provide any services to them.
        prvit 4y ago
        In this case the donor would merely be a sanctions violator, while tornado.cash is sanctioned. So the money isn't coming directly from a sanctioned entity.
        from 4y ago
        I was reading and I think 18 USC 1957 may be a problem. > Whoever, in any of the circumstances set forth in subsection (d), knowingly engages or attempts to engage in a monetary transaction in criminally derived property of a value greater than $10,000 and is derived from specified unlawful activity, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b). The withdrawal from Tornado Cash after the sanctions were imposed is the specified unlawful activity (IEEPA violation). Even if the withdrawal itself was legal (the person who withdrew the money was not a US person), the government could argue that he should have known the funds could have came from some crime, i.e: > In a prosecution for an offense under this section, the Government is not required to prove the defendant knew that the offense from which the criminally derived property was derived was specified unlawful activity.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  A house. If this was a donation specifically for a side project I've been working on because someone just loves the idea of it, I'd probably spend it on not working a day job so I can commit 8 hours a day to that specific side project so long as that money is available. Because it's me and I can live under my own means while I hired developer needs to be paid a fair salary, and I have a very clear way to use the money, that would be the best path forward.
- captn3m0 4y ago
  The Pineapple fund is quite representative of what I think would happen. KDE/Apache/LetsEncrypt/OSM/SFC/EFF
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  Probably hire some lawyers and an account to work with the IRS on justifying why it's legitimate income.
cultofmetatron 4y ago
props on them. I can't think of a worthier project. Would love to make redox my daily driver someday
aliqot 4y ago
pedant, pseudonymous
- joosters 4y ago
  Well the coins came from the tornado cash mixer, so it is pretty anonymous. ... and also possibly illegal to handle, if the recipient is in the US?
  - aliqot 4y ago
    Mixers do not render something anonymous, even on a balance-based network.
    - joosters 4y ago
      If it's not anonymous, would you care to show where the coins originated from, please?
      - aliqot 4y ago
        I should probably lead with this, but I'm an expert researcher and developer-contributor to this field. I'm qualified to make this assertion and it could save someone's life so it's very important we're clear here on this. Your argument is not the 'gotcha' you think it is. Those transactions are public record. The money has to get into the mixer somehow, and it has to come out somehow. Unless your coins never exit the system or interact with a daemon you operate or that can be tied to you, sure you enjoy a modicum of pseudonimity, but the moment you interact with that account you've given that up. Whether this is SPV, light wallet, custodial wallet or home grown daemon wallet, you must make a connection to a daemon and it must gather peers and chain-data. Even if you mine the coins, you have to broadcast a TX to solve the block, collect reward and propagate new coins. Same with proof of stake. New coins must be minted and rewarded, something must solve to mint. One of the most common ways 'private' transactions are traced is through daemon broadcast. The first daemon to broadcast/relay a transaction holds tangible log info to nail users. After that broadcast you now have 8-16 other daemons who've seen and recorded that peer broadcast in their logs, then they reach out to update the swarm. You don't need to operate many nodes to get very targeted info on the originator of a transaction, you only need what's called 'peer diversity'. TOR does very little to negate this, especially when 'light-transactions' are used, where only the transactions lacked during sync are requested- this is a passive 'fingerprint' of a given daemon and its sync-state. Often 'light transactions' are lauded as a performance mechanism but unfortunately anything that decreases traffic homogeneity will have an influence on a bad actor's ability to isolate a given user's traffic. Anybody can run these daemons. You don't need sophisticated surveillance infrastructure for this, it's being done today by hackers and agencies alike to target users of actually-private cryptoassets that have inherently private blockchains.
