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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."
Respect to the donator.
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.
..... 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.
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Money. But you cannot force people to seek diagnosis and medication. It is against the law now. So money isn't the problem.
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.
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.
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Only the miners carry the whole chain. Not ordinary users.
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.
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.