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."

Comments

Tis the Season

[rmdingler]

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.

Re:How about helping declare a city homeless free.

[swillden]

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.