edf13 4y ago
Problem is that the source has come via Tornado cash (Which has injuctions in place in the US)....
- dmos62 4y ago
  One can use Bisq for anonymous (and trustless) crypto<->fiat exchange. I last used it couple of years ago, though.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Ok, you've exchanged some eth for usd. That's in your credit card or bank. They've reported to the IRS that you've received this much money. That is an abnormally large gift and gets into https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/frequently-asked-questions-on-gift-taxes https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe... Who is paying the taxes on that? The person giving it probably didn't/hasn't paid the gift taxes. This sort of irregularity is going to get you audited or a closer look and that isn't going to be be fun. Where did that money come from? Oh, it came from Tornado... now you're going to get audited to make sure that this isn't you sending yourself money. That's really not going to be fun. If you got money, its going to be taxed somehow. Trying to avoid paying taxes on that money is going to get you into more trouble. Any investigation on the history of that money is going to cause problems for the person.
    - from 4y ago
      Banks only report >$10000 cash deposits/withdrawals to the IRS. They do not report checks wires or anything else unless they are using them as part of a suspicious activity report. Gifts from foreigners aren’t subject to gift tax. There are websites where you can convert this amount of crypto to dollars in cash or in a bank account in a couple of hours if the official exchanges don’t want to touch you either (of course the fees can be higher).
      - dmos62 4y ago
        The other commentor makes a good point about taxes being a bother. You can get around it, but scaling that is similarly (or more) bothersome.
mhmmmmmm 4y ago
Interesting sidenote: The donor also left a message for two other operating systems, "Qubes address? GrapheneOS address?". https://etherscan.io/tx/0xca5bb04204f446f73a510ea02b2bd7c01e16b58b1d16532a2a1be90d82820297 https://etherscan.io/tx/0xca5bb04204f446f73a510ea02b2bd7c01e...
- Scumbag24 4y ago
  Qubes has now set up an Ethereum address(Mainnet): https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2022/09/29/qubes-os-project-now-accepting-donations-on-ethereum/ https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2022/09/29/qubes-os-project-no...
- svnpenn 4y ago
  no message like that is on the page you linked
  - iancnorden 4y ago
    Change 'Input Data' to utf-8 via 'View Input As' dropdown.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - usmannk 4y ago
    Press "Click to see More". Then the message is there, displayed as bytes encoded into hex. There is a toggle to display that data in UTF-8 format too.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
turingfeel 4y ago
Probably not a hugely popular viewpoint, but I can’t help but immediately think there’s a good chance it’s dirty money. There’s just so much of it that can’t be laundered so it’s worthless except for altruistic purposes like this.
- prvit 4y ago
  >There’s just so much of it that can’t be laundered How come? What money can't be laundered?
  - svnpenn 4y ago
    when you launder money, it has to be in a way that's actually plausible to the IRS. So if you have a small bookstore making 1 million per year, it might look suspicious.
    - IshKebab 4y ago
      Isn't that what NFCs are for?
      - scrollaway 4y ago
        NFC is near-field communication, a system your bank cards and modern smartphones use for transmitting data over very short distances. Maybe you’re thinking of NFS? ;)
