
Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity - apo
https://pineapplefund.org/
======
chaseadam17
Watsi cofounder here. We're extremely grateful for this support. It's going to
enable us to help a lot of patients access healthcare. I also think it's great
for the crypto community as a whole. Thank you, Pineapple!

~~~
giarc
Do you immediately convert to USD (or whatever currency) and spend, or do you
hold as an investment?

~~~
runeks
Holding for a charitable organization would not be an investment, but
speculation, and would be irresponsible, in my humble opinion (because you’re
gambling with donations). The people who choose to donate should get full
value from their donation. So, until one can buy goods with bitcoin and pay
omes employees with it, holding it when you have an obligation to buy
something with it amounts to speculation.

~~~
mpfundstein
You can do all of these things already. In Europe at least. I have a TenX
debit card that I can use everywhere VISA is accepted! Bought iphone and car
with it

~~~
IanCal
That's not spending BTC on something, that's selling BTC then buying things in
your local currency.

Until prices are regularly set (and stable) in BTC, holding 80+M in BTC is a
huge risk.

~~~
mpfundstein
But I don't have to go through coinbase or whatever in order to buy it. I can
hold Bitcoin, and if I feel like I want to buy something I can do so.

If I order something with my CC in the US, prices are also denoted in dollars.
But it withdraws from my Euro account with respect to a specific conversion
rate.

~~~
IanCal
You're holding BTC, then selling to get dollars and buying in dollars,
effectively.

> If I order something with my CC in the US, prices are also denoted in
> dollars. But it withdraws from my Euro account with respect to a specific
> conversion rate.

Yes, and here you're holding Euros and selling them to buy dollars to buy
items.

Similarly, if you were mostly doing business in the US, picking a different
fiat currency to hold your money in would be a risk and that risk would
increase the more volatile the exchange rate is.

The key point here is that until the prices you're paying are stable values in
BTC, there's significant risk in holding a currency different to what your
contracts are in. If I have $10,000 dollars and have a contract that requires
me to pay out $5,000 dollars next year I know I have enough. If I have 0.5 BTC
and the same contract then I do not know if I have enough.

------
natch
To the person running this, if you really want to remain anonymous, be careful
not to write too much. You can be outed by textual stylometrics.

~~~
omarforgotpwd
If someone determines my identity through textual stylometics, finds me,
manages to get me to reveal how to get my bitcoin, and then kills me I won’t
even be mad. Just impressed.

------
sauravt
I think this is one of the greatest example of effective altruism, the world
has seen to date. As a student of this subject, I would like to suggest a
minor improvement in this project, an image of pineapple for the favicon.

[http://www.favicon.cc/?action=search&keywords=pineapple](http://www.favicon.cc/?action=search&keywords=pineapple)

~~~
chadkruse
Who is going to be the first to submit the Pull Request? :)

[https://github.com/PineappleFund/pineapplefund.github.io](https://github.com/PineappleFund/pineapplefund.github.io)

------
chejazi
People spend their entire lives focused on wealth accumulation.

Bitcoin has endowed many people with financial means in a way completely
orthogonal to their day-to-day work. Say what you will about bubbles, but this
"fund manager's" perspective is healthy check on reality.

~~~
mikepurvis
While true, as someone with a number of friends just now "getting into"
bitcoin, I find the zero sum aspect of it troubling. Assuming a
crash/correction is coming, most of the wealth that accrued to the early
adopters will be at the expense of these later, less-informed "investors" who
bought in thinking it was a no fail quick buck.

~~~
nihonde
That’s how markets work. Early adopters take risks that pay off when late-
comers try to bet on a proven winner.

~~~
thkim
no, it is not how normal markets work. a stock, bond, real estate "generates
income". that's why it has value. bitcoin does not.

~~~
ravingraven
A) Bitoin is not a stock, it's a currency. It'ss value lies in its utility.

B) There are (a lot of) stocks that do not pay dividends and never will. There
are a lot of stocks that were issued by companies that never made a profit.
Both of those categories are traded with a value above zero, how do you
explain that?

~~~
glastra
Bitcoin has absolutely no utility as a currency. Look at the current mempool
[0] to see why.

People then switch to arguing that it's a great store of value. Given its
volatility this makes no sense.

[0]: [https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h](https://jochen-
hoenicke.de/queue/#24h)

~~~
ravingraven
To clarify: Bitcoin is deeply flawed, and I agree with you that _Bitcoin_ is
probably worth less than many people speculate it is worth (but not zero).

