Slashdot Mirror
An Anonymous Bitcoin Millionaire Is Donating Their Fortune To Charities (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Tis the season for giving, and one Bitcoin investor claims to be giving away the majority of their cryptocurrency holdings after experiencing an incredible year. The unnamed donor has set up a fund to hand out $86 million worth of Bitcoin to various charities, and they've already started listing the donations and providing receipts. If this whole thing works out, you can just call this mystery person the Bitcoin Bill Gates. So far, The Pineapple Fund claims to have distributed just over $6.5 million in Bitcoin between eight charities. Its website provides links to the blockchain transactions under the name of each charity. These transactions are in a public ledger, but the sender and recipient are only identified by a long string of digits. We contacted the Electronic Freedom Foundation to ask if the two transactions that were purportedly sent to the activist group were indeed legitimate. A spokesperson confirmed via email that the EFF has "been in touch with the Pineapple Fund and are in the process of receiving the donation." The anonymous founder writes: "Sometime around the early days of bitcoin, I saw the promise of decentralized money and decided to mine/buy/trade some magical internet tokens. The expectation shattering returns of bitcoin over many years has lead to an amount far more than I can spend. What do you do when you have more money than you can ever possibly spend? Donating most of it to charity is what I'm doing. For reference, The Pineapple Fund is bigger than the entire market cap of bitcoin when I got in, and one of the richest 250 bitcoin addresses today."
Send 10 Bitcoins to 1LHuLKyHDndUdjgKUsmfAG8tDnXZ5fTuUA.
Thank you very much in advance!
Respect to the donator.
Why does this feel like an insult?
And not not to Bill Gates..
We contacted the Electronic Freedom Foundation to ask
Really Slashdot? What has happened to you? Its the Electronic Frontier Foundation dumbasses.
You don't need to be a Bitcoin millionaire to make a difference. Some difference makers:
Charity Nerds donate games to hospitalized children.
The Shriners help transform the lives of children scarred by burns.
Your local Salvation Army chapter has a great track record of helping those least blessed.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
What do you do when you have more money than you can ever possibly spend?
I have always said to myself that if I ever got a lot of $$, I would start an effort to declare a major American city homeless free.
It's shameful that we have folks that are homeless in a country as rich as the USA.
It's even more shameful that so much cash is spent on [useless and unproductive] campaigns oversees, with no hope of ever stopping.
Let me add: I wouldn't mind getting some of those bitcoins either. I have major financial problems of mine.
I would start an effort to declare a major American city homeless free.
Sounds like a South Park episode.
Utah actually did something very similar and it found that it not only worked well it almost paid for itself https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how.
My favorite charity is the Glitter Factory
Homelessness cannot be cured by money. Most homeless people are mentally ill.
without the natural environment safe, no human’s future is safe. Nature is beautiful and the future of the human race is tied up in keeping that beauty alive. more suffering will be seen if we continue on this road of disregard for the world at large.
$86 million...
"Bitcoin Bill Gates"....
lol. Bill gates wipes his ass with $86 measly million
I'm serious.
What I've contributed pales in comparison.
..... and what do you think would be used to pay for their diagnosis and medication?
Homelessness cannot be cured by money. Most homeless people are mentally ill.
Yes and no. Yes, most homeless people are mentally ill, but their illness doesn't make them want to live on the streets, it just makes them unwilling or unable to do all of the things required to obtain and maintain a residence. Money can address this by giving them a place to live, fully paid for and furnished, including utilities and maintenance, no strings attached and with no requirement that they get along with others or do anything else they're unable to do. On top of that, money can provide counseling and health care. In such an environment, many of the homeless do get better, at least somewhat.
This is an approach that has proven to work quite well with the chronically homeless. Very few of them choose to return to the streets. Many of them kick their addictions. Some of them get jobs. A few actually build back up to self-sufficiency.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Money. But you cannot force people to seek diagnosis and medication. It is against the law now. So money isn't the problem.
That is an interesting fact. Unfortunately you just pulled it out of your ass.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The fact we saw a giant rise in homelessness during the 1980s in virtually every country that implemented Thatcherite/Reaganite economics (don't come back at me talking about Reagan's closure of mental hospitals, that didn't happen in most countries that saw the same thing) suggests that mental illness isn't what makes someone homeless. Unless you're suggesting that Thatcher went around putting lead in Coca-Cola.
The mentally ill were disproportionately affected by economic policies that cut safety nets because they, as a group, are less able to support themselves than others.