        kube-system 4y ago
        NFS is network file system, a system for computers to access files from other computers over a network. Maybe you're thinking of NFL?
        endofreach 4y ago
        NFL is the national football league. They play a game called football even though they seem to be carrying the ball with their hands, most of the time. Seems important in the US… Maybe you're thinking of NFV?
0x64 4y ago
And $0.26 in transaction fees, $0.04 of which went to the block proposing validator
gnu8 4y ago
“If money had to be clean before it was spent, we’d all be living in caves.” Any attempt by feds to steal this money or sanction Redox for using it should be considered a direct attack on the project for its own sake, meaning the feds feel that Redox is a threat and they want to shut it down. The origin of the money is not a valid concern.
- NegativeK 4y ago
  To be frank, the feds aren't going to put a lot of weight in what you're considering as an attack. The end result of the donation is probably going to involve some lawyers and boring meetings (potentially even directly with the Treasury department), not a pro-cryptocurrency revolution because the Federal government has its fangs out for a super niche Unix-like.
b800h 4y ago
Sidenote here: A lot of charities have serious problems with out-of-scale donations like this. They often encourage the organisation to grow in a way which is unsustainable and can have a damaging downside once the capital is exhausted.
- madsbuch 4y ago
  Can you enlighten why this is the case? Especially for non-for-profits I don't think this should be a problem, as they can merely just save the money. On the contrary I see that quite some non-profits run on an endowment model, where these money would basically just grow the endowment.
  - guywithahat 4y ago
    Because they'll hire sometime as a way to spend that 300k, or maybe let their server expenses grow in a way that's not cost effective, and then after a while the money runs out and there's a panic. I don't think it's a huge issue but it's something they'll have to think about
    - b800h 4y ago
      The classic example is that they make a capital purchase, like a building, for which they can't afford the ongoing maintenance.
wokwokwok 4y ago
It’s not equivalent to 393k though, is it? It’s worth absolutely nothing unless it can be converted into actual money, which is appears will be quite difficult to do. Now you just have “I have a lot of worthless ether” bragging rights and pretty much nothing else you didn’t have before except maybe legal woes. Sums up my feelings about crypto pretty much completely.
- weberer 4y ago
  >which is appears will be quite difficult to do Its very easy to at least exchange a few thousand dollars back and forth on Coinbase. I don't know if there's extra hurdles moving almost 400k.
- zeroclip 4y ago
  Depends on your jurisdiction. In some parts of the west you can easily exchange 400k to fiat in less than an hour. But in some countries, this might not be so easy. If you reside in Russia, China, or Canada, you might have a hard time. It may also prove difficult actually using the money once it arrives in your bank. Traditional banks are hesitant with sudden windfalls, and you might have your account suddenly frozen for a month or two with no recourse. There is also the option to just hold the ETH or a stablecoin token.
  - from 4y ago
    > you reside in Russia, China, or Canada, you might have a hard time Interestingly, the opposite is true. The countries with the most restrictions (officially China, Russia, Argentina, Nigeria etc) have the most crypto activity, it’s just all “underground.“
    - zeroclip 4y ago
      I don’t doubt it but I think the commenter was referring to a legal means of exchanging the funds to fiat.
- exolymph 4y ago
  > It’s worth absolutely nothing unless it can be converted into actual money, which is appears will be quite difficult to do. No it isn't. As someone else said upthread, you can pay people directly in ETH. The potential labor pool will be smaller than if you're paying USD, but it still exists.