 _Cryptocurrencies_ in general have a lot of utility and solve real problems.

~~~
Cthulhu_
And yet they introduce a lot of new problems too - problems that have been
solved by traditional currencies a while ago. Problems like exchange security
and protection to citizens. If my bank goes bankrupt for whatever reason, the
government has an insurance for up to 100K for me. When mtgox went down,
everyone lost their money.

~~~
Lunar_Lamp
I'm not sure I agree here. Those are definitely real issues that you've
highlighted, but they're not because of crypto currency.

There's no reason that a crypto-exchange cannot be as secure as a bank (or
more), and that governments cannot insure crypto deposits up to some value.
Those are purely problems for regulators/governments, which have been
relatively slow to adapt legislation.

The problems you highlight are real, and can be good reasons to favour
traditional currencies, but they're also easy problems to solve - the thinking
has already been done once for traditional currencies and the solutions for
crypto are mostly identical.

------
mrweasel
Apparently the Pineapple Fund has also donated $50.000 to the OpenBSD
Foundation:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7jj0oa/im_donating...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7jj0oa/im_donating_5057_btc_to_charitable_causes/dr6q6tj/?context=3)

~~~
Cthulhu_
I thought the Pineapple Fund donated bitcoin, not dollars?

Same criticism to the headline of this thing - it's an X amount of bitcoin,
not a dollar amount which will be outdated within the hour.

------
londons_explore
It's hard to sell large amounts of bitcoin. Most banks, when they see an
incoming wire transfer for $10M marked "bitcoin" will run a mile and close
down your account.

Hopefully by 'donating' it to these charities, who will probably choose to
sell slowly over time or hold it, that alleviates the problem.

~~~
rando444
HSBC literally told drug cartels how to alter forms in order to bypass
security scans done to detect money laundering.

It's safe to assume that not all banks are as altruistic as one would hope.

~~~
eternalban
[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/11/hsbc-us-
mon...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/11/hsbc-us-money-
laundering-george-osborne-report)

[https://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/07072016_o...](https://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/07072016_oi_tbtj_sr.pdf)

------
bevan
Dear Rich Pineapple:

Congrats on your huge BTC surplus!

To make the biggest difference, consider looking into _Effective Altruism_ [1]
(an idea, not a charity) if you haven't already. Their motto is “using reason
and evidence to do the most good”.

Perhaps do away with the charity proposal form, and instead choose one or
several of the most effective charities as ranked by GiveWell.org[2] (who do
rigorous effectiveness analysis). OpenPhilanthropy[3] is a charity that takes
the EA perspective.

Unfortunately, seemingly worthy charities are often _orders of magnitude_ less
effective than the few most effective causes. Charity evaluators like GiveWell
help us find the gems that can leverage our money many times more effectively.

For more info about Effective Altruism, listen to Tim Ferriss[4] and Sam
Harris[5] interview the co-founder of Effective Altruism, check out this NYT
piece[6], or read Doing Good Better[7].

[1] [https://www.effectivealtruism.org/](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/)

[2] [https://www.givewell.org/](https://www.givewell.org/)

[3] [https://www.openphilanthropy.org/](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/)

[4] [http://tim.blog/2015/11/22/will-
macaskill/](http://tim.blog/2015/11/22/will-macaskill/)

[5] [https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/being-good-and-
doing-...](https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/being-good-and-doing-good)

[6] [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/upshot/effective-
altruism...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/upshot/effective-altruism-
where-charity-and-rationality-meet.html?_r=0)

[7] [https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Good-Better-Effective-
Altruism/...](https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Good-Better-Effective-
Altruism/dp/1592409660/)

~~~
justonepost
I think he needs charities that are willing to take BTC.

~~~
celticninja
Bitpay will act as a middleman for charities.

~~~
justonepost
I suspect you're handing over a lot of vig to Bitpay these days given the
volatility in BTC.

------
obiefernandez
An individual whose BTC holdings (that they are willing to give away) are
worth almost 100 million. Mind blown...

~~~
ttul
Back in early 2011 when I started looking at Bitcoin, they were worth 0.70
each. I talked to people who had 100,000 BTC that they’d mined in the early
days on their CPU. For kicks. Some of them are still holding it.

~~~
hindsightRegret
Wait, you're trying to tell me you knew people who were paper (ledger?)
billionaires and were willing to disclose that? Nuts

~~~
ttul
They were not billionaires when the price was 0.70

------
bootsz
Congrats on your fortune. This is a very honorable thing to do.

But my real question is: How on earth did you manage to resist selling your
holdings for such a long time after you crossed the $1MM mark? That's some
superhuman level of self control.

