Good on him/her/them. It would be really nice if more wealthy people donated to the Open source world, to organisations like the EFF and mental health organisations etc (without strings attached...).
Most of those wealthy people you mean are older and not as technologically aware, so the charities they fund are ones that they know of (and bring them more social kudos) such as AIDS/Cancer/Human Rights organisations.
I wonder if this is somebody really being philanthropic, or if they just control a ton of bitcoin that they can't access (for fear of taxation / Questions Being Asked), so they drop it on charities they're sympathetic to...
The donor has said/intimated they they have enough money from bitcoin that they own that they really dont need the rest and so it may as well go to good causes. He/She/They can probably expect something of a tax write-off but I imagine that taxes arent really a problem for them either. If you are happy to give away ~$80m then paying ~$10-20m in taxes is not going to phase you.
Obscuring the source won't help if the IRS knows "John Doe at least once controlled the Bitcoins at address foo". At that point, they'll assume you still control them unless you can prove otherwise.
Unless the money came from an illicit source (I don't think the source was stated, but making a ton of money from Bitcoin's rise is perfectly legitimate), cashing out would surely be perfectly legitimate as long as one paid the right taxes, which there would hardly be a reason not to.
In the US, there's a limit to how much you can deduct in charitable donations from your tax obligation, and IIRC it's something like up to 20% of your taxable income. So unless PF has a taxable income > $56M * .2 (or whatever the actual amount is), they'd get very little tax benefit to making it rain this much. Assuming, of course, that they're in the US.
The donor has submitted patches for one of the open source projects that they have funded. I imagine that it would be possible for someone to identify him and further the source of the coins could be identified if they were, for example, related to a hack or Silk Road, even tumbling them (tricky with such large volumes) would be noticeable. There is a permanent ledger showing where they have been.
I kind of like to think there are people out there that really think and live according to that phrase "because once you have enough money, money doesn't matter".
I know I would...
This is wonderful, but imagine if we harnessed that kind of money in such a care filled way all the time without giving individual wealthy people power over us.
Pine didn't deserve that kind of power as I'm sure they would acknowledge. (Otherwise why give it away?) They made money on speculation, not an activity that actually would produce expertise in philanthropy or would produce some other kind of legitimacy.
While Pine almost certainly didn't intend to do so, the PR from their gift produces a certain kind of effect. Namely, it provides cover for capitalism. It's a big attention grabbing move that makes it seem as though capitalism has a human face, all for the price of a few tens of millions of dollars in an 18 trillion dollar economy that is dominated by tight fisted oligarchs.
We should be routinely taking money from the wealthy and using it to produce results for the mass of people. Nonetheless, thank you Pine for being a good citizen of humanity.
It's hosted by Github pages which only needs an email address and is free so no billing info. Domain requires payment and stuff but you can easily use whois privacy protection. Looks like they use "Whois Guard Protection".
In the end they are relying on both whois guard and the domain registrar to keep their anonymity.
They could have registered the domain in the name of a legal entity registered in a state like Wyoming where company directors can remain anon. Basically shielded behind lawyers and shell corporations.
Most domain registrars allow you to add "privacy protection" for a nominal fee, which basically replaces your name under the WHOIS registrant info with theirs instead of yours. While this effectively shields outsiders from discovering who you are, the registrar likely knows the information of the original buyer...
It probably can be handled by a lawyer and/or trust as well. Even if they get past the registrar privacy, they get some business entity or lawyer contact.
There’s a UDRP precedent where the panel held that registering a domain via njal.la constituted bad faith, so their business may not be on entirely solid ground.
The title was changed to include "Pineapple Fund". At the time of my comment it said something like "Wealthy Bitcoin Millionaire ..." and the first thing I, and probably others, wondered is if there was a second person following Pine's example.