145 points by padraic7a 4y ago

A nice problem to have. What would HN readers spend such a windfall on? Contracting developers to work on the project seems like the obvious choice.

arghwhat 4y ago
I imagine it's a horribly stressful problem to have with significant taxation and legal work to follow to figure out what to do with it, if anything at all...
- kordlessagain 4y ago
  Like a job?
- traceroute66 4y ago
  > I imagine it's a horribly stressful problem to have with significant taxation and legal work Absolutely this ! In this day and age, the last thing you want is a large chunk of money turning up on your doorstep whose origins you cannot account for. Its bad enough when you can prove the origins and you have to provide all the audit trail documentation. Ask anyone in the financial sector who has had to deal with compliance questions landing in their Inbox about a client's source of wealth. When you can't prove the origins, well, "not a good look" as the old saying goes.
  - exikyut 4y ago
    Hmm, the sad aspect of ownerless currency. In these kinds of situations you need to be able to prove the funds didn't fall off the back of a truck, both in order to be able to use them in the present, and to viably tie them into the timeline in the long term. :/
  - SkyBelow 4y ago
    Maybe I'm being naïve and idealistic, but I would think an open source project would have a much easier time of navigating this than a private individual. Open source projects are built off of donations of both money and time. As for what is being returned, the project itself existing helps enable many businesses leading to many people becoming rich. As for expenditures, large open source projects are open with how they spend their money, so where the money ends up going is easy to see as well. There is far less ability for something nefarious to be going on for why a person is being paid.
    - msh 4y ago
      Banks want KYC information, even for donations, esp when its in these amounts.
      - nerf0 4y ago
        I don't see a problem. Of course banks want KYC, but that doesn't stop you from selling the crypto on e.g. Coinbase (also KYC'ed) and sending to your bank.
        jon-wood 4y ago
        If you deposit a quarter million dollars into your bank account out of the blue the bank are absolutely going to ask you where it came from, and "don't worry yourself with that", or even "I sold some crypto" are unlikely to be sufficient answer to avoid your account being frozen and a note sent to the relevant authorities.
        prvit 4y ago
        >or even "I sold some crypto" are unlikely to be sufficient answer to avoid your account being frozen For 99% of banks, you'd be totally wrong about that. > a note sent to the relevant authorities. This, of course, means literally nothing. Banks will "send a note" for just about any reason. This results in said authorities drowning under a mountain of millions of pointless suspicious activity reports.
  - jaywalk 4y ago
    > In this day and age, the last thing you want is a large chunk of money turning up on your doorstep whose origins you cannot account for. If it was physical cash turning up on my physical doorstep, I certainly wouldn't mind :)
    - noirbot 4y ago
      I dunno, I feel like if I walked outside and there was just a bag of cash out there, I'd be pretty hesitant to touch it. People generally don't just "lose" large amounts of cash, and may want it back. This is almost literally the plot of the movie A Simple Plan, amusingly, and many of the same stresses apply.
- duxup 4y ago
  Yeah I can imagine how a team suddenly has to deal with money issues and the potential emotional responses/ maybe expectations or disagreements. That’s a big change for some teams possibly?
- cge 4y ago
  If this is indeed from Tornado Cash, which is OFAC-designated, to an individual in the US, as seems to be the case, then the tax implications seem like the smaller legal problem. It would appear that even if the developer doesn't touch the funds, they need to make a report within 10 days to OFAC. Honestly, this seems quite a bit like someone is trying to donate dirty money after being unable to launder it for their own use.
  - prvit 4y ago
    You believe that it is illegal to merely accept money from someone you believe to be a sanctions violator? Could you expand on that theory? It is not illegal to sell a house to a known drug dealer, and neither is it illegal to accept a donation from a drug dealer. Why do you think this situation would be different?
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      If it's interpreted as accepting money for some implied services (future or past), then that could be an issue if the law prohibits people under US jurisdiction to provide any services to them.
      - prvit 4y ago
        In this case the donor would merely be a sanctions violator, while tornado.cash is sanctioned. So the money isn't coming directly from a sanctioned entity.
        from 4y ago
        I was reading and I think 18 USC 1957 may be a problem. > Whoever, in any of the circumstances set forth in subsection (d), knowingly engages or attempts to engage in a monetary transaction in criminally derived property of a value greater than $10,000 and is derived from specified unlawful activity, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b). The withdrawal from Tornado Cash after the sanctions were imposed is the specified unlawful activity (IEEPA violation). Even if the withdrawal itself was legal (the person who withdrew the money was not a US person), the government could argue that he should have known the funds could have came from some crime, i.e: > In a prosecution for an offense under this section, the Government is not required to prove the defendant knew that the offense from which the criminally derived property was derived was specified unlawful activity.
bioemerl 4y ago
A house. If this was a donation specifically for a side project I've been working on because someone just loves the idea of it, I'd probably spend it on not working a day job so I can commit 8 hours a day to that specific side project so long as that money is available. Because it's me and I can live under my own means while I hired developer needs to be paid a fair salary, and I have a very clear way to use the money, that would be the best path forward.
captn3m0 4y ago
The Pineapple fund is quite representative of what I think would happen. KDE/Apache/LetsEncrypt/OSM/SFC/EFF
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
SilverBirch 4y ago
Probably hire some lawyers and an account to work with the IRS on justifying why it's legitimate income.

cultofmetatron 4y ago

props on them. I can't think of a worthier project. Would love to make redox my daily driver someday

