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The brief mention of the recipient which, in response to a one-time boon, scaled up significantly is a little saddening. That’s a very common failure mode.
Their primary business is not keeping recordings and publishing neatly organized transparency records. Because (a) it's not what the people working for them are interested in, (b) they're heavily volunteer supported, & (c) they don't / can't spend the money to hire someone to do that work.
In the same way someone on Etsy wants to make jewelry, not run a C-corp.
End result... good charities look a lot like bad charities, with limited ability for bystanders to distinguish. In fact, possibly negatively, as actively malicious charities can spend time and money optimizing for externally visible attributes.
The solution is, as you noted, to lean on someone who does have the time to externally audit various charities.
When I give to charity I want to known that almost all the money is going to a cause and not spent on overhead
As for charities being run by volunteers
The American Red Cross paid its CEO ~700k in 2018 and spent ~110m on administrative expenses with ~89% of their income spent on programs, hardly a loose bunch of people
Just saying and people should make their minds on if the overhead of their favorite charity is appropriate.
And they are one of the better ones there are widely known charities with 20/30 % overhead. There was a charity that had most of its income spent on raising money !
You're optimizing only one of the three important things about a charity. True, the absolute worst charities are those with massive overhead, basically scams. But just avoiding those scams doesn't mean your donation will do the most good. Also crucial are: is the charity directed at an evidence-based goal? And is the charity prepared to handle more money? These are the things GiveWell checks into.
It seems like in many of these cases The organization why did the scale up anyway, but never had the capital to make the required infrastructure/technology/manpower investments. At least one of them said scaled up significantly and as a result attracted a new class of donors.
How great to have adopted cryptocurrency/in something early enough where you're able to give back in such a substantial way. That feeling they have must be deeply rewarding.
Sell it on any above-board exchange, wire the money to your bank account, if there's any income (either when receiving these coins for something, or capital gains due to them appreciating in value), file the appropriate documentation with IRS or whatever your local tax authority is. If the income is substantial, then (just as with any less common substantial income) a tax lawyer might be helpful.
It doesn't really function without JavaScript enabled, either. The page loads, but the article is cut off, and graphics/logos don't seem to load completely. There is evidently a lot of JavaScript doing the heavy lifting to display ordinarily static content here.
I think it's fair to believe them unless you have personal experience (or statistics) that contradict what they're saying.
I've never understood why "that sounds wrong to me, a person with no first-hand knowledge of it" would ever trump another, credible person's "this is what I've experienced".
Anyway, it doesn't seem like a make-or-break detail in the article.
Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the accuser? They're basically accusing everyone of being sexist. Even if that's true I don't see the point of it in this context, all of the charities are struggling.
I guess the men got the short end of that stick since they can't blame it on others./s
> Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the accuser? They're basically accusing everyone of being sexist.
The accusation is milder and more general than you imply. They suggest they have a harder time raising money on average than a male company.
Perhaps that means only 10% of people have a bias (which is not the same as sexism). That's much easier to believe than that 100% of people are consciously sexist.
> Even if that's true I don't see the point of it in this context, all of the charities are struggling.
That line read to me more as “[we have found that] donors are reluctant to donate large amounts to female-led organizations”, but I am also hesitant to accept that at face value
Either ways why bring gender into it at all? Most of the charities mentionned in the article were struggling as well. They make it seem as if male-led organizations are flourishing.
No I don't, in fact I think, as a woman, that it's the other way around. Either ways it doesn't matter as most charities are struggling. You can't just blame it on sexism.
Yes, that's the problem with quoting prices. Most articles I see written about publicly traded stocks at least pull a current price. With something as volatile as Bitcoin, this becomes even more important.
This is a huge problem and most sites that do report the price often report it wrong. If you are interested here is the realtime price segmented via a streaming pool of reputable exchanges that stream their trades directly for tally vs. tickers. So the accuracy is high and by the minute. API is also available. [1]
How do you solve new data no longer showing point reflected by surrounding text? Sounds like you'd need data->article to do that well (and not just add a disclaimer or something)
> "My aims, goals, and motivations in life have nothing to do with [. . .] being [. . .] mega rich. So I'm doing something else: donating the majority of my bitcoins to charitable causes.”
