Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity • Hacker News Board

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#211

Post by mikepurvis » Thu, Dec 14, 2017, 7:04 PM UTC

celticninja wrote: post #168

cryptodogemoon wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not with Bitcoin. Satoshi designed the supply to rapidly mint the majority of coins to the smallest group of users for the least amount of effort/capital/work input. It's designed to manipulate any user who joins the system after you. Satoshi could easily have chosen a linear curve to align with time, user growth, and increase in work input yet instead the manipulative log curve was chosen. Old users are now incentiv…

You bring this up in every crypto thread. Do you have an alternative suggestion as to how it should work that could actually be implemented now in a new crypto?

Isn't it fundamentally a bootstrapping problem? A state can reasonably presume to sell a new currency in exchange for older (or foreign) currency— this is similar to issuing a bond or whatever else to raise money. And there's a guarantee of value in the sense that the state will accept the currency later on as your taxes.

The Bitcoin network/ecosystem has nothing to offer in this sense— there's no plausible reason for it to be "raising" money by direct sales, and no one owes it taxes. So the initial tokens were distributed based on the fact that they were mined by early adopters before the difficulty got to be too great. There is indeed a basic unfairness in this, but it's not obvious to me how to resolve it for future projects of this kind.

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#212

Post by mtpn » Thu, Dec 14, 2017, 7:07 PM UTC

mtpn wrote: post #184

taejo wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wider sentence spacing certainly predates the typewriter, but the question then was not "how many spaces" but "how much space". Someone writing by hand obviously does not count a discrete number of spaces, and a cold-metal typesetter has a wide variety of spaces available: they might use a one-and-a-half-en space (either a single piece of type or an en space followed by a half-en space) or an em space. It must have b…

> It must have been the introduction of the typewriter that brought the idea of "two spaces" instead of "wider space". Come to think about it, why not the movable type printing press as the starting point?

(please ignore this, I apparently didn't read your comment fully!)

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#213

Post by cryptodogemoon » Thu, Dec 14, 2017, 7:11 PM UTC

celticninja wrote: post #168

cryptodogemoon wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not with Bitcoin. Satoshi designed the supply to rapidly mint the majority of coins to the smallest group of users for the least amount of effort/capital/work input. It's designed to manipulate any user who joins the system after you. Satoshi could easily have chosen a linear curve to align with time, user growth, and increase in work input yet instead the manipulative log curve was chosen. Old users are now incentiv…

You bring this up in every crypto thread. Do you have an alternative suggestion as to how it should work that could actually be implemented now in a new crypto?

A linear distribution curve that matches work/watt input. This modestly levels the playing field, although it simply allows existing capital to match the input/output. Satoshi style curves are both capital dependent and skewed disproportionately to the first to arrive within the tiny timeframe.

Anti-sybil attacks would be immensely beneficial. Encouragement of honest economic activity. Scaling of bandwidth and fees.

The ideal solution is a PoW that is computationally useful and desirable, BOINC, folding@home. Ethereum almost does this, but PoW algos as they exist now are anti-scale by design, where increasing computational power does not improve the network at all.

The foreseeable longevity of PoW is ungodly waste, when a world wide distributed computing network has potential far far beyond brute force hash puzzles.

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#214

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi » Thu, Dec 14, 2017, 7:45 PM UTC

ttul wrote: post #85

obiefernandez wrote: post #11

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

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.

Even in the CPU mining days, 100,000 was a lot. I think this is typical of many embellished Bitcoin stories. Several times I've had people tell me they 'should have bought at $#.##", so I ask them how they heard about Bitcoin. It's usually the "10,000 BTC Pizza" or a news story about Silk Road, or even the Nov 2013 bubble. At any rate, the actual price when they first heard about Bitcoin is often very different from what they remembered.

It's very likely there are fewer than a dozen people that have ever held >100,000 Bitcoins. That would take two weeks of mining every single block in the days of 50BTC coinbase rewards. Reasonable estimations of Satoshi's mining vs. others in the pre-GPU days makes 100,000 very tight for more than a few individuals. This would also require continuous mining for several months unless you were the only person mining (which isn't the case for anyone but Satoshi). Hardly 'for kicks'.

If you look in old forum threads, you'll see that many people mining in 2009 and 2010 mined several blocks over few days or weeks of mining. That would net a few hundred coins, and sometimes a few thousand. The majority of mining was done this way. The opportunity for many individuals to mine 100,000 simply was not there. If you actually talked to more than one individual who did this, you probably met 2 out of the 3 biggest Bitcoin miners ever.

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#215

Post by scotty79 » Thu, Dec 14, 2017, 8:29 PM UTC

bootsz wrote: post #199

scotty79 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#216

Post by deadmetheny » Thu, Dec 14, 2017, 8:33 PM UTC

ravingraven wrote: post #152

thkim wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

>Bitoin is not a stock, it's a currency. It'ss value lies in its utility.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Bitcoin's current transaction fee is like $20, and the value of Bitcoin itself has gone up 25% in the past week alone. If I bought a pizza last week using $20 worth of Dunning-Krugerrands, that same pizza would be $25 this week for no reason. That alone makes it useless as a currency.

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#217

Post by oh_sigh » Thu, Dec 14, 2017, 9:30 PM UTC

natch wrote: post #61

oh_sigh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would help for sure, but it need not be assumed. There are other collections of text besides the public internet. Some of which are only accessible by certain entities and certain of their employees, to be sure, but still extant. Email, for example. Note I’m not implying the person has done anything wrong... on the contrary. But someone with a large quantity of BTC has reasons to be wary of rogue actors.

What's the play here? Let's assume the NSA or CIA has archives of everyones emails. Would the IRS troll that to try to find out who has all this money so they can properly tax it?

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#218

Post by joshdotsmith » Thu, Dec 14, 2017, 10:54 PM UTC

ForrestN wrote: post #43

philipwhiuk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

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.

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#219

Post by joshdotsmith » Thu, Dec 14, 2017, 10:55 PM UTC

gdoypoll wrote: post #98

chaseadam17 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watsi cofounder here. I can confirm this is true. We're very grateful for the support, it's going to help a lot of people.

Ok. Please tell the world how you scam people with fees and eat up charity donation being a middleman.

Watsi only funds its operations via tips. 100% of your non-tip donations go to funding treatments.

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#220

Post by topmonk » Thu, Dec 14, 2017, 11:47 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #153

topmonk wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Very interested in the bank name.

I closed the account, so I don't think I have to be paranoid about it. The bank was ally.com . My lawyer recommended it to me as hassle free.