aliqot 4y ago

pedant, pseudonymous

joosters 4y ago
Well the coins came from the tornado cash mixer, so it is pretty anonymous. ... and also possibly illegal to handle, if the recipient is in the US?
- aliqot 4y ago
  Mixers do not render something anonymous, even on a balance-based network.
  - joosters 4y ago
    If it's not anonymous, would you care to show where the coins originated from, please?
    - aliqot 4y ago
      I should probably lead with this, but I'm an expert researcher and developer-contributor to this field. I'm qualified to make this assertion and it could save someone's life so it's very important we're clear here on this. Your argument is not the 'gotcha' you think it is. Those transactions are public record. The money has to get into the mixer somehow, and it has to come out somehow. Unless your coins never exit the system or interact with a daemon you operate or that can be tied to you, sure you enjoy a modicum of pseudonimity, but the moment you interact with that account you've given that up. Whether this is SPV, light wallet, custodial wallet or home grown daemon wallet, you must make a connection to a daemon and it must gather peers and chain-data. Even if you mine the coins, you have to broadcast a TX to solve the block, collect reward and propagate new coins. Same with proof of stake. New coins must be minted and rewarded, something must solve to mint. One of the most common ways 'private' transactions are traced is through daemon broadcast. The first daemon to broadcast/relay a transaction holds tangible log info to nail users. After that broadcast you now have 8-16 other daemons who've seen and recorded that peer broadcast in their logs, then they reach out to update the swarm. You don't need to operate many nodes to get very targeted info on the originator of a transaction, you only need what's called 'peer diversity'. TOR does very little to negate this, especially when 'light-transactions' are used, where only the transactions lacked during sync are requested- this is a passive 'fingerprint' of a given daemon and its sync-state. Often 'light transactions' are lauded as a performance mechanism but unfortunately anything that decreases traffic homogeneity will have an influence on a bad actor's ability to isolate a given user's traffic. Anybody can run these daemons. You don't need sophisticated surveillance infrastructure for this, it's being done today by hackers and agencies alike to target users of actually-private cryptoassets that have inherently private blockchains.

edf13 4y ago

Problem is that the source has come via Tornado cash (Which has injuctions in place in the US)....

dmos62 4y ago
One can use Bisq for anonymous (and trustless) crypto<->fiat exchange. I last used it couple of years ago, though.
- shagie 4y ago
  Ok, you've exchanged some eth for usd. That's in your credit card or bank. They've reported to the IRS that you've received this much money. That is an abnormally large gift and gets into https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/frequently-asked-questions-on-gift-taxes https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe... Who is paying the taxes on that? The person giving it probably didn't/hasn't paid the gift taxes. This sort of irregularity is going to get you audited or a closer look and that isn't going to be be fun. Where did that money come from? Oh, it came from Tornado... now you're going to get audited to make sure that this isn't you sending yourself money. That's really not going to be fun. If you got money, its going to be taxed somehow. Trying to avoid paying taxes on that money is going to get you into more trouble. Any investigation on the history of that money is going to cause problems for the person.
  - from 4y ago
    Banks only report >$10000 cash deposits/withdrawals to the IRS. They do not report checks wires or anything else unless they are using them as part of a suspicious activity report. Gifts from foreigners aren’t subject to gift tax. There are websites where you can convert this amount of crypto to dollars in cash or in a bank account in a couple of hours if the official exchanges don’t want to touch you either (of course the fees can be higher).
    - dmos62 4y ago
      The other commentor makes a good point about taxes being a bother. You can get around it, but scaling that is similarly (or more) bothersome.

mhmmmmmm 4y ago

Interesting sidenote: The donor also left a message for two other operating systems, "Qubes address? GrapheneOS address?". https://etherscan.io/tx/0xca5bb04204f446f73a510ea02b2bd7c01e16b58b1d16532a2a1be90d82820297 https://etherscan.io/tx/0xca5bb04204f446f73a510ea02b2bd7c01e...

Scumbag24 4y ago
Qubes has now set up an Ethereum address(Mainnet): https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2022/09/29/qubes-os-project-now-accepting-donations-on-ethereum/ https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2022/09/29/qubes-os-project-no...
svnpenn 4y ago
no message like that is on the page you linked
- iancnorden 4y ago
  Change 'Input Data' to utf-8 via 'View Input As' dropdown.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- usmannk 4y ago
  Press "Click to see More". Then the message is there, displayed as bytes encoded into hex. There is a toggle to display that data in UTF-8 format too.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

turingfeel 4y ago

Probably not a hugely popular viewpoint, but I can’t help but immediately think there’s a good chance it’s dirty money. There’s just so much of it that can’t be laundered so it’s worthless except for altruistic purposes like this.

