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Comment by jakewins | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a way to donate money towards a fund - like, give $100USD, that goes into some index fund, and then LetsEncrypt withdraws $3.50 (as per https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Safe_withdrawal_rates) a year until the sun burns out.

I'd much rather spend my money knowing its a small ways toward making this kind of thing self sustainable.

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You could set such a thing up yourself. It's basically a trust. Put your money in the index fund, and have a process to automatically withdraw the safe amount and donate it.

Now build a product around that idea, and be the next patreon. I heard of this great company that'll help you get ssh certs for free.

I've thought about this extensively, and it's actually not that easy to set one up yourself. For one thing, the overhead required to administer a trust is non-zero, and would be prohibitively expensive (non-sustainable) for a small amount. The barest minimum endowment is at least $10k, and possibly $100k. Best case, you find a way to align the trust with a university, who adds it to their portfolio and administers the funds according to your/their goals.

This also presumes that there are public investment instruments which can get a reliably positive rate of return. In today's economy, it's difficult to get even a few percent reliably. Some places are toying with negative interest rates, even (which means that passive investments are deflationary).

How does the overhead scale when you go from, say, having $10k in the pool to $10m? If a service existed that ran a trust where you could put in money and then dictate where your share gets routed, would this overhead keep going up dramatically as it grows?

The overhead is nearly constant with respect to the number of dollars. But the cost goes up linearly with the number of shareholders (as each one needs at least a modicum of attention over time, to update records reflecting changes of dispensation, or to verify death certificates, etc). And the costs also go up with the complexity of the trust, e.g. if the money has to do anything other than being held and dispersed at appropriate times. (Someone has to file the taxes).

Banks often employ someone called a Trust Officer, who handles things like this related to the trusts that the bank is managing (and carrying). They make around $30/hour. And let's say that 100 people each put in $1000, or $100k total. At 3% interest, the fund would generate $3k/year. If each shareholder requires an hour of the trust officer's time over the course of the year, then all income from the trust goes to pay the trust officer, and there's nothing left over to be dispersed.

It sounds like a good idea, and I'd definitely take advantage of the service if it existed. But lawyers and accountants have to be involved, and they want to be paid. And they're expensive.

It'd be a stellar price list:

- $100: Donate $16,100,000,000 ($3.50/year for 4.6 billion years)

- $200: Donate $32,200,000,000 ($7.00/year for 4.6 billion years)

If Let's Encrypt believes that's the best way to spend their money, they'll do that. Do you think you've thought more about their sustainability than they have?

I'm not talking about how Let's Encrypt spends it's money, I'm talking about how I spend mine :)

Assuming Let's Encrypt knows more about its sustainability than you do, and given that they can also invest their money in index funds if they believe it's the right approach, isn't giving the money to them outright just better?

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