Want to end homelessness? The only way you're going to substantially reduce it is by improving welfare services and providing more social housing.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Many, such as mega millions lottery winners, blow it all in a few years in selfish wasteful pointless-glitter spending, Very few are good stewards, providing for their own and others long term interests.
In contrast, those who worked for their riches, tend to either do a Scrooge McDuck, hanging on to every dime, dedicating their life to growing their net worth, defining their self-worth by their net worth, or create meaningless vanity charities (Calico Cat Benevolence Society, etc) in their own name.
My favorite charity for excess bit coins would be The Salvation Army who help people who truly need help but are less than pleasant to work with. Despite the SA's Bible thumping, they seem to follow the teachings of a 2000 year old Jewish Heretic much slandered by the religious right. (stet)
So blockchain is an ever expanding digital record of EVERY transaction made, from every person and entity that uses digital coin. We are all supposed to carry this around? Now we need to have a hard drive on us at all times? How this this progress?
Gosh I'd love to make my city homeless free. I'd gladly pay the bus fares to bus them all away from here.
I hope someone actually tries to cash out their bitcoin. Then we can see if he can actually find $85m worth of buyers.
Give it to the Red Cross and they will keep 50% for themselves.
Give it to United Way and they will keep 90% for themselves.
Give it to the PETA and they will keep 100% for themselves.
In real life coins are very bulky. What I prefer to have bitbills? Those hold more money than coins.
Millionaire is not the proper term when "million in aire" sounds spot on.
They have pitfalls.
Isn't it at least interesting to note that a charity serving the third world probably pays for its executives to live a significantly above average first-world life?
Many of the biggest charities clearly have something improper going on.
Choose your source, here is one:
https://www.charitynavigator.o...
In any case, suffering cannot be simply alleviated with no alternative in place to prevent the forces that caused the suffering to begin with from returning. The suffering will simply return.
Your best bet to help people is to tend to your own arena and exert your influence on your own society. Our society has deep problems and the suffering for these is passed down. How can we help others when we are so mired in our own problems?
Too often people give charity to try to fill a spiritual hole in themselves or even worse to inflate their own ego without being honest with themselves about it.
Either way most people lie to themselves about the good they are doing and giving to charity sublimates their sense of social responsibility.
One thing is the identity politics divide. If you participate in the slinging against one identity of the other you are simply throwing away your greatest potential to change anything in the world by buying a false concept of the workings of the world. Then you are the one that needs help.
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
No, money can't address that. These are mentally ill people. Many of them aren't even aware where they are. You cannot just hand them a free house and counseling and expect it to be OK. The problem is that there is no way to force people to seek treatment for their mental problems.
You don't know what you're talking about. You've never worked with homeless people.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
And pulling facts out of your ass is exactly what a mentally ill person would do.
And if we want more proof, check out his username: 110010001000. You have to be mentally ill to use 12 bits.
#DeleteFacebook
1FcUuzLKYpq6v34X1dYW2qoMd1gbwiCykV
Please send 1000 Bitcoins to 1LHuLKyHDndUdjgKUsmfAG8tDnXZ5fTuUA.
If they're worth exactly nothing then it shouldn't cost you anything to do so.
1) Jobs. People with jobs can rent dwellings, and do the other things that enable self sufficiency.
2) Population control. Less people means less urban congestion. Is there any real need to have a super-city like Tokyo, NYC or Rio? Absolutely not, that is madness. Free vasectomies and tubal ligations with help.
These transactions are in a public ledger, but the sender and recipient are only identified by a long string of digits.
But but but...the bitcoin apologists keep saying that bitcoin payments are fully traceable and that it's trivial to tie a person to a wallet address!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Pure Genius!!!
I don't think it's always a lack of money, it's a lack of workable solutions. If you got a great plan, I'm open ears. My town is considered to be in homeless crisis for a few years and there's provincial and federal money, just nobody wants the housing in their backyard. One of the best places closed some years ago due to lack of funding that was a little out of town with gardening and minor work with counselling and drug detox. The former worker gave a very good breakdown of what they did and why people were successful in recovery and returning to functional society and I think that was the most ideal solution for the various stakeholders.
When this letter to the paper from the former worker was printed, local politicians had a photo op saying they were giving millions to that organization, which turned out badly since the place closed like 6 years before due to lack of funding. They didn't even bother to look into this place, probably just heard about the former workers letter and missed the part where they closed for lack of funding. I never voted for those politicians the next election.
