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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."
Your choice of charities optimizes for charities which maximizes how much one personally feels emotionally good about it, rather than maximizing the amount of good done per a dollar. For those who want to maximize utility increased, here are some others to consider, based on the Givewell ratings which tries to maximize things like quality adjusted life years per a dollar donated https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities. Their most effective charities are the Against Malaria Foundation https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf and the Malaria Consortium https://www.givewell.org/charities/malaria-consortium, which are so effective in part because malaria is such a huge problem but treatment for it is very cheap. If one wants to help deal with global warming then Cool Earth is the most optimal https://www.coolearth.org/, with other good ones including Everybody Solar http://www.everybodysolar.org/ and the Solar Electric Light Fund https://self.org/.
Was going to make a cheap swipe against utilitarianism, but this is dead right. Bang for buck, theres little more important than trying to solve malaria. It, along with HIV has put such a massive strain of Africa , that even putting aside shitty dictators and corruption, its hard to see how Africa can get out of its poverty without solving Malaria and HIV. These two diseases put huge sections of the adult population in bed sick (And trust me, Malaria is no joke) instead of working, and thats *terrible* for keeping people fed and housed. HIV is a hard one, although it CAN be neutralized with good meds, but Malaria is straight up preventable, and yet its ignored
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Homelessness cannot be cured by money. Most homeless people are mentally ill.
..... and what do you think would be used to pay for their diagnosis and medication?
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.
Cynic mode: It will be just the right amount to ensure he pays no tax on the millions he cashes out for himself.
No sig today...