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Comment by fianchetto | Hacker News Reader

EFF taking Bitcoin is good for Bitcoin but they won't get a single satoshi from me. I joined EFF not long after the Steve Jackson days and supported them until relatively recently.

I didn't believe their original "we don't want to be the story" explanation for not wanting to accept bitcoins. The EFF didn't want to get tagged as 'fringe' in their DC circles by accepting bitcoins in the wake of the Wikileaks/bitcoin story. Now that Bitcoin is being backed by startup money, EFF sees Bitcoin as socially safe again.

EFF alienated me by letting go of principle when it was more important to hang onto it.

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You have to keep in mind that the EFF get into some very important political battles and earn some very fearsome enemies.

In DC politics your enemies will not kill you but they will sue you, or they can do even worse -- they can ask their friends in Congress to open an investigation or to ask the DOJ to do so.

Thus, the lawyers for the EFF have to be really really careful and make sure that there are no open avenues of attack. When you are potential target, you have to be much more cautious than you would usually be. Especially if your enemies are very powerful and well connected lawyers, powerbrokers and publicity people. These people can take the slightest infraction, real or imagined, and weave it in a complex and snowballing story that ends with you having lost all credibility.

Note what happened to Julian Assange.

So no you cannot blame the EFF for refusing to be adventurous vis-a-vis bitcoin.

Furthermore, their change of policy is probably not related to startup money but to the government providing guidance for virtual currency.

Not just that, but they gave away all their previously donated bitcoins (which is a very large amount of money at current prices) to some borderline scam "Receive 0.0001 BTC free" operation instead of refunding them.

My friend personally donated 20000 BTC to them, luckily he has the disposition of a Buddhist monk.

EDIT: Trying to get this story confirmed, as comments below have pointed out, there is clearly a discrepancy.

Geez, Two Years ago that would still be 100K USD, to think thats a cool 2M today.

that's ok

I am going to have to call bull on that.

Here is the original EFF donation page: http://web.archive.org/web/20110514012705/https://www.eff.or...

It contains the bitcoin address.

Here is the history for that address: https://blockchain.info/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2...

Which as you can see received a total of 3,515.077 BTC. This is still a lot and is worth over $400k today, but way short of your 20,000.

FYI, here is the original discussion: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=20185.0

edit: That discussion was right after the first bitcoin bubble and at the time it was trading for around $17 so the total donations that they were talking about was about $60k. Still a lot of money to be going to the faucet (and down the drain?).

Cannot edit or delete the old post, i was wrong by several orders of magnitude, please down vote and ignore. it was 20k USD worth of bitcoin at the time he donated.

Apologies.

Hardly insignificant.

Don't apologize too much. I was having fun demonstrating how to track this stuff down. That said I would have been really upset if I had donated a significant amount of money to the EFF and then they decided to give all of it away.

BTW it is probably possible to verify that the money donated was REALLY send to the bitcoin faucet.

Oh and yeah I got my first bitcoins from the faucet like many of these other people. It was an important service, however given how bitcoins can be split up it didn't need to be giving out large amounts at all.

An excellent demonstration of why Bitcoin is awesome: complete transparency on the block-chain.

Really skeptical about this. Taking a look at their block chain, doesn't look like they've ever received a donation of that size: https://blockchain.info/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2...

And EFF are denying that they've ever had anything near to 20k bitcoins on Twitter: https://twitter.com/evacide/status/335461080220454913

Apparently they determined that selling them (at the time) could have crashed the market.

Borderline scam? That's Gavin's bitcoin facuet!

I receives some of my first bitcoin from him! Bitcoin faucets are how many of the bitcoiners got their start.

I believe the EFF donated their coins to the original "Bitcoin Faucet", a service by Bitcoin lead developer Gavin Andresen that would give away fractions of a coin for free, so the newbies would have some to experiment with. (The Bitcoin Faucet happens to be where I got my first 0.05 BTC, a few years ago.)

Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=20185.0;wap2

The faucet funds, presumably including the EFF donations, were used to refund pools that had blocks orphaned in the recent blockchain fork: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=156641.0

They didn't want to get tagged as fringe, so they wait to accept bitcoins until right after the largest bitcoin exchange had funds seized by the DHS?

The cause of both is the same: FinCEN guidance now provides relative certainty that some uses of Bitcoin are presumptively legal and some others are presumptively illegal.

If you don't mind, (I am looking to start donating to the EFF and ACLU in the future), can you explain a bit more why you decided to stop supporting them? Was it just bitcoins, or is there something else also going on that I should be worried about?

My own disappointment with EFF comes from many years of watching them go from a grassroots group to being an established thinktank in DC. I don't feel like they represent me and that feeling was certainly reinforced during the past two years with regard to Bitcoin.

It's only my personal opinion. You should donate to whomever you want to. As I said, EFF taking Bitcoin is good for Bitcoin.

I strongly disagree with this. Afaik they don't even have a single person based permanently in DC, and they don't generally play the DC/lobbying game. If anything, that could be considered a criticism of the way they operate (too idealistic, not compromising enough to be pratical). But they certainly haven't become a "DC thinktank."

They're very much still a grassroots organization. For example, they had a big impact in the anti-SOPA and CISPA campaigns.

To a degree they've shifted their work to providing legal representation to technologists in courts. But that is very, very important and much needed work.

I'm confused as to why you want any group to represent you whose job isn't to represent you.

Hey, just so you know -- I used to work from EFF from 2005-2009, and recently rejoined them. I wasn't around during the suspension of bitcoin, but ensuring that we weren't 'part of the story' is a deliberate policy from far further back than that. Our work is primarily legal in nature, and conflicts of interest in that environment can prevent us from defending key players.

We have one person in DC, and he works there because he likes the city, not because of lobbying or thinktank activities (he's David Sobel, and leads our FOIA work). The rest of us work in San Francisco, and continue the primary role of EFF, which is to act as a legal firm and conduct public impact litigation.

Indeed. I support their mission, but I certainly won't be giving them any Bitcoin.

What would you say is a better alternative to donate to?

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