
The Pineapple Fund donated $55M in nonprofit Bitcoin grants - herendin2
https://www.thegivingblock.com/post/pineapple-fund-bitcoin-donated-to-nonprofits-here-s-what-happened
======
oefrha
Btw, anyone remember the Unknown Fund from just slightly over a month ago?

[https://www.unknown.fund/press-release](https://www.unknown.fund/press-
release)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21538748](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21538748)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20191114165212/https://www.unkno...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191114165212/https://www.unknown.fund/press-
release)

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/...](https://assets.squarespace.com/universal/scripts-
compressed/dialog-61e0209d15f6bfd4ce10f-min.en-US.js)

~~~
solotronics
They achieved perfect anonymity.

------
dang
Related from 2018:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17038553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17038553)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16487159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16487159)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377543)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273496](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273496)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16121306](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16121306)

2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15917598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15917598)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15995391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15995391)

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foobiekr
The brief mention of the recipient which, in response to a one-time boon,
scaled up significantly is a little saddening. That’s a very common failure
mode.

~~~
comicjk
Picking charities, much like picking stocks, is not for amateurs. Now I just
give to GiveWell and let them handle it.

~~~
ethbro
I think of charities like Etsy shops.

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.

~~~
zaphirplane
When I give to charity I want to known that almost all the money is going to a
cause and not spent on overhead

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...](https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=3277)

Edit: Cancer survivor charity spends 5% on programs.

~~~
comicjk
You're optimizing only one of the three important things about a charity.
True, the absolute worst charities are those with massive overhead, basically
scams. But just avoiding those scams doesn't mean your donation will do the
most good. Also crucial are: is the charity directed at an evidence-based
goal? And is the charity prepared to handle more money? These are the things
GiveWell checks into.

------
TaylorGood
How great to have adopted cryptocurrency/in something early enough where
you're able to give back in such a substantial way. That feeling they have
must be deeply rewarding.

------
trollied
Just an aside - how do you go about liquidating a fairly large amount of
bitcoin into cash legally?

~~~
PeterisP
Sell it on any above-board exchange, wire the money to your bank account, if
there's any income (either when receiving these coins for something, or
capital gains due to them appreciating in value), file the appropriate
documentation with IRS or whatever your local tax authority is. If the income
is substantial, then (just as with any less common substantial income) a tax
lawyer might be helpful.

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tmporter
> magical internet money we know as Bitcoin

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marczellm
This website started doing something heavily CPU bound on my machine.

~~~
throwawaymath
It doesn't really function without JavaScript enabled, either. The page loads,
but the article is cut off, and graphics/logos don't seem to load completely.
There is evidently a lot of JavaScript doing the heavy lifting to display
ordinarily static content here.

Not that this is uncommon, as we approach 2020...

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bdcravens
The article says it's from 5 days ago, but according to the article:

> Bitcoin is currently valued at around $8,250.

The price hasn't been that high for over a month.

~~~
sbierwagen
Blog posts, especially very long blog posts, are not written instantly.

~~~
bdcravens
Yes, that's the problem with quoting prices. Most articles I see written about
publicly traded stocks at least pull a current price. With something as
volatile as Bitcoin, this becomes even more important.

~~~
electic
This is a huge problem and most sites that do report the price often report it
wrong. If you are interested here is the realtime price segmented via a
streaming pool of reputable exchanges that stream their trades directly for
tally vs. tickers. So the accuracy is high and by the minute. API is also
available. [1]

[1] [https://blockmodo.com/quotes/BTC](https://blockmodo.com/quotes/BTC)

------
danans
> "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.

~~~
Acrobatic_Road
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.

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

