Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pineapple Fund's $56M Giving Spree

philanthropy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 59 posts

Re: Pineapple Fund's $56M Giving Spree

#11

Post by jadedhacker »

This is wonderful, but imagine if we harnessed that kind of money in such a care filled way all the time without giving individual wealthy people power over us.

Pine didn't deserve that kind of power as I'm sure they would acknowledge. (Otherwise why give it away?) They made money on speculation, not an activity that actually would produce expertise in philanthropy or would produce some other kind of legitimacy.

While Pine almost certainly didn't intend to do so, the PR from their gift produces a certain kind of effect. Namely, it provides cover for capitalism. It's a big attention grabbing move that makes it seem as though capitalism has a human face, all for the price of a few tens of millions of dollars in an 18 trillion dollar economy that is dominated by tight fisted oligarchs.

We should be routinely taking money from the wealthy and using it to produce results for the mass of people. Nonetheless, thank you Pine for being a good citizen of humanity.

Re: Pineapple Fund's $56M Giving Spree

#13

Post by ISL »

philsnow wrote: post #3

I wonder if this is somebody really being philanthropic, or if they just control a ton of bitcoin that they can't access (for fear of taxation / Questions Being Asked), so they drop it on charities they're sympathetic to...

High-profile lavish giving to charities without paying taxes on income is a guaranteed recipe for a bad time.

In my mind, this person is simply choosing to be charitable, a wonderful thing.

Re: Pineapple Fund's $56M Giving Spree

#14

Post by lucbocahut »

The source of the funds should be a concern for the charities involved in my opinion. I find the recipients a little quick to praise the donor with little being said about how the bitcoins were obtained. Maybe this information was simply not made public, and that would be fine if there was due diligence. However the fact more established institutions did not receive gifts is an eyebrow raiser: it is more likely these larger institutions would have taken steps to ensure the funds were legit to start with.

Re: Pineapple Fund's $56M Giving Spree

#15

Post by ceejayoz »

piracy1 wrote: post #10
philsnow wrote: post #3

I wonder if this is somebody really being philanthropic, or if they just control a ton of bitcoin that they can't access (for fear of taxation / Questions Being Asked), so they drop it on charities they're sympathetic to...

They could still obscure its source and exchange it for cash.

Obscuring the source won't help if the IRS knows "John Doe at least once controlled the Bitcoins at address foo". At that point, they'll assume you still control them unless you can prove otherwise.

Re: Pineapple Fund's $56M Giving Spree

#16

Post by garmaine »

lucbocahut wrote: post #14

The source of the funds should be a concern for the charities involved in my opinion. I find the recipients a little quick to praise the donor with little being said about how the bitcoins were obtained. Maybe this information was simply not made public, and that would be fine if there was due diligence. However the fact more established institutions did not receive gifts is an eyebrow raiser: it is more likely these…

Honest question: why should they care?

Re: Pineapple Fund's $56M Giving Spree

#17

Post by celticninja »

philsnow wrote: post #3

I wonder if this is somebody really being philanthropic, or if they just control a ton of bitcoin that they can't access (for fear of taxation / Questions Being Asked), so they drop it on charities they're sympathetic to...

The donor has submitted patches for one of the open source projects that they have funded. I imagine that it would be possible for someone to identify him and further the source of the coins could be identified if they were, for example, related to a hack or Silk Road, even tumbling them (tricky with such large volumes) would be noticeable. There is a permanent ledger showing where they have been.

Re: Pineapple Fund's $56M Giving Spree

#18

Post by bradhe »

Noob question here: You receive $1mil in bitcoin as someone who knows nothing about bitcoin...then what? Do you sell it? Do you need to go find someone to sell it to?

I'd imagine you can't just go to an exchange and unload $1mil in bitcoin as most exchanges have limits on how much you can trade at once without more advanced accounts?

Re: Pineapple Fund's $56M Giving Spree

#20

Post by supbitcoin »

andruby wrote: post #12

For people who skip the article and go straight to the comments. This is indeed about the Pineapple fund [0]. [0] https://pineapplefund.org

I have a question, how can you register a website by being anonymous ? I don't understand, anyone care to explain ? Thanks.
Post reply on HN