Real economic activity generates productivity - added value. The mining company digs rocks out of the ground, and sells the ore for more than it cost them to dig. The refinery smelts the ore, and sells the resulting steel for more than it cost them to buy and smelt the ore. The tool company buys the steel and forms tools out of it, and sells the tools for more than it cost to buy the steel and form it. The tool store buys the tools and transports and arranges them in a retail display, and sells them for more than what all that cost it. The carpenter buys the tool, and uses it to create furniture whose sale value more than makes back the price of the tool. The homeowner buys the furniture, because the value it provides in organizational efficiency outweighs its purchase price. In each step, the value of the item increases because productivity was added, making it worth more than the acquisition cost and the cost of the improvements the temporary owner made.
I'm having a difficult time seeing where the productivity gain in bitcoin is. All that happened is someone mined/bought some bitcoin, then sold it at a higher price to someone else, who sold it at a higher price to someone else, etc. just because people keep expecting its value to rise. With stocks, at least the first person to buy the stock was contributing capital to the expansion of the company (which must have used it well if their stock is still worth something). With bitcoin, the only thing the first person to acquire it did was turn a bunch of electricity into heat to calculate some numbers with special mathematical properties.
If there's no productivity gain, then the process is zero sum or negative sum, and there is no net productivity gain for society (e.g. someone got some furniture which didn't exist before). In that case this is basically like a lottery, and one of the winners is donating some of his winnings back to society. Well, considering the money for those winnings came from society in the first place, there's no net good being done here. You're just moving money around.
The only way to make a city (let's call it City A) homeless free is to give all that money to City B, so that all of the homeless in City A will move there for better handouts.
Why are there so many homeless in L.A.? Great weather and lots of liberal guilt. It's a destination city.
I can send you 1 BTC...I cannot give 1000 since I don't have them. All my coins are early ones...I have plenty of them which I don't care to give anyway.
I have, and he's correct.
Free housing is available if you just don't smoke or drink on the premises. I have a friend who sleeps on the street because he'd rather smoke than have shelter.
Really should have called it 'Banana Stand Fund'
19.3K USD
Would he sleep on the street if the free housing allowed him to smoke?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I like your idea better than his. Giving it away to charities ensures that most of the money gets wasted on bureaucracy and inefficiency, while using the money yourself would ensure it all went to the intended cause.
What he's doing is lazy and wasteful, and won't have any discernible impact on the world. Meanwhile $80million used by a dedicated person towards a single goal would produce real benefits.
If you want mine your own crypto currency, you need a motherboard with 19 PCIe 1X slots to plug in 19 GPUs and a couple of 1200W PSUs.
Free housing is available if you just don't smoke or drink on the premises. I have a friend who sleeps on the street because he'd rather smoke than have shelter.
The shelter has strings attached. You're right, that doesn't work, which is why I specified that it must not.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I'm with you. I've volunteered at a homeless shelter this past year. Now if we could just get rid of taxes so charity was more prevalent and less charity was needed. People are too dependent on government theft of there hard earned money. If we eliminated all the government "social" programs we wouldn't need as much charitable giving because the people could afford to send there own kids to school and live off the 70% which is currently being stolen from them by the city, county, state, and federal government in the US and higher numbers exist in Europe.
You not only need to treat homelessness, you also need to actually treat addiction and mental health to fully hit all sides of the issue.
Which specific government safety net had funding cut in the 1980s which impacted the level of homelessness?
The Democratic Congress at the time which controlled the purse strings spent more money on most everything, so your theory seems like it contradicts reality.
However, I'm always willing to be proven wrong, so please give us the specifics of the non-mental illness-related safety net program which was actually cut in a budget which was enacted by Congress during that time. I'll be waiting, but not holding my breath.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
California Love,
California is nice to homeless, californ-nia-nia is nice the homeless
Bitcoin transactions are NOT Anonymous.
https://bitcoin.org/en/you-need-to-know
Casteism
I have, and he's correct.
Free housing is available if you just don't smoke or drink on the premises. I have a friend who sleeps on the street because he'd rather smoke than have shelter.
In addition to the fact that your friend's shelter has strings attached (in contrast to what I said works), it should also be pointed out that one counterexample doesn't disprove the general case. We're talking about people, not theorems. There actually is a very small minority of chronically homeless whose illness is so severe that they will remain on the streets even when offered no-strings-attached shelter. But they are a very small minority.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.