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Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

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

#161

Post by IanCal »

mpfundstein wrote: post #146
runeks wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holding for a charitable organization would not be an investment, but speculation, and would be irresponsible, in my humble opinion (because you’re gambling with donations). The people who choose to donate should get full value from their donation. So, until one can buy goods with bitcoin and pay omes employees with it, holding it when you have an obligation to buy something with it amounts to speculation.

You can do all of these things already. In Europe at least. I have a TenX debit card that I can use everywhere VISA is accepted! Bought iphone and car with it

That's not spending BTC on something, that's selling BTC then buying things in your local currency.

Until prices are regularly set (and stable) in BTC, holding 80+M in BTC is a huge risk.

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

#162

Post by imbeel »

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?

B) It's straightforward - those companies are very often bought by other companies (because they have intrinsic value). The buyer purchases all of the shares from the shareholders (usually in cash), which realizes the value of the company.

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

#163

Post by cryptodogemoon »

nihonde wrote: post #112
mikepurvis wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s how markets work. Early adopters take risks that pay off when late-comers try to bet on a proven winner.

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 incentived to attempt to psychologically exploit new people by selling the asset for far more than the cost of production or acquisition.

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

#164

Post by taejo »

monocasa wrote: post #135
mtpn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anecdote I heard was that the extra space made it more clear when sentences were ending based on how the fixed-width typeface would read. With proportional fonts the spacing is already clear enough with 1 space, and that has become the conventional thing. So adding the extra space creates too much space now. It certainly sends a signal to me that the person has absorbed a “rule”, but not its purpose, which I thin…

Except the fact that the two spaces before a period far predate the typewriter.

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 been the introduction of the typewriter that brought the idea of "two spaces" instead of "wider space".

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

#165

Post by thkim »

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?

the guy I was replying to was saying a ponzi scheme is how markets work, which is definitely not true.

a) this is valid point, but bitcoin is failing currency. if there was a central authority then its value would have been stabilized. never gonna happen with bitcoin.

b) expected income. for bitcoin, it's nil for ever. don't confuse investment with speculation.

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

#166

Post by nathan_f77 »

bobsgame wrote: post #111

I believe the Gates Foundation has already put an enormous amount of thinking and research into determining the most effective use of a large amount of funds to improve the overall state of the world. My opinion is that you would probably rationally be better off investing that money or building a corporation to try and turn it into billions and then donate that to Gates.

The donation to Watsi will provide life-changing surgeries in the near future, and will potentially save hundreds or thousands of lives. You might be able to do more good in the future with a larger sum of money, but if you made this choice, you are condemning the smaller group of people to suffering and death. If you met with the smaller group of people and learned all of their names and faces, you probably wouldn't want to let them die. If you could somehow travel to the future and meet with the larger group of people, you might decide to sacrifice the smaller group in order to save millions of lives instead of hundreds. You could also try to find a balance between the two extremes. I guess this is a variation of the Trolley problem [1].

However, there's a few additional variables that are very important.

1. The price of Bitcoin may fall dramatically, or your business and investments might fail. Now you can't help anyone.

2. By saving the smaller group of people, you will alter the course of history. Some of the people in the larger group might never experience the disease or accident that required medical intervention. Some of them will never even be born.

I think it's better to choose the predictable outcome that is guaranteed to ease suffering, instead of gambling with people's lives.

P.S. I just finished watching the first episode of 11.22.63 [2] a few minutes ago. (It was incredibly good!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2879552/

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

#167

Post by PineappleFund »

mikepurvis wrote: post #89
chejazi wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Hi, creator of the Pineapple Fund here (pineapplefund.org/verification.txt)

I am actually quite sad to see the current state of the cryptocurrency community, and how people in it these days widely misrepresent the risk and intricacies of bitcoin/crypto.

When I first got into bitcoin, most people were there because they were fascinated in building a decentralized currency. Profit seeking was always a part, but not the predominant part.

I'm a little bit sad to see where crypto is today. But I think the original faction is still alive.

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

#168

Post by celticninja »

cryptodogemoon wrote: post #163
nihonde wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s how markets work. Early adopters take risks that pay off when late-comers try to bet on a proven winner.

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?

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

#169

Post by celticninja »

justonepost wrote: post #116
bevan wrote: post #64

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…

I think he needs charities that are willing to take BTC.

Bitpay will act as a middleman for charities.

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

#170

Post by rlpb »

spookthesunset wrote: post #46
drcross wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This meme needs to die. Keeping the lights on tens of thousands of banks and keeping hundred of thousands of servers running transaction processing cost a lot of electricity too. Efforts are underway to get rid of dirty energy because the costs of renewable and battery storage are so much cheaper that this is a non-issue.

Give me a fucking break. The "traditional financial world" processes tens if not hundreds of thousands of transactions per second worldwide. Bitcoin processes no more than 4 per second. On a per-transaction basis, you could be insane to argue that Bitcoin is anything other than an environmental disaster. Worse, Bitcoin's energy consumption scales based on the price of bitcoin, not on transaction volume. The more USD…

> Worse, Bitcoin's energy consumption scales based on the price of bitcoin, not on transaction volume. The more USD each bitcoin is worth, the more miners will spend on energy to get that sweet, sweet block reward.

Until Bitcoin is done bootstrapping and the block reward is zero.

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