The Pineapple Fund donated $55M in nonprofit Bitcoin grants
thegivingblock.com
thegivingblock.com
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/...
Only if you have JS enabled.
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.
As for charities being run by volunteers The American Red Cross paid its CEO ~700k in 2018 and spent ~110m on administrative expenses with ~89% of their income spent on programs, hardly a loose bunch of people
Just saying and people should make their minds on if the overhead of their favorite charity is appropriate. And they are one of the better ones there are widely known charities with 20/30 % overhead. There was a charity that had most of its income spent on raising money !
https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...
Edit: Cancer survivor charity spends 5% on programs.
Not that this is uncommon, as we approach 2020...
My mileage may vary from yours since I use Ublock and uMatrix and I also block add sites with my own DNS server.
> Bitcoin is currently valued at around $8,250.
The price hasn't been that high for over a month.
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.
That way only Fidelity has to deal with bitcoin instead of N charities.
Also way more complicated from the donor’s perspective.
You'd only have to transfer to one address, rather than collect addresses and transfer to one per charity (many of whom probably have to set up wallets). You only have one tax receipt, rather than one receipt per charity. It's slighty-to-massively simpler for the recipient, and it's much simpler for the donor.
1. Researching the various providers and setting it up
2. Transferring in the asset
3. Waiting for the fund administrator to liquidate the assets
4. Advise them on where and how much money to send to whom
5. Wait for them to do it
Not to mention if you want to donate more you need to do steps 2-5 again.
Versus one bitcoin transfer.
I realize that now the charity needs to do the liquidating which obviously is not trivial but certainly it is much easier from the donors perspective. And again, the bitcoin way makes them completely anonymous. You set up a 50 million dollar DAF with fidelity and the government is going to know about it whether or not the charities do.
So probably they're evading taxes by not declaring capital gains on their other sales.
Declining the receipts makes the donations truly anonymous which is pretty cool. I think it was a novel idea and novel execution and obviously did a lot of good.
>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.
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?
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.
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.