prvit 4y ago
>There’s just so much of it that can’t be laundered How come? What money can't be laundered?
- svnpenn 4y ago
  when you launder money, it has to be in a way that's actually plausible to the IRS. So if you have a small bookstore making 1 million per year, it might look suspicious.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    Isn't that what NFCs are for?
    - scrollaway 4y ago
      NFC is near-field communication, a system your bank cards and modern smartphones use for transmitting data over very short distances. Maybe you’re thinking of NFS? ;)
      - kube-system 4y ago
        NFS is network file system, a system for computers to access files from other computers over a network. Maybe you're thinking of NFL?
        endofreach 4y ago
        NFL is the national football league. They play a game called football even though they seem to be carrying the ball with their hands, most of the time. Seems important in the US… Maybe you're thinking of NFV?

0x64 4y ago

And $0.26 in transaction fees, $0.04 of which went to the block proposing validator

gnu8 4y ago

“If money had to be clean before it was spent, we’d all be living in caves.” Any attempt by feds to steal this money or sanction Redox for using it should be considered a direct attack on the project for its own sake, meaning the feds feel that Redox is a threat and they want to shut it down. The origin of the money is not a valid concern.

NegativeK 4y ago
To be frank, the feds aren't going to put a lot of weight in what you're considering as an attack. The end result of the donation is probably going to involve some lawyers and boring meetings (potentially even directly with the Treasury department), not a pro-cryptocurrency revolution because the Federal government has its fangs out for a super niche Unix-like.

b800h 4y ago

Sidenote here: A lot of charities have serious problems with out-of-scale donations like this. They often encourage the organisation to grow in a way which is unsustainable and can have a damaging downside once the capital is exhausted.

madsbuch 4y ago
Can you enlighten why this is the case? Especially for non-for-profits I don't think this should be a problem, as they can merely just save the money. On the contrary I see that quite some non-profits run on an endowment model, where these money would basically just grow the endowment.
- guywithahat 4y ago
  Because they'll hire sometime as a way to spend that 300k, or maybe let their server expenses grow in a way that's not cost effective, and then after a while the money runs out and there's a panic. I don't think it's a huge issue but it's something they'll have to think about
  - b800h 4y ago
    The classic example is that they make a capital purchase, like a building, for which they can't afford the ongoing maintenance.

wokwokwok 4y ago

It’s not equivalent to 393k though, is it? It’s worth absolutely nothing unless it can be converted into actual money, which is appears will be quite difficult to do. Now you just have “I have a lot of worthless ether” bragging rights and pretty much nothing else you didn’t have before except maybe legal woes. Sums up my feelings about crypto pretty much completely.

weberer 4y ago
>which is appears will be quite difficult to do Its very easy to at least exchange a few thousand dollars back and forth on Coinbase. I don't know if there's extra hurdles moving almost 400k.
zeroclip 4y ago
Depends on your jurisdiction. In some parts of the west you can easily exchange 400k to fiat in less than an hour. But in some countries, this might not be so easy. If you reside in Russia, China, or Canada, you might have a hard time. It may also prove difficult actually using the money once it arrives in your bank. Traditional banks are hesitant with sudden windfalls, and you might have your account suddenly frozen for a month or two with no recourse. There is also the option to just hold the ETH or a stablecoin token.
- from 4y ago
  > you reside in Russia, China, or Canada, you might have a hard time Interestingly, the opposite is true. The countries with the most restrictions (officially China, Russia, Argentina, Nigeria etc) have the most crypto activity, it’s just all “underground.“
  - zeroclip 4y ago
    I don’t doubt it but I think the commenter was referring to a legal means of exchanging the funds to fiat.
exolymph 4y ago
> It’s worth absolutely nothing unless it can be converted into actual money, which is appears will be quite difficult to do. No it isn't. As someone else said upthread, you can pay people directly in ETH. The potential labor pool will be smaller than if you're paying USD, but it still exists.