The source of the funds should be a concern for the charities involved in my opinion. I find the recipients a little quick to praise the donor with little being said about how the bitcoins were obtained. Maybe this information was simply not made public, and that would be fine if there was due diligence. However the fact more established institutions did not receive gifts is an eyebrow raiser: it is more likely these larger institutions would have taken steps to ensure the funds were legit to start with.
Ethics: if the money comes from theft, child pornography or selling crack cocaine (extreme examples, not saying this is the case here), you can hardly say you are making the world a better place.
Mining rights, proper registration and certification of the gold nugget, etc., etc. It’s fairly common in the financial industry to check where funds come from (“know your customer”). It’s done to prevent money laundering and make illicit activity harder.
The blockchain is public, the source of the coins can be tracked, not to an individual, but if they were 'tainted' coins e.g from a known silk road wallet, or from a major hack we would already know. Even if they were tumbled or rinsed through alt coins it would throw up some flags based on the transactions that fed into the main wallet address(es), and you can bet people have trawled through the transaction history of the pineapple fund wallets by now.
Noob question here: You receive $1mil in bitcoin as someone who knows nothing about bitcoin...then what? Do you sell it? Do you need to go find someone to sell it to?
I'd imagine you can't just go to an exchange and unload $1mil in bitcoin as most exchanges have limits on how much you can trade at once without more advanced accounts?
How does taxation/deduction work on bitcoins which were not a taxable asset when originated but are maybe sort of an asset now that they're being given away? Is this donation of magic beans deductible now that the IRS has maybe started to notice? I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't have been deductible a year ago.
Really great to see MDMA research (MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) get funded by Pine. MDMA seems to be a high potential therapy.
I hope the next crypto philanthropist funds other psychedelic research, e.g. Heffter Research. https://heffter.org/ Psilocybin and classic psychedelics also seems to be very high potential - e.g. for addiction [0], problem solving/creativity [1], and for depression/anxiety [2].
Not sure how to feel about that. Given that bitcoin is a strictly negative-sum game now, all that money came from greater fools in the end (they just don't know it yet). It's somewhat Robin Hood-esque (except that a majority of bag holders will be poor people duped into buying btc) and the morality of it is… complicated.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadIn my mind, this person is simply choosing to be charitable, a wonderful thing.
Pine didn't deserve that kind of power as I'm sure they would acknowledge. (Otherwise why give it away?) They made money on speculation, not an activity that actually would produce expertise in philanthropy or would produce some other kind of legitimacy.
While Pine almost certainly didn't intend to do so, the PR from their gift produces a certain kind of effect. Namely, it provides cover for capitalism. It's a big attention grabbing move that makes it seem as though capitalism has a human face, all for the price of a few tens of millions of dollars in an 18 trillion dollar economy that is dominated by tight fisted oligarchs.
We should be routinely taking money from the wealthy and using it to produce results for the mass of people. Nonetheless, thank you Pine for being a good citizen of humanity.
[0] https://pineapplefund.org
In the end they are relying on both whois guard and the domain registrar to keep their anonymity.
http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/text/2017/d2017...
I'd imagine you can't just go to an exchange and unload $1mil in bitcoin as most exchanges have limits on how much you can trade at once without more advanced accounts?
https://gemini.com/institutions/
"...bitcoin deposits were usually handled by outside agencies, such as BitPay, which then transferred cash to the charity’s bank account."
I hope the next crypto philanthropist funds other psychedelic research, e.g. Heffter Research. https://heffter.org/ Psilocybin and classic psychedelics also seems to be very high potential - e.g. for addiction [0], problem solving/creativity [1], and for depression/anxiety [2].
[0]: https://hub.jhu.edu/2014/09/11/magic-mushrooms-smoking/
[1]: https://thethirdwave.co/psychedelics-creativity/
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/health/hallucinogenic-mus...
Edit: They link to the transactions on the pineapple fund site
Philanthropy.com did this person a grave disservice. This drastically narrows the donor pool and is quite in violation of their earlier statement:
> Pine agreed to a phone interview with the Chronicle on the condition that the article include no identifying information.