Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023
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jjakemanger about 4 hours ago 167 comments
I was looking at neovim's donation footer at the bottom of their site and saw a bitcoin donation address.
Thought I'd check how much in donations they've gotten. And I saw this massive 10 Bitcoin donation from back in 2023 (worth $800,000 now...)
From the activity history, neovim last sent bitcoin out of the address in 2019 so it's been max 7 years since they've definitely had access.
Does anyone from the neovim project know about this? Seems like a pretty significant amount of funding to have sitting there. Hope it can come to good use as I use neovim daily.
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1Evu6wPrzjsjrNPdCYbHy3HT6ry2EzXFyQ
Discussion (167 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
They would have to either pay the tax on gains or write off losses.
So assuming they are the holders of the bitcoin as well, there would be no tax liability.
I much prefer land value taxes (and similar taxes on non capital wealth like jewellery) and leisure taxes (ideally taxing people for every hour they don't work). Of course these are difficult to administer in practice, but British business rates and US overtime tax discounts effectively approximate this.
It seems quite a bad idea from a practical point of view.
Not so much because it's socialist but it leads to all sorts of extra paperwork for no good reason. Like say you buy some utility company share for your retirement in 20 years and it fluctuated. Do you want to be valuing it and paying tax and then claiming it back when it goes down every year for 20 years or just declare the gain at the end?
Edit: it seems perfectly acceptable and ideal even for society to say there is a cost to wealth. As others have mentioned Neovim is in the US is likely mostly tax exempt so this hypothetical doesn't even apply to them.
I wonder how people at large crypto exchanges handle that. Perhaps shamir share the access to the pkey password and store parts at secure places like a bank? And make official access protocol akin to dnssec, but simplified?
We explored using smart contracts to have logic perform the 3/5 consensus rather than a cryptosystem, but that was never rolled out while I was there. Social recovery wallets in general did not take off, which was a big learning moment for me that very few people actually cared about the technology and what they really wanted was an app with as many gambling features as possible that uploaded their keys to google drive.
People who are not HN-profile never care about the technology, and always care about usable, convenient features. The shocker is: most HN-profile people feel the same way.
Also see: https://m.xkcd.com/2501/
Managing your private keys is cumbersome, error prone, requires some computer literacy, the list goes on.
Tbh I have been kind of impressed by how fast L2 businesses brought back centralisation in every possible way. I guess it's more efficient for them.
In the same way, the internet was supposed to be decentralised, everyone being in charge of their own servers. But in practice nobody has the time to set up their own MX servers.
"Not being seizable" hasn't really worked out for bitcoiners who've been arrested. Or for that matter robbed at gunpoint.
For most people, cryptocurrency is just another stock market / betting app.
Nothing wrong with putting money under a mattress for 100y if the value of money is not evaporating.
For most of human history the money was stable. It’s the disasters of 20th century wars that eroded the value, and 21st century lack of monetary discipline that keeps driving it down now.
(Hint: the gold might be under a mattress or in a vault, but you can still an almost arbitrary amount of gold denominated debts and loans and deposits.)
At the micro level, the change in price is too small for every day purchases. Would you starve yourself for one day because the pizza will be one cent cheaper tomorrow?
At the macro level, every interest rate will be adjusted based on the base inflation/deflation rate, so the net effect is zero. Banks will offer a higher profit rate for their savings account to entice people to deposit their money in the bank instead of their mattress.
(At the moment, there's a smallest fraction you can send on the network, but they can change that.)
Bitcoin addresses encode the ripemd160 hash of the public key, so by default when payments are made to new addresses they are not quantum crackable.
But when someone spends from an address they publish the public key to the chain as part of the spend. From then on, any new deposits sent to the same address are at risk of quantum attack
If they haven't accidentally done this, they've definitely got some balls
It's very reminiscent of stocks that rocket 500% in a year, while almost nothing in the underlying company changed.
A couple other examples: https://bitcoindeaths.com/posts/2019-02-07-bitcoin-inefficie..., https://bitcoindeaths.com/posts/2024-11-20-nobel-prize-winni.... This bothers me, you can't respond to a genuine critique with "but look how much money I've made!"
Also, I gotta say I do not think Bitcoin is a bubble or whatever (IMO a real value there), but really this sort of site makes it seem like it is a bubble with the sort of "blind to history" boosterism.
Go read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, or Market Wizards series, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, or any number of books about financial history and there are endless people saying 'it will never die and all the doubters are just wrong' before any big market crash.
All are criticism that can be evaluated on their own but it's irrelevant how much bitcoin grew since they were made.
The first quote i got was "Bitcoin is evil" and then the subtitle "bitcoin worth now 10000%"
Bitcoin is still evil and it has very much to do with the value of bitcoin.
This page is ignorant and shit :(
Similar to Swordfish? :)
Not sure how this applies to donations though, and of course this will almost certainly be changed in the future, .nl is leading the way in taxing _unrealised_ gains; we are sure to follow!
Why does HN collectively tolerate this level of understanding when it comes to crypto
> Why does HN collectively tolerate this level of understanding when it comes to crypto
Well that's really funny. Because the 7 years are about tax liabilities not the speed of bitcoin transactions.
So maybe you made a statement about crypto advocates here...
And the tax liability sister comments all disagree with each other
Notably, the parent commenter hasn’t replied at all yet
They should send it to a dead wallet instead.
Neovim first.
I've never "purchased" Bitcoin or any cryptocurrencies ever because it is not money or legal tender and never will.
Your 'point't doesn't make any sense at all?
Behind the US Dollar is a whole country and a lot more countries if not the whole world.
Behind Bitcoin are random investors, random people.
Bitcoin is also rarly traded directly it uses fiat for most. So Bitcoin is even dependend on this proof-of-stake system.
Bitcoin is a proof-of-work system dependend on the best proof-of-stake system we have.
But as long as others giving you real money for this garbage, it would be better to use it for a project like neovim :)
Yeah no.
You know what happened in el salvador? A Lot of people got their initial crypto stolen.
And you know what real people do? They use euros and dollars as hard cash. Like i have seen in Iran.
However the value is as much as people agree to value it and for a typical person both have little utility. Maybe BTC has even more utility because it facilitates remote transfers of value very easily.
So as long as the network exists there is intristic value in BTC. I believe more than one can say about gold.
Still, a good portfolio will contain both gold (in small coins likely as a kind of "war hedge") and BTC as a kind of hyperinflation hedge.
Not really. Try using gold in retail.
Your gold might give you food, your btc is rotting on some hard disk on a computer you can't / wont use.
BTC as a hyperinflation hedge? We have seen already what happens to btc when money gets tide: BTC drops.
We don't know where the Bitcoin has come from, so it needs to go through extensive anti money laundering checks.
Save the hassle of all of that taxes, accountancy and just send everything to a dead wallet.
How about they use the bitcoin to donate?
You just have to be able to sell it for money.