Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

[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?

[cheeze]

Thank you for what you do. Donating to Watsi and getting the updates about people that I've helped is one of the highlights of my day to day life.

Shameless plug for Watsi incoming... Consider donating monthly. They don't spam you and your money is going to a great cause. https://watsi.org/monthly

[nitinsingla0999]

I simply love Watsi, you guys are so transparent with your financials. I hope you guys start accepting cryptocurrencies soon.

[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.

[joshumax]

That's always why I have a good laugh when someone comes out claiming to be Satoshi when they end their sentences with only a single space after a period. If you wanted to come out as Bitcoin's creator, you'd have used 2 spaces...

[koolba]

I’be been waiting for someone to do a cross analysis of HN comments to identify potential sock puppets.

[oh_sigh]

That's only assuming that they have a corpus of other writing out there on the internet which is linkable to their real life identity.

[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

[chadkruse]

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

https://github.com/PineappleFund/pineapplefund.github.io

[kaicianflone]

Haha I was just about to suggest that!

[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.

[thkim]

bitcoin is just extortion on craze of the crowd. if no income is been generated by it, then its value is arbitrary. an investment asset needs a cash flow to repay investment and then some. bitcoin has none. i admit bitcoin is not the only asset that has this characteristic.

[mrweasel]

Apparently the Pineapple Fund has also donated $50.000 to the OpenBSD Foundation: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7jj0oa/im_donating...

[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.

[frut]

I don't follow bitcoin much, but shouldn't every popular community project be essentially swimming with cash (or at least bitcoin) these days? On the other hand I guess the same could be said about the tech boom.

[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.

[topmonk]

I've sold and transferred more than $800K over the course of 3 days. I had no problem. This was from Gemini to a US Bank

[dahdum]

I didn't sell a ton, but I got a call from my bank about the first deposit from Coinbase. They asked how I came about the funds, where my initial investment came from (employment) and that was it.

Though my bank did invest in Coinbase so they are probably pretty ahead of the times.

[bdonlan]

A number of donor-advised funds accept BTC contributions (and take care of converting to USD). This also avoids realizing capital gains, and allows it to be immediately converted to USD before the value crashes while allowing the decision of which charity to donate funds to to be deferred.

[cessna-v]

[citation needed]

[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/

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

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

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

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

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/upshot/effective-altruism...

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

[pfd1986]

Agreed. With the enourmous cuts in science funds nowadays one can make a big difference by, for instance, fueling cash into research in virtually any area. The achievements can still be watched within a lifetime.

[justonepost]

I think he needs charities that are willing to take 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.

[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."

[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 and can not decide -- 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://prnt.sc/hn5g6w-- 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...

[JauntyHatAngle]

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

[grimmfang]

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

[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.

[ringaroundthetx]

you can donate appreciated assets to registered charities and this does allow you to avoid the capital tax AND also get a charitable tax deduction

[dba7dba]

I am not curious. One could be buying up through bred horses or $$$ paintings to avoid tax. I much prefer this kind of financial maneuvering to avoid paying tax. Well done.