~~~
scotty79
It's pretty much in the (sub)title of the page: "Because once you have enough
money, money doesn't matter."

~~~
bootsz
Yes but you can only really "have enough" once you've cashed out into a medium
that has a negligible risk of being worth nothing. It still takes major
cojones to leave that much in BTC for so long, thus my kudos

~~~
scotty79
You can cash out half when it's enough and let the other half grow thousand
times or go to 0 without caring.

I have no idea if that happened here.

------
agotterer
What are the tax implications for something like this? I assume some or all of
the donation itself could be a write off, but isn’t he subject to income tax
on the initial gains?

------
staunch
At least one important thing will happen as a result of this person's effort.
Probably many great things no one expected.

The world needs a lot more people like this. The example being set here should
be emulated by many others.

------
egwor
I hope that the charity looks to sell or hedge some of this....

~~~
TuringNYC
Well, now that we have a futures market...

------
1ba9115454
The brilliance of this is not just that he's donating to charity which is
great of course but that he managed to hold for so long.

------
Jasmine83
hello, I have a problem few months ago I had an accident because of drivers of
trucks, and I had surgery on the spine, but the doctors say we need to do the
surgery but I have no money to pay for operations, 75000 $
[https://goo.gl/g7bj5U](https://goo.gl/g7bj5U) and can not decide --
[https://prnt.sc/hn57gv-](https://prnt.sc/hn57gv-), I got into an accident and
after operations could not walk, and I asked the doctors to have an operation
again on a spine that I would go as before, but the doctors require 75,000
dollars that is 5 btc ,this my video and photos before the crashes
[https://youtu.be/ZtWKigANVxs](https://youtu.be/ZtWKigANVxs) \--
[https://prnt.sc/hn5g6w--](https://prnt.sc/hn5g6w--) [https://prnt.sc/hn5ge0--
https://prnt.sc/hn5hfe](https://prnt.sc/hn5ge0--https://prnt.sc/hn5hfe) ,,, I
have no hope left but found you and now I have the last hope or God sent you
to Christmas, sorry if you do not understand me, I used the translator google,
I muslim in Kazakhstan live, help if can, and if you do not want to help at
least answer me to me luysta, I'm waiting for your answer, thank you good
people and good luck in your life and your children, thank you bitcoin address
18Fgt1N2oePgtBaD5s7B8mjXUkCpyshjRZ

------
focal
I love that its anonymous and simple and the donations are transparent. Does
anyone by chance know if there are restrictions on charities receiving
anonymous bitcoin donations?

------
ericfrederich
Can someone explain this to me? Where did this BTC come from? There was a
single deposit on 12/8 of like 5k BTC. Since then there have been withdrawls
from that address.

[https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5...](https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5zMAKG8FK3kJM4rjt)

~~~
JauntyHatAngle
I'm not sure I understand your question, but there are multiple addresses for
the 5K btc transaction to that address.

------
throwaway31231
This is so inspiring. Thank you.

------
loceng
I'm curious - is this making charitable donations in lieu of taxes on the
gains?

~~~
natalyarostova
I think you should do a little research on how cap gains taxes interact with
charity, it's not how you think.

~~~
loceng
Do you know differently or it's different in your area -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15919075](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15919075)
?

------
QML
Speaking of charities, are most of them transparent and accountable with the
funds they receive? I’d like to see a ledger of where every cent given to
charity was used / spent.

~~~
philipwhiuk
Not that it's not a noble objective. But the accountability stuff costs money
which could otherwise be spent on the core purpose.

~~~
ForrestN
This. I run a small non-profit. We would love to be hyper-transparent, but
there are three of us working full time just to do the work that donors are
supporting. We'd need to spend a lot of time and effort to release and
contextualize all of that information, make sure it's current, and respond to
the inevitable feedback and conversation that would be generated from
releasing that information. Everything that sounds like it would be quick and
easy, well, isn't.

~~~
joshdotsmith
If your non-profit needs any help with any of the software side (that can be
made open source) let me know and I'd be happy to see how I can help.

------
grimmfang
The Free Software Foundation needs some donations right now. I hope they get a
little help.

------
sigenc
You need to Support CopperheadOS. It's something really important for freedom
and safety

------
atrain714
This seems so fake. If its too good to be true...

