Pineapple Fund's $56M Giving Spree | Hacker News Reader

Pineapple Fund's $56M Giving Spree

philanthropy.com

107 pointsburkaman54 comments

Really great to see MDMA research (MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) get funded by Pine. MDMA seems to be a high potential therapy.

I hope the next crypto philanthropist funds other psychedelic research, e.g. Heffter Research. https://heffter.org/ Psilocybin and classic psychedelics also seems to be very high potential - e.g. for addiction [0], problem solving/creativity [1], and for depression/anxiety [2].

[0]: https://hub.jhu.edu/2014/09/11/magic-mushrooms-smoking/

[1]: https://thethirdwave.co/psychedelics-creativity/

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/health/hallucinogenic-mus...

Looks like Pineapple Fund donated some to http://csp.org/psilocybin/, awesome!

I wonder if this is somebody really being philanthropic, or if they just control a ton of bitcoin that they can't access (for fear of taxation / Questions Being Asked), so they drop it on charities they're sympathetic to...

The donor has said/intimated they they have enough money from bitcoin that they own that they really dont need the rest and so it may as well go to good causes. He/She/They can probably expect something of a tax write-off but I imagine that taxes arent really a problem for them either. If you are happy to give away ~$80m then paying ~$10-20m in taxes is not going to phase you.

They can do a DAF if they are in the us.

Or they feel guilty with how those coins were obtained.

Isn't it philanthropy regardless? If Pine benefits, it's only because society benefits.

Just like Robin Hood then? :)

It's difficult to realize a structural benefit to society through charity.

Could you elaborate on your meaning?

They could still obscure its source and exchange it for cash.

Obscuring the source won't help if the IRS knows "John Doe at least once controlled the Bitcoins at address foo". At that point, they'll assume you still control them unless you can prove otherwise.

Unless the money came from an illicit source (I don't think the source was stated, but making a ton of money from Bitcoin's rise is perfectly legitimate), cashing out would surely be perfectly legitimate as long as one paid the right taxes, which there would hardly be a reason not to.

High-profile lavish giving to charities without paying taxes on income is a guaranteed recipe for a bad time.

In my mind, this person is simply choosing to be charitable, a wonderful thing.

In the US, there's a limit to how much you can deduct in charitable donations from your tax obligation, and IIRC it's something like up to 20% of your taxable income. So unless PF has a taxable income > $56M * .2 (or whatever the actual amount is), they'd get very little tax benefit to making it rain this much. Assuming, of course, that they're in the US.

The donor has submitted patches for one of the open source projects that they have funded. I imagine that it would be possible for someone to identify him and further the source of the coins could be identified if they were, for example, related to a hack or Silk Road, even tumbling them (tricky with such large volumes) would be noticeable. There is a permanent ledger showing where they have been.

I kind of like to think there are people out there that really think and live according to that phrase "because once you have enough money, money doesn't matter". I know I would...

> OpenMRS said Pine had contributed software patches to the effort previously.

Philanthropy.com did this person a grave disservice. This drastically narrows the donor pool and is quite in violation of their earlier statement:

> Pine agreed to a phone interview with the Chronicle on the condition that the article include no identifying information.

It's third-hand reporting. OpenMRS has it on their website.

Noob question here: You receive $1mil in bitcoin as someone who knows nothing about bitcoin...then what? Do you sell it? Do you need to go find someone to sell it to?

I'd imagine you can't just go to an exchange and unload $1mil in bitcoin as most exchanges have limits on how much you can trade at once without more advanced accounts?

I think you can open an Institutional account at one of the exchanges like Gemini or Kraken and have them unload it for you slowly.

https://gemini.com/institutions/

From the article:

"...bitcoin deposits were usually handled by outside agencies, such as BitPay, which then transferred cash to the charity’s bank account."

Good on him/her/them. It would be really nice if more wealthy people donated to the Open source world, to organisations like the EFF and mental health organisations etc (without strings attached...).

Most of those wealthy people you mean are older and not as technologically aware, so the charities they fund are ones that they know of (and bring them more social kudos) such as AIDS/Cancer/Human Rights organisations.

These are cryptocurrency gifts, right? How would the recipients realize the money from them, or would they treat them as assets to hold?

