Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

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

How much do you exchange though? There seems to be some kind of hard wall at £100k in the UK, and anything more than that seems to get a personal call from a fraud investigator who demands documents proving what money was moved, where it came from, where it is going to, who it is for, and what was bought or sold with receipts etc.

Do 10 payments for £10k each, and you'll usually get the same call.

If the word bitcoin is mentioned, even once, then you'll get a letter saying "Dear Mrs X, We are withdrawing financial services from you, and your account is now closed".

This even happened on two so called "bitcoin friendly" banks...

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

Good question! I don’t think it’s a scientific number, but rather based on the current price (approx. $15,000 at the time of writing) to represent a 10x increase in Bitcoin’s valuation.

(Full disclosure: I'm EFF's International Director)

Probably the two fastest ways to find out what we do (and how we're funded) is to:

* Read our annual report: https://www.eff.org/files/annual-report/2016/index.html (our reporting year is from June-July, so this is up to this summer).

* Read some of the stories from Hacker News -- our work is often covered here, because the topics we defend with our lawyers, activists and technologists are often close to people here. So, for instance, working to stop controls on crypto, the fight for net neutrality, defending people who are creating or innovating new tech, stopping the worst effects of DRM, tracking the consequences of AI, challenging mass surveillance in the courts, founding and supporting Let's Encrypt, etc. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=eff.org&sort=byDate&prefix&pag...

We've been around for over 27 years now, so some of the stuff you might discover online about us might not look so relevant now, but helped set the groundwork for the modern Net. So, it's now (almost exactly!) 20 years since the Internet censorship provisions of the Communications Decency Act was declared unconstitutional, but you still sometimes find GIFs of the Blue Ribbon Campaign EFF worked on to raise awareness of that issue on the early Internet. And the project you mentioned -- the Cooperative Computing Award -- is one of these earlier initiatives. It was fully funded in 1999 by a generous single benefactor, in order to encourage distributed computing in a period where it was felt that the incentives were more strongly aligned to centralise processing power. We've given out two of these prizes over the last 18 years, with two more to go. Of course, distributed computing -- including platforms like Ethereum and concepts like blockchain validation -- is more established now than it was in 1999.

Our budget for all of our work is in the order of $10 million, a large proportion of which comes from individual members' donations. To give hopefully relevant comparisons, the MPAA took $76 million in 2015; the 2016 budget for the ACLU was $138 million. We try to remain agile with what we have, but where new technology and civil liberties meet, there's always new things to do.