The very act of large scale giving is an act of power which uniquely characterizes the mega rich. Such giving invariably has an agenda attached, whether it's one that you like or dislike. That's the case for mega rich donors as seemingly disparate as the Gates Foundation or th DeVos foundation.
In the case of this fund, the agenda appears to be to push Bitcoin. Otherwise they could have just liquidated the Bitcoin to legal tender before donating thereby relieving the recipient institutions of the challenges associated with it. Having spoken people at one of these organizations, they had zero desire to hold Bitcoin, as they need cash for day to day operations.
From a tax perspective donating an asset is much better than liquidating it and donating the cash. Charities don’t have to pay capital gains, you do, even if the money is eventually going to a charity.
You could open a Donor Advised Fund with e.g. Fidelity, donate your bitcoin to your fund, and have the fund send normal cash checks to the charities you choose.
That way only Fidelity has to deal with bitcoin instead of N charities.
How would that be more complicated? Setting up a DAF is quite simple.
You'd only have to transfer to one address, rather than collect addresses and transfer to one per charity (many of whom probably have to set up wallets). You only have one tax receipt, rather than one receipt per charity. It's slighty-to-massively simpler for the recipient, and it's much simpler for the donor.
The donor didn’t get tax receipts so clearly they valued the anonymity more than the deduction, but even still, setting up a DAF requires:
1. Researching the various providers and setting it up
2. Transferring in the asset
3. Waiting for the fund administrator to liquidate the assets
4. Advise them on where and how much money to send to whom
5. Wait for them to do it
Not to mention if you want to donate more you need to do steps 2-5 again.
Versus one bitcoin transfer.
I realize that now the charity needs to do the liquidating which obviously is not trivial but certainly it is much easier from the donors perspective. And again, the bitcoin way makes them completely anonymous. You set up a 50 million dollar DAF with fidelity and the government is going to know about it whether or not the charities do.
I’d imagine if they have 55 million to give away then they can afford the taxes on the rest. Nothing about this method of donation implies the donor is a criminal.
Declining the receipts makes the donations truly anonymous which is pretty cool. I think it was a novel idea and novel execution and obviously did a lot of good.
Why would he give away bitcoin just to promote Bitcoin? Are you suggesting he had an even larger sum of Bitcoin hidden somewhere? Or he just wanted to promote Bitcoin at a personal cost?
>Otherwise they could have just liquidated the Bitcoin to legal tender before donating thereby relieving the recipient institutions of the challenges associated with it.
And give up their anonymity in the process. He clearly cares about such things.
My riposte would be that $1M donations aren't uncommon - but million-dollars-in-bitcoins-from-mysterious-person are, they're interesting, we write this thread about them. Additionally it emphasizes where the money came from - this isn't a million shaved off a few billion of MS company stock. It's come from somebody who took a punt and it paid off handsomely. Equivalent to a lottery win. Finally he gave it to smaller charities and asked them to do something significant with it.
I'm not in the least religious, but taps into the tropes about reaping, sowing, sharing, blah blah - and as the article points out, it inspired others to do the same.
At least be honest and say that this is your guess / speculation on the motivation of Pine. Not sure how you can claim that donations like this are "invariably" of selfish nature. Some people actually do want to help others for no alterior reason.
>Otherwise they could have just liquidated the Bitcoin to legal tender before donating thereby relieving the recipient institutions of the challenges associated with it.
Pine's money is likely in a not-fully-legal status. That's why Pine needs to donate bitcoin, and needs to donate it anonymously, and doesn't care about receipts from the charities. If the money is not-fully-legal, it's going to be hard to convert it to dollars.
https://www.unknown.fund/press-release
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21538748
https://web.archive.org/web/20191114165212/https://www.unkno...
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