~~~
CLGrimes
The address checks out:
[https://blockchain.info/address/3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5zMAKG8FK3k...](https://blockchain.info/address/3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5zMAKG8FK3kJM4rjt)

~~~
harryh
And a NULL transaction to/from that address encoded the string
"pineapplefund.org"

[https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c765...](https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c7652311f0a23aafa8e54d7db0911a2c7b5bc20ff988/)

~~~
Tepix
That transaction cost 20€. Ouch.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Spare change if you've got $100 million to throw around. Or whatever the
current btc price is.

------
elephant_burger
Wow is this for real?

------
senatorobama
Does anyone know people who are absurdly wealthy in BTC but only average (i.e
software eng)?

What's their game plan ?

~~~
funnelsgun
A couple of the folks I know are just HODLing until BTC hits $150,000. Most of
them bought Bitcoin when it was a couple of $, haven’t bought Bitcoin since
and are just waiting it out to see what happens.

~~~
bringtheaction
Why $150,000 exactly? Because of what the market cap will be then?

~~~
cableshaft
Yeah, more or less. Basically if Bitcoin is ever going to get to the same
market cap of the stock market or the gold market, it's going to have to get
up to a certain price, and there are quite a few people that are fairly
confident it will get there. It's gone up well over 10x just this year alone,
it's not too crazy to believe that it could go up another 10x in the next 1-5
years (I would have said 5-10 years six months ago).

------
almostApatriot1
It'd be nice if some of the money were used to make it easier for charities to
convert to cash as quickly as possible. Bitcoin pointlessly consumes so much
dirty energy, I imagine many environmental charities see bitcoin akin to blood
money.

~~~
drcross
This meme needs to die. Keeping the lights on tens of thousands of banks and
keeping hundred of thousands of servers running transaction processing cost a
lot of electricity too. Efforts are underway to get rid of dirty energy
because the costs of renewable and battery storage are so much cheaper that
this is a non-issue.

~~~
spookthesunset
Give me a fucking break. The "traditional financial world" processes tens if
not hundreds of thousands of transactions per second worldwide. Bitcoin
processes no more than 4 per second. On a per-transaction basis, you could be
insane to argue that Bitcoin is anything other than an environmental disaster.

Worse, Bitcoin's energy consumption scales based on the price of bitcoin, not
on transaction volume. The more USD each bitcoin is worth, the more miners
will spend on energy to get that sweet, sweet block reward.

So it isn't a "meme" and Bitcoin's proponents would do well to concede that
"yeah, bitcoin pisses away a lot of electricity--sorry about that...".

~~~
Frogolocalypse
Supply and demand. If you want mining to reduce emissions, increase the cost
of energy. Bitcoin will remain unaffected. Don't blame bitcoin because of the
cost of energy. Blame the energy producers for selling it to miners at that
price.

~~~
dsacco
Why not blame both?

~~~
Frogolocalypse
Because one is to blame and the other is not.

~~~
dsacco
That's tautological. Implicit in the question is a request for an explanation
of why both are not to blame. If you don't believe Bitcoin has an _enabling_
or _encouraging_ effect on activity that is bad for the environment, why is
that? Why is it more appropriate to shift blame entirely on the energy
provider instead of the very energy inefficient process?

Do you also suppose that we should reduce vehicle emissions by increasing the
cost of gasoline? Why isn't it fair to blame vehicles that run on gasoline and
vehicles which are particularly inefficient at running on gasoline?

~~~
Frogolocalypse
> That's tautological.

No it's not. I'm saying you can fix the problem by modifying one constraint.
Fix the cost of energy, and you fix your problem with energy wastage. It will
make absolutely zero difference to bitcoin what the price of energy is. If
energy is more expensive, mining will reduce, and bitcoin difficulty resets to
the lower mining hashrate.

> Do you also suppose that we should reduce vehicle emissions by increasing
> the cost of gasoline?

Of course. It's ludicrous to think otherwise.

~~~
spookthesunset
What a cop out. So we have to increase energy prices so a bunch of greedy
scammers can waste energy speculating on hot air?

Again. Give me a break...

~~~
Frogolocalypse
You can do with your money what you like. There's a word for that : freedom.

~~~
Huggernaut
Of course you can, but that doesn't make it not environmentally unfriendly.

------
bobsgame
I believe the Gates Foundation has already put an enormous amount of thinking
and research into determining the most effective use of a large amount of
funds to improve the overall state of the world. My opinion is that you would
probably rationally be better off investing that money or building a
corporation to try and turn it into billions and then donate that to Gates.

