Farewell from the Pineapple Fund

I don't have solutions I guess, just grumbling. But thinking about that makes this historical act of kindness a little bittersweet.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Feeney

The benefit to society from donating to charity can range from positive, to zero, to negative. Often negative. Anyone with money can donate, but it takes a lot of work to donate to things that make the world better. The Pineapple fund seems to have put in the effort to donate to projects with high positive impact, in a way that does the most good. (It's possible to donate to good projects in bad ways, such as by requiring them to use the money to build a building with your name on it.)

Doing the work can be exasperating, because you think "I'm giving away money, and I have to do all this work too???" But it's the work that makes the difference.

Someone posted this comment on Reddit:

"Thank you for doing what so many wish they would do in your position but yet fail to when they get there. Really proud of you and appreciative of your generosity." - https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/8ieffr/farewell_fr...

And I pasted my reply below - I'd appreciate conversation to get into the depths of others understanding if you have contrary thoughts to mine, and so if you believe my thinking is wrong then I can further refine my understanding and nuances:

There's likely no generosity here. All of the donations were likely related to countering capital gains taxes. Depending on where this person lives, let's say their capital gains taxes are 40%: for them to owe $55,000,000 they would have sold and removed roughly $140,000,000 from the ecosystem; How a qualified appraiser reasonably determines "fair market value" in something as volatile at incentivized crypto-assets - I don't know - it's probably going to end up gouging society via taxes as well.

Likewise, they potentially did absolutely nothing except do mining early on (or make a good bet) and promote Bitcoin et al, getting more people to adopt/buy them - allowing them to then sell with where we're at in the scheme.

These incentivized crypto-assets are also a Ponzi-Pyramid structure, where like in a traditional Ponzi scheme it's usually the early adopters who gain more and the later adopters who lose more; technically with a single stock broker making the decisions, they would get to decide exactly who profits from the investment, and who's money they run or exit with.

It is possible they donated more than they required to counter taxes, however I doubt they'd verify that with independently selected third-parties - and it'd be naive to merely take their word for it.

It's also other people's future money being donated - and those people are now bearing the unrealized cost, until they sell at least; not such a big deal for the receiving party of a donation, however it's a problem if they were actually purchased.

And now unfortunately these charities have become aligned and vested in these crypto-asset donations maintaining their current value, or promoting them so they go up even for (for no actual work being done) - trying to get later adopters to buy in a higher perceived value; if actual work was being done that was worthwhile to pay for, people could pay in a non-incentivized crypto-asset, if the immutable blockchain ledger is a primary value.

It's only reached such proportions because in part of its global nature, and because there isn't a single stock broker - it's an situation that's been forced on regulators around the world, and who are being influenced by lobbyists to attempt to indoctrinate regulators based on their biased understanding. It's a global pyramid of cards stacked waiting to tumble, the people making the money are the earlier adopters, and those [platforms] selling the shovels/services for this new "gold" rush.

Those who think society is oblivious to the Ponzi-Pyramid structures are going to find disappointment. The positive rallying for Bitcoin et al is because you're all aligned, incentivized to want them to work out - and that sentiment isn't equally countered solely because people keeping the system in check aren't at minimum disproportionately incentivized (e.g. they may have a government job with a salary that pays fiat currency as their incentive to do the work), nor are there the masses - the "HODL" rallying of both when a crypto-asset value is at a high and a low is interesting, to say the least: https://hackernoon.com/analyzing-every-reddit-comment-mentio...

It is great - yes - that there is at least one person who perhaps did indeed invest the majority (50%+1?; if they're telling the truth) of their crypto-assets to charities who could realize the value now (and I like a lot of those charities), or the charities may hold onto them until they crash in value. Or they will slowly sell them off as a trickle to not upset the ecosystem [as the ecosystem has seemed to have learned to manage for now] - meanwhile the remainder of the community, likely individuals with the smaller amounts invested, are doing the HODL rallying game keeping the perceived value artificially higher - meanwhile earlier adopters are extracting money at a rate that new money is coming into the system (based on the confidence the stabilized price - maintained by the HODLing - allows for).

Now what about the unknown list of bad actors who have already entered the system, who are perhaps planning to put more money into it to keep it perpetuated, and will attempt at any means to cause more-to-all of society to adopt it so the artificially perceived value - and wealth/buying power - is unreasonably and unnecessarily reallocated weighted towards them, the earlier adopters?

I would recommend everyone think through the long-term negative consequences, they aren't outweighed by the potential positives - and those positives are all achievable by non-Ponzi-Pyramid scheme incentivized means. The long-term in discussions, particularly the negatives, is rarely brought up - I imagine heavily to avoid flame wars, or you simply get "downvoted to hell" by those, as I mentioned above, incentivized to rally for their gains.

It's interesting too that they didn't liquidate the $55MM (or their full amount into fiat currency), and then donate that to charities. Aside from the negative impact dumping that quickly could have on its perceived value - like we've seen before, it's apparently better for tax reasons too to donate a crypto-asset; I imagine now that larger financial institutions are involved and other well-organized organizations have created a legitimate market structure, perhaps like Coinbase, are keeping large sums of capital at bay from investors wanting to buy a lot -- so they can buy up large quantities when necessary to avoid exposing volatility.

If you think the layman person investing say as little as $100 (that little or less for them to be aligned with the masses of the ecosystem, to be part of the mob) is educated enough to make a sound investment decision, to understand this complex holistic ecosystem, well you're wrong and if you profit off of selling your incentivized crypto-asset you're taking advantage of people. This is why stock markets were formed with regulations and oversights and due diligence for individual companies, etc. Perhaps you reading this don't fully understand it either, or didn't, and it's long-term implications. So are you going to pretend it's not a Ponzi-Pyramid scheme and hope it works out, and that society isn't actually being taken advantage of? I hope more of you sooner than later realize this. Some people do know this is the game they're playing, and they're happy to take advantage of others - however it's immoral to do if they don't know they're playing that game.

The simple truth is the proposed benefits of the structures allowed with incentivized crypto-assets don't work out long-term if you can't separate the two systems. If the system inherently has a Ponzi-Pyramid structure - you can't simply dismiss that, and you can't - as a society - allow it; the two systems being a model that leads to "incentivized collaboration" leading to independently owned services tied together through a transaction layer (that logically doesn't make sense to have an incentivized structure), and that of Ponzi-Pyramid schemes.