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Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023
I was looking at neovim's donation footer at the bottom of their site and saw a bitcoin donation address.
Thought I'd check how much in donations they've gotten. And I saw this massive 10 Bitcoin donation from back in 2023 (worth $800,000 now...)
From the activity history, neovim last sent bitcoin out of the address in 2019 so it's been max 7 years since they've definitely had access.
Does anyone from the neovim project know about this?
Seems like a pretty significant amount of funding to have sitting there. Hope it can come to good use as I use neovim daily.
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1Evu6wPrzjsjrNPdCYbHy3HT6ry2EzXFyQ
- JimBlackwood 15d agoI imagine they might wait, to make sure it’s legally obtained Bitcoin.
- a3w 15d agoIn which country would waiting help?
- cyberpunk 15d agoIn Germany at least if you've held the coin(s) for 7 years before selling you don't need to pay tax on the profit. Not sure how this applies to donations though, and of course this will almost certainly be changed in the future, .nl is leading the way in taxing _unrealised_ gains; we are sure to follow!
- T0Bi 15d agoIt's one year, unless something changed recently.
- la_fayette 15d ago1 year
- ksk23 15d agoOne year yes, and politics wants to change it..
- yieldcrv 15d agoSomething that takes 5 seconds with bitcoin, faster than any other property type, is something you rationalize as taking 7 years Why does HN collectively tolerate this level of understanding when it comes to crypto
- nottorp 15d ago> Something that takes 5 seconds with bitcoin, faster than any other property type, is something you rationalize as taking 7 years > Why does HN collectively tolerate this level of understanding when it comes to crypto Well that's really funny. Because the 7 years are about tax liabilities not the speed of bitcoin transactions. So maybe you made a statement about crypto advocates here...
- yieldcrv 15d agoLegally obtained bitcoin is what the person I responded to said, suggesting anti money laundering concerns which are the concerns I responded to And the tax liability sister comments all disagree with each other Notably, the parent commenter hasn’t replied at all yet
- pluc 15d ago[flagged]
- esskay 15d agoI know you're joking but keeping bitcoin now really does feel like a poor investment given it's showing no signs of ever being revived.
- accountrequired 15d agoBitcoin died *again*? hehe :P
- esskay 15d agooh i dont think its 'dead' in the way people often describe. More...done. Like, the period of obscene growth is over and its now seemingly settled into a fairly dull investment with mediocre returns.
- sph 15d agoWell, that’s what people have said all the way to $70k+ price.
- ForHackernews 15d agoIt's underperformed the S&P500 over the last 5 years, but you know what they say about past performance not predicting future returns. Maybe AI will unlock an untapped reservoir of ever-greater fools.
- singiamtel 15d agoIsn't that a good thing? The main argument I've heard against using bitcoin as currency is that it's too volatile.
- Forgeties79 15d ago
- seymon 15d agoI hope they still have the private key.
- jakemanger 15d agoReally hope so too. Would be devastating
- osigurdson 15d agoIt is an interesting fact about Bitcoin in general. There are 21M tokens in total AND some percentage are lost every year. Run this simulation long enough and there will be very few active Bitcoins remaining.
- dakolli 15d ago[dead]
- Roark66 15d agoSeems pretty silly to build in deflation into a currency. It incentivises putting your money in a mattress for 100 years.
- PowerElectronix 15d agoI like the alternative even less, as it incentivises spending more than you would and taking on debt you don't really need.
- velcrovan 15d agoWell, countries have experienced moderate inflation and moderate deflation, ask the ones who lived through both which one they preferred.
- eru 15d agoModerate deflation is fine, it's good even. But only as long as nominal GDP stays stable. See the so called 'Long Depression' in the 19th century. Which was only a depression of the price level, everything else did well. For a more sectoral example, see how computer hardware used to get cheaper and cheaper all the time, but total spending on hardware went up.
- wyclif 15d agoThe project no longer uses that Bitcoin wallet for bounties.
- ricardobeat 15d agoWhat does that mean for that donation, and why is the wallet still listed on the website?
- ramijames 15d agoI think that a large part of the priced in "value" of Bitcoin is just lots and lots of Bitcoin that nobody can access anymore.
- abirch 15d agoBitcoin's supposed to be "liquid" but I'm wondering what happens when there's a forced liquidity event.
- altmanaltman 15d agoI mean, it's the opposite of that; it's forced illiquidity when people lose access to their keys. There is no way to gain access to those coins and you cannot "force" liquidity on the bitcoin protocol.
- eru 15d agoWhat do you mean by forced liquidity event?
- abirch 15d agoIf people are trading bitcoin on margin or if Strategy is forced to sell a large percentage of its holdings.
- colesantiago 15d ago[flagged]
- AIiscoming 15d agoTrue and its also not compareable to gold. But as long as others giving you real money for this garbage, it would be better to use it for a project like neovim :)
- deniska 15d agoTo never have experienced a usefulness of cryptocurrency is a privileged position to be in.
- AIiscoming 15d agoAh yes lets ignore the tons of co2 which has direct impact of primarily poor people around the whole globe and the energy stealing which also is happening through bitcoin to make the case for alll of this for a handful of techsavy people in a handful of countries who are apparently now able to get their money through crypto but also have to now find people taking this? Yeah no. You know what happened in el salvador? A Lot of people got their initial crypto stolen. And you know what real people do? They use euros and dollars as hard cash. Like i have seen in Iran.
