Butterfly Labs has donated 1,000 BTC – currently valued at more than $120,000 – to the newly established Bitcoin Development Fund. This is a meta-charity that supports a wide variety of bitcoin related charities and open-source projects:
The Bitcoin development fund was created to support projects that benefit the greater bitcoin community. Special emphasis is placed on supporting open source code development as well as charitable organizations.
This donation is from a wager in October, 2012 that they would meet their power target of 1 GH/s per 1.1 Watts of power in their ASIC bitcoin miners. Butterfly Labs completed shipping their June 2012 pre-orders of 5 GH/s miners yesterday, which did not meet this speed to power ratio. It is not clear whether this Bitcoin Development Fund would exist if Butterfly Labs had won their bet, however they were the inaugural donation.
So far, 226 bitcoins have been allocated to three different projects:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) supports electronic freedom through legal methods, while CGminer and BFGminer are open source mining software. Sean’s Outpost is a non-profit organization that feeds homeless people through bitcoin donations.
In their press release, Butterfly Labs explains this is only phase one of the project. They have two ambiguously-described later phases that will include more interaction with allocation of funding towards nominated charities:
The BDF project will allocate funds to worthy charities and project as time goes on. Currently the BDF site is in phase one of the roll out, but more user interaction and participation in the selection of projects and charities to donate to is planned for phase two and three.
If you have a charity or open source project that you believe benefits the greater bitcoin community, please feel free to submit it to [email protected]. It will be reviewed and vetted by the BitcoindDF for inclusion into the site.
It’s probably from all the BTC they mined with my freaking equipment for the last year!
Yes, with an evil cackle they placed your miner on a shelf and while petting their long hair cat exclaimed “Rod’s miner will make us so much BTC that we’ll be able to just roll in it like Scrooge McDuck!”