Anonymous bitcoin enthusiast is giving away $86 million to charity. Is it a scam or can you apply for donation?
On December 13th a redditor submitted a post “I’m donating 5057 BTC to charitable causes! Introducing The Pineapple Fund”.
His post immediately got thousands likes and comments and rose to the top.
Let’s do a little investigation and try to understand if it’s a sophisticated scam-scheme or a real charity project.
(His BTC address is public on official website, so I assume that he doesn’t mind people investigating it to check his real intentions.)
Pineapple fund
Official website pineapplefund.org domain was registered on December 4 and stayed blank for 9 days.
And at the same day (Dec, 4) he tried to withdraw his funds from Bitfinex.
Since Bitfinex is constantly under DDoS attacks and users have big problems withdrawing their funds, it took him 2 days (tx1, tx2) to withdraw ~600 BTC from Bitfinex, and finally this money joined the pineapple fund.
The official website was released on December 13, right before submitting a reddit post.
He claims that The Pineapple Fund is the majority of his cryptocurrency holdings. It’s hard to check this for sure since he might have many wallets with different coins, but at least if you follow back the official bitcoin address, it seems like 5,057 is indeed a majority of his BTC holdings (don’t worry, he still has a lot for himself).
Donations
First donation transaction ($1 million) was made on December 8 to Watsi nonprofit crowdsourcing healthcare platform that enables individual donors to directly fund medical care for individuals in developing countries (mostly Central America, Africa and South-East Asia). They do have a twitter account (registered in 2011) with 7,5K followers, facebook, instagram, wiki page and a website.
Official Watsi website was registered in 2011 by Chase Adam and released in the same year.
Their FAQ page indeed has the same bitcoin address as in the first transaction.
One week later Chase Adam (co-founder of Watsi) confirmed that The Pinapple Fund supported the project, and official Watsi twitter account also retweeted this tweet.
Both Watsi project and a first donation transaction look legit to me.
I’ve also checked other websites with transactions and even though I didn’t find public BTC addresses for some organizations, but most of them look legit, so we can state that The Pineapple Fund has good intentions and it’s indeed a real charity project.
Why?
Because once you have enough money, money doesn’t matter.
PineappleFund is an early investor who jumped in before BTC reached $10, so now he has much more bitcoins than he can spend.
And owning so much money is nothing, but a burden for him, so he decided to take a very honorable path and donate the majority of his funds to charity.
That could also be an impulsive decision, because on November 29th there were multiple flash crashes on Bitfinex, people lost millions, DDoS attacks increased, users had serious withdrawal problems, Bitfinex threatened critics with litigations, and as a result media exploded with even more articles about Tether scandal and potential bitcoin crash.
December 5: Bloomberg (Tether), BitcoinMagazine (threats), DavidGerard(Tether & threats), Nasdaq (threats)
December 6: Cointelegraph (threats), aft (Tether), Biznews (Tether), WeLiveSecurity (DDoS)
December 8: Bitcoin.com (flash crash & Tether), Bitcoin.com (threats), Reddit post with 4,500 upvotes (Tether)
December 10: Jerrybanfield (Tether), TracandTrapThem (Tether)
December 11: SeekingAlpha (Tether)
December 12: HackRead (DDoS), LatestHackingNews (DDoS), SiliconAngle(DDoS)
December 14: BitcoinExchangeGuide (Tether & mismanagement)
December 15: TrustNodes (warrant canary)
In such a stressful situation one can wisely choose to get rid of his burden and donate money for good. As you remember, the official website was registered in the same day when the first withdrawal was requested (December 4).
You can read in more details what happened with Bitfinex in this article.
Is it efficient?
Most people did support his doings and suggested different nonprofit organizations. However, some redditors threw reasonable criticism, because continuously donating smaller amounts of money over a long period of time can give much better results, rather than one-time large donations.
Also there were concerns about big nonprofit organizations that usually get 90% of all donations because of marketing. Redditors suggested to hire some professionals to do a charity research like GiveWell.
Lastly, people are worried that unprepared users might lose their BTC, so one-time $1 million donations are too dangerous.
To this moment The Pineapple Fund donated more than $6,5 million to 8 different organizations. There are still $80 million remaining and bitcoin keeps climbing up, so the journey has just begun.
Apply for donation
If you are a registered nonprofit organization, then you can and should apply for a donation at the official website.
The amount of money that you can receive is significant, but be ready to write a detailed plan of what will be achieved with a donation of this size.
If you want to suggest an amazing small nonprofit organization that is underfunded, then please leave your comment in this reddit post.
And keep in mind that Pineapple Fund does not donate to individuals. Please do not post your addresses or PM.
Crypto space is indeed full of scammers, but I believe that the majority are good people working together for a better future and PineappleFund is one of them.
Disclaimer: this article is for educational purpose only and it’s not a financial advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.
- And if you want to save your money, you can read why you shouldn’t scan two-factor authentication QR codes.
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