The Pineapple Fund donated $55M in nonprofit Bitcoin grants

https://www.thegivingblock.com/post/pineapple-fund-bitcoin-donated-to-nonprofits-here-s-what-happened

by herendin2 • 7 years ago

168 43 7 years ago

thegivingblock.com

bdcravens3• 7 years ago

The 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• 7 years ago

Maybe just a typo? It's valued around $7,250 dollars currently

sbierwagen• 7 years ago

Blog posts, especially very long blog posts, are not written instantly.

bdcravens3• 7 years ago

Yes, 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.

rolltiide• 7 years ago

Just imagine it said at time of writing or time of draft, and move on

bdcravens3• 7 years ago

Of course. I suspect if it had said $8250 and the price was $12250 your typical Bitcoiner would do the same :-)

oefrha• 7 years ago

Btw, anyone remember the Unknown Fund from just slightly over a month ago?

https://www.unknown.fund/press-release

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21538748

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/...

forgotmypw• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

They achieved perfect anonymity.

api• 7 years ago

It was probably some kind of scam. Either that or the funders backed out or never had the funds to begin with.

foobiekr• 7 years ago

The 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• 7 years ago

It 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.

comicjk2• 7 years ago

Picking charities, much like picking stocks, is not for amateurs. Now I just give to GiveWell and let them handle it.

ethbro• 7 years ago

I 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.

marczellm• 7 years ago

This website started doing something heavily CPU bound on my machine.

throwawaymath• 7 years ago

It 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• 7 years ago

Had 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.

danans2• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

I 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.

peter4224• 7 years ago

From 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.

klipt2• 7 years ago

You 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.

Acrobatic_Road• 7 years ago

Why would he give away bitcoin just to promote Bitcoin? Are you suggesting he had an even larger sum of Bitcoin hidden somewhere? Or he just wanted to promote Bitcoin at a personal cost?

Otherwise they could have just liquidated the Bitcoin to legal tender before donating thereby relieving the recipient institutions of the challenges associated with it.

And give up their anonymity in the process. He clearly cares about such things.

lawn• 7 years ago

He might want to promote it because he truly believe in it, not just because he want to get rich from it.

danans2• 7 years ago

Why would he give away bitcoin just to promote Bitcoin?

Why not? The donation drove a lot of awareness of Bitcoin in a context - charity - that few people would criticize.

Are you suggesting he had an even larger sum of Bitcoin hidden somewhere?

I presume he does. I doubt his donations impoverished him, but it's irrelevant to the argument.

Or he just wanted to promote Bitcoin at a personal cost?

Again, sure, why not?

baobabKoodaa• 7 years ago

At least be honest and say that this is your guess / speculation on the motivation of Pine. Not sure how you can claim that donations like this are "invariably" of selfish nature. Some people actually do want to help others for no alterior reason.

Buge• 7 years ago

Otherwise they could have just liquidated the Bitcoin to legal tender before donating thereby relieving the recipient institutions of the challenges associated with it.

Pine's money is likely in a not-fully-legal status. That's why Pine needs to donate bitcoin, and needs to donate it anonymously, and doesn't care about receipts from the charities. If the money is not-fully-legal, it's going to be hard to convert it to dollars.

dang• 7 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16487159

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377543

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273496

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16121306

2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15917598

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15995391

tmporter• 7 years ago

magical internet money we know as Bitcoin

trollied• 7 years ago

Just an aside - how do you go about liquidating a fairly large amount of bitcoin into cash legally?

aprao• 7 years ago

The OTC markets

PeterisP• 7 years ago

Sell 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• 7 years ago

How 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.

The Pineapple Fund donated $55M in nonprofit Bitcoin grants

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