I believe that many/most organizations have policies to convert unstable assets asap.

How does taxation/deduction work on bitcoins which were not a taxable asset when originated but are maybe sort of an asset now that they're being given away? Is this donation of magic beans deductible now that the IRS has maybe started to notice? I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't have been deductible a year ago.

Loosing access to a 69 BTC PK from 2012 still gives me nightmares, but I feel happy for the ones who made enough money to spread good will.

Has the wallet (or wallets) they have been sending from been revealed?

Edit: They link to the transactions on the pineapple fund site

Not sure how to feel about that. Given that bitcoin is a strictly negative-sum game now, all that money came from greater fools in the end (they just don't know it yet). It's somewhat Robin Hood-esque (except that a majority of bag holders will be poor people duped into buying btc) and the morality of it is… complicated.

For people who skip the article and go straight to the comments. This is indeed about the Pineapple fund [0].

[0] https://pineapplefund.org

I have a question, how can you register a website by being anonymous ? I don't understand, anyone care to explain ? Thanks.

It's hosted by Github pages which only needs an email address and is free so no billing info. Domain requires payment and stuff but you can easily use whois privacy protection. Looks like they use "Whois Guard Protection".

In the end they are relying on both whois guard and the domain registrar to keep their anonymity.

Oh thanks! So it means it's not completely anonymous, someone at the registrar can lookup the info if I got this rigth?

They could have registered the domain in the name of a legal entity registered in a state like Wyoming where company directors can remain anon. Basically shielded behind lawyers and shell corporations.

Thanks.

You could pay in bitcoin and give fake details too, however if you get your domain stolen proving your ownership becomes difficult.

Most domain registrars allow you to add "privacy protection" for a nominal fee, which basically replaces your name under the WHOIS registrant info with theirs instead of yours. While this effectively shields outsiders from discovering who you are, the registrar likely knows the information of the original buyer...

It probably can be handled by a lawyer and/or trust as well. Even if they get past the registrar privacy, they get some business entity or lawyer contact.

Hire someone to represent the fund, and have them do the registration for you.

i highly recommend https://njal.la/ (you can use any email you want and pay with bitcoins)

There’s a UDRP precedent where the panel held that registering a domain via njal.la constituted bad faith, so their business may not be on entirely solid ground.

http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/text/2017/d2017...

There’s absolutely nothing preventing you from registering a domain with fake information... Especially when paying with bitcoin.

Plenty of previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pineapple%20fund&sort=byDate&d...

Well yea, it literally says so in the title. Or do people just click on 'comments' without even reading the post title now?

The title was changed to include "Pineapple Fund". At the time of my comment it said something like "Wealthy Bitcoin Millionaire ..." and the first thing I, and probably others, wondered is if there was a second person following Pine's example.

The source of the funds should be a concern for the charities involved in my opinion. I find the recipients a little quick to praise the donor with little being said about how the bitcoins were obtained. Maybe this information was simply not made public, and that would be fine if there was due diligence. However the fact more established institutions did not receive gifts is an eyebrow raiser: it is more likely these larger institutions would have taken steps to ensure the funds were legit to start with.

Honest question: why should they care?

Ethics: if the money comes from theft, child pornography or selling crack cocaine (extreme examples, not saying this is the case here), you can hardly say you are making the world a better place.

Ehhh that reasoning feels backwards. It's not like people get into those activities in the hope of being able to donate to charity.

If someone tells you that they personally dug up some gold in a mountain in Colorado, how exactly would you go about verifying their claim?

Mining rights, proper registration and certification of the gold nugget, etc., etc. It’s fairly common in the financial industry to check where funds come from (“know your customer”). It’s done to prevent money laundering and make illicit activity harder.

Ok, but now there are no mining rights or certifications for virtual magic beans.

The blockchain is public, the source of the coins can be tracked, not to an individual, but if they were 'tainted' coins e.g from a known silk road wallet, or from a major hack we would already know. Even if they were tumbled or rinsed through alt coins it would throw up some flags based on the transactions that fed into the main wallet address(es), and you can bet people have trawled through the transaction history of the pineapple fund wallets by now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com