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Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

> "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.

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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.

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.

This makes you anonymous (if you want) to the charities but not anonymous to Fidelity or whoever runs your DAF.

Also way more complicated from the donor’s perspective.

How would that be more complicated? Setting up a DAF is quite simple.

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.

The donor didn’t get tax receipts so clearly they valued the anonymity more than the deduction, but even still, setting up a DAF requires:

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.

> The donor didn’t get tax receipts so clearly they valued the anonymity more than the deduction

So probably they're evading taxes by not declaring capital gains on their other sales.

I’d imagine if they have 55 million to give away then they can afford the taxes on the rest. Nothing about this method of donation implies the donor is a criminal.

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.

aside from the lack of anonymity, you are also restricted to 501(c)(3) entities

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.

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

> 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?

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.

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.

>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.

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