~~~
nathan_f77
The donation to Watsi will provide life-changing surgeries in the near future,
and will potentially save hundreds or thousands of lives. You might be able to
do more good in the future with a larger sum of money, but if you made this
choice, you are condemning the smaller group of people to suffering and death.
If you met with the smaller group of people and learned all of their names and
faces, you probably wouldn't want to let them die. If you could somehow travel
to the future and meet with the larger group of people, you might decide to
sacrifice the smaller group in order to save millions of lives instead of
hundreds. You could also try to find a balance between the two extremes. I
guess this is a variation of the Trolley problem [1].

However, there's a few additional variables that are very important.

1\. The price of Bitcoin may fall dramatically, or your business and
investments might fail. Now you can't help anyone.

2\. By saving the smaller group of people, you will alter the course of
history. Some of the people in the larger group might never experience the
disease or accident that required medical intervention. Some of them will
never even be born.

I think it's better to choose the predictable outcome that is guaranteed to
ease suffering, instead of gambling with people's lives.

P.S. I just finished watching the first episode of 11.22.63 [2] a few minutes
ago. (It was incredibly good!)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem)

[2]
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2879552/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2879552/)

------
chrishacken
This looks sketchy as hell. No personal information attached at all and the
domain has who-is protection. How do we know this is legit?

(Edit: nvm, misinterpreted the website)

~~~
ryanlol
It does irrefutably link a very large amount of bitcoins with the site.

[https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c765...](https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c7652311f0a23aafa8e54d7db0911a2c7b5bc20ff988/)

~~~
harryh
He also links to a couple of completed donations. The first is a transfer of
of 64.77BTC (approx $1M) to address 1AttfyuVVVpsJ6FzBcJMqkFrPRzFiQoRb6 which
is definitely Watsi's BTC address:

[https://twitter.com/watsi/status/938241988121583616](https://twitter.com/watsi/status/938241988121583616)

I'm having a bit of trouble connecting this transfer back to address
3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5zMAKG8FK3kJM4rjt which currently holds the coins that he
says will be donated. If true this should be possible though...

EDIT: Oh wait, here is the connection:

[https://blockchain.info/tx/d290acbfa7c619ad4215537ae83bfe165...](https://blockchain.info/tx/d290acbfa7c619ad4215537ae83bfe165902b1c232fda1a360edaf1428acd80a)

I have to say, I'm generally pretty skeptical of stuff like this but there is
evidence here that this is legit.

EDIT2: They also encoded "pineapplefund.org" in a NULL transaction. Even more
reason to believe.

[https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c765...](https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c7652311f0a23aafa8e54d7db0911a2c7b5bc20ff988/)

------
lobo_tuerto
I think a clearer—or at least a less click-baity—title would be something
like:

Pineapple Fund: Donating $86 million USD in/through BTC to charity.

I think the current one makes it sound like they are donating 86M BTC. I know
that's above the theoretical maximum, but that's not the point.

~~~
ringaroundthetx
It clearly has $ in the HN post, and the actual site.

And you even know thats above the maximum so your concerns should have been
disregarded as erroneous stimuli as the rest of our brains are already
programmed to do.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
He just wanted to show off that he knew the "theoretical maximum" amount of
Bitcoins.

~~~
ethftw
Enough of the ad homenium

------
bennettfeely
I'd love to know what the Electronic Frontier Foundation does exactly with
millions and millions of dollars in donations. Based on Wikipedia it awards
money to rich people with powerful computers for finding new prime numbers.
But it seems to me the other charities are much more deserving.

~~~
sinak
There are three general buckets of work that EFF does. All three are focussed
on protecting user's online rights to free speech, security, and privacy - but
each achieves that result in a different way:

* Legal: Taking on precedent-setting cases (e.g. establishing code as a form of speech, overturning Betamax Doctrine, challenging censorship laws). Full list is here: [https://www.eff.org/victories](https://www.eff.org/victories)

* Technology: Helping launch projects like LetsEncrypt (now its own org), Privacy Badger, Certbot, Panopticlick, Democracy.io, HTTPS Everywhere.

* Advocacy/activism: Pushing state & federal legislatures in the US and around the world to pass laws that protect user's rights, and not to pass laws that would harm them. Also to push regulatory bodies (e.g. FCC) similarly.

(I'm a Tech Fellow at EFF but not speaking for the org in any capacity)

