One day in January, Linda Tannenbaum opened an email that would radically change her small, medical-research charity almost overnight. The note said that her organization would soon receive a gift of $1 million, to use as it saw fit.
Over the next couple of weeks, she swapped emails with the donor, whom she knew only by the alias “Pine” and with whom she never spoke. It was an informal exchange, with Pine occasionally adding a smiley face or an exclamation mark.
Then Pine sent Tannenbaum another second surprise email: “I’d be happy to discuss making a larger contribution,” it read. Soon after, Pine promised an additional $4 million.
Today, the Open Medicine Foundation is working with scientists on a host of studies to be funded with this $5 million — $2 million more than what it raised in 2017. It is just one of nearly 60 organizations, mostly charities, to receive windfall gifts from Pine ranging from $50,000 to $5 million.
Pine began this most unusual giving spree in December, aiming to give away the majority of a newly earned fortune in bitcoin. “I have far more money than I can ever spend,” Pine said on the social-media platform Reddit and invited groups to apply for money.
Stunned and Delighted
Pine agreed to a phone interview with the Chronicle on the condition that the article include no identifying information. In the interview, the donor said the run of giving was over. After combing through more than 10,000 applications for funding with the help of friends, Pine made nearly $56 million in contributions, leaving a trail of delighted, often stunned nonprofit leaders.
Chase Adam, a co-founder of Watsi, an international health group, was on a plane when his team got word to him that Pine had made a $1 million gift. He was so moved that he cried. “It just felt like a miracle,” he says.
Pine later upped it to $2 million, a total that covers nearly a year of Watsi’s operations at a critical time. The San Francisco organization — which launched just seven years ago and was the first nonprofit to get backing from Silicon Valley’s famous Y Combinator accelerator — is building technology to help developing countries provide universal health care.
Adam says Watsi since has received another $500,000 in anonymous cryptocurrency gifts, presumably from donors inspired by Pine.
Tannenbaum, meanwhile, says Pine’s gift has stirred an outpouring of gratitude from the patients who follow her group’s work. She started Open Medicine Foundation in 2012. She and Ron Davis, a scientist who leads a Stanford research center funded by the foundation, both have children who suffer from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. They aim to spur research into chronic diseases that afflict millions and leave many bedridden.
Hundreds of people thanked Pine on Reddit and on an Open Medicine webpage. “They believe Pine is one of us,” Tannenbaum says. “They believe someone really cares about us and really, truly believes in us.”
Bitcoin for Good
Pine is new to philanthropy, according to the donor, and did not set out to support any particular causes. “I was just thinking that I wanted to use my bitcoin for good in this world.”
But several themes emerged. Pine made a point of showering largess on relatively obscure organizations, bestowing cash on a few high-profile groups — the American Civil Liberties Union’s political arm and Charity: Water each received $2 million — but mostly on small organizations and those working on complicated issues that might not attract average donors.
Those included the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies ($5 million), a research group studying the use of marijuana and psychedelic drugs in medical treatments; Nuzzles & Co. ($1 million), a Utah pet-rescue and adoption organization; and the Water Project ($1 million), which is working to provide clean water to sub-Saharan Africa.
Pine also looked for groups that promised a “multiplier effect” — in other words, organizations parlaying donations into partnerships or rapid, technology-fueled expansion. A gift of $1 million, for instance, went to OpenMRS, a network of volunteers aiming to build open-source medical-records systems in developing countries. OpenMRS said Pine had contributed software patches to the effort previously.
Surprise Gifts
Pine made the contributions in simple fashion, doling out bitcoin from something called the Pineapple Fund.
As a test before the Reddit invitation for funding requests, Pine donated bitcoin to four organizations. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which protects digital privacy and free expression, received a note in its general email inbox. “The subject line read, ‘The Pineapple Fund wants to give you $1 million,’ " says Aaron Jue, the organization’s development director. Thinking the note was a scam — like “those emails from a Nigerian prince,” Jue says — the organization didn’t respond until a second email arrived.
As Jue talked with Pine about the gift by email, his fears of a scam eased. “I could tell they were sincere,” he says. (Like others, Jue referred to Pine in the plural, partly because of Pine’s unknown gender and partly because it wasn’t clear how many people were involved.) “They knew the kind of work EFF did, and they sincerely wanted to support it.”
Later, when Pine began accepting funding requests, groups applied through an online form that took only a few minutes to complete. “I wanted them to spend less time on administrative work and more time on programs,” Pine explained.
Those who received gifts say Pine communicated only through brief emails; bitcoin deposits were usually handled by outside agencies, such as BitPay, which then transferred cash to the charity’s bank account. Gifts had few, if any, restrictions; Pine asked only that organizations provide occasional updates.
Adam of Watsi said such simplicity belied a thoughtful giving process.
“Some people can see it as too simple, but in reality I think it’s actually the most sophisticated way to give — picking organizations they believe in, giving money with few strings attached, and letting organizations focus on their mission,” he says.
In discussions with organizations, Pine sought assurances that a big gift would not swamp the group. Writing to Tannenbaum after the first gift, Pine wanted to make sure any additional donation “is sustainable and does not harm [the group] once the funding runs out.”
Pine also opted for a transparency that big philanthropists don’t always embrace. Pine listed gifts on the Pineapple Fund website and included links to a blockchain ledger confirming the bitcoin deposits. Pine also posted gift announcements on Reddit and discussed the giving choices with commenters.
Pine said the closely guarded anonymity was partly for the sake of personal safety but also to focus attention on the cryptocurrency community broadly, which Pine said is often seen as filled with greedy speculators.
When Pine announced the commitment to give, the value of the bitcoin set aside for philanthropy was about $86 million. But bitcoin’s value crashed in mid-January.
Nevertheless, Pine planned to start giving again if the value grew, saying, “This is not a one-time thing.” Next time, Pine plans to give money away more gradually and to assess the outcomes of gifts.
Groups that received the money, meanwhile, say the experience has taught them a few things. The Tennessee River Gorge Trust, a conservation group that received $250,000 from the Pineapple Fund, says it applied for funding even though it had never before accepted bitcoin donations. After Pine agreed to make a gift, the organization spent about a week setting up the mechanism to accept the donation and convert it to cash, says executive director Rick Huffines.
Huffines told his board he will keep that account open. “I told them that this could be a new face of philanthropy.”
Correction: A previous version of this article said the donor had given more than $53 million instead of nearly $56 million.