- tigereyeTO 15d ago“Yeah no.” Ah yes let’s ignore the tons of energy being used in giant data centers run by visa and Mastercard to operate the payment cards used by billions of people around the world. “Yeah no.” You know what happened in USA? A lot of people got their cash stolen. Your arguments are as coherent as the dissonant “Yeah no.”
- AIiscoming 15d ago"Yeah no" have had these arguments for ages and nothing has changed. Bitcoin uses a massive amount of energy and has neither the transaction amount, nor the transaction speed and a LOT of features missing which visa/mastercard and a normal bank provide. Losing your key to a wallet? BTC gone Fraud? Yeah and now what? Seller or buyer protection? hahaha no Lets not compare apples with stones okay?
- loopydosuette 15d ago[flagged]
- Razengan 15d agoThis could become the premise of a near-cyberpunk heist movie.. Similar to Swordfish? :)
- zicohacks 15d agoI checked their official donation channel is OpenCollective. I think the Bitcoin address is no longer being used and they just forgot to update the footer
- deleted 15d ago[deleted]
- philipwhiuk 15d agoYeah, someone probably deposited an amount a long time ago and it's sat there earning interest.
- benenrjdnz 15d agoBitcoin doesn’t pay interest. And that’s a good thing.
- deleted 15d ago[deleted]
- matesz 15d agoI’ve read so many news stories of people gone missing who had been know to have sole access to bitcoin wallets with large amount of bitcoins in them. I wonder how people at large crypto exchanges handle that. Perhaps shamir share the access to the pkey password and store parts at secure places like a bank? And make official access protocol akin to dnssec, but simplified?
- krageon 15d agoLarge exchanges handle this very simply: If they have the keys, it goes to the inheritor(s) once they get a court order. If they do not, it goes nowhere
- slipwalker 15d agobut what sort of people keep their bitcoins on the exchange ? the whole point is about not being seizable by dirty governments...
- lizardking 15d ago"Number go up" people
- debesyla 15d agoHype vibe investors, probably.
- pjc50 15d agoTraders; low information investors; people who are not 100% confident in their personal infosec and not willing to lose their bitcoins on their own. "Not being seizable" hasn't really worked out for bitcoiners who've been arrested. Or for that matter robbed at gunpoint.
- skinfaxi 15d ago> "Not being seizable" hasn't really worked out for bitcoiners who've been arrested. Or for that matter robbed at gunpoint. This seems orthogonal to the ability to seize assets.
- DataDive 15d agoWhat happens if some of those tax the unrealized gains bills pass in some country where they have obligations? They would have to either pay the tax on gains or write off losses.
- mikeocool 15d agoNeovim’s current donation page says that funds are managed by OpenCollective — a 501c6 organization in the US. 501c6’s are tax exempt. So assuming they are the holders of the bitcoin as well, there would be no tax liability.
- nullocator 15d agoSounds good. Edit: it seems perfectly acceptable and ideal even for society to say there is a cost to wealth. As others have mentioned Neovim is in the US is likely mostly tax exempt so this hypothetical doesn't even apply to them.
- wiseowise 15d agoTheft is good? What?
- nullocator 15d agoI'm not sure what argument you're making? Taxes are theft? Consensus on that type of thinking seems to be hard to come by.
- superxpro12 15d agoconsensus is easy. its that people want to not pay taxes and still use public infrastructure anyway. thats the real theft.
- wiseowise 15d ago> Taxes are theft? Taxing unrealized gains is theft and stupidity.
- 15d ago
- cranberryjoe 15d agoRainy day fund. Everybody needs one. Love neovim for living under their means, great program!
- ashkankiani 15d agoFor a reference point, when I was unemployed and between jobs, I got involved with Neovim for fun, and after some contributions, I eventually tried some full(ish)-time paid work. I wrote the native lua LSP client (:h vim.lsp, and the nvim-lspconfig repo) for Neovim in a few weeks for about $3k USD (circa 2019)? This amount could fund quite a lot of work to be sure.
- commandersaki 14d agoThank you, built in LSP is invaluable.
- justinmk 14d ago> wrote the native lua LSP client ... in a few weeks for about $3k USD (circa 2019) That extrapolation is missing the 1000s (thousands) of commits + person-years of work spent on maturing vim.lsp since those few weeks. Hope to see you around again norcalli.
- ashkankiani 14d agoYes, sorry, I should've said "first version of the built-in lua lsp." I basically laid down the foundations of a house and you guys built the rest of it, haha. No one wants to live in just the foundations except for the brave ones who can imagine the future shape of the house. I'm slowly starting to come out of my shell again.
- wavemode 15d agowell, I just emailed the project just to see if they're aware of it part of me feels like this is most likely a defunct wallet and nobody involved with the project has the keys anymore
- jakemanger 14d agoIf so they better take it off their site footer so donations don’t get wasted. Let us know if they respond
- tosti 15d agoAt least a part of it should go to Kibaale Children's Centre imho.
- xanthine 15d agoI got the Bram Moolenar reference.
- jakemanger 14d agoLoved the time of Bram’s belligerent dictatorship (BDFL)
- captainsinclair 15d agoI love vim and neovim. Thank you
- doreenjentzsch9 14d ago[flagged]
- Rayan4 14d ago[flagged]
- la_fayette 14d agoscam
- GreenLightGo 11d agoI just regret not holding on to my Bitcoin back then.
- xacky 11d agoIt's not real money, try and cash it out and you will get scammed.