Bitcoin Forum

I was looking at the donation page and it says people donated 50 and 10 bitcoins???? isn't that like 10,000 to 50,000 dollars depending on the price of bitcoin?

It is more like $31,250 and $6250

But well indeed it is a lot of money for most of us ..
But if you donated one year ago, price was much much lower per 1BTC :)
and so on.

Regards.

If you check the donation address [1] as its linked under donate you will see that the last donation for 50 BTC was in 2011[2].

oldest price I could find on bitcoincharts [3] is from 2011-09-13 ~5 USD per BTC. The donations come from a time when BTC wasnt worth as much. It was discussed often if the amount to donate for VIP should be lowered, but theymos and others in charge think it would not be fair to those that donated 50 BTC in the past. I also think its a good idea that VIP essentials says: I have been here a long time and I believed in it. If the amount to donated would be lowered to e.g. 0.4 BTC (~ equivalent in USD to 50 BTC 2011) we'd see way to many VIPs.



[1] https://blockexplorer.com/address/17RTTUAiiPqUTKtEggJPec8RxLMi2n9EZ9
[2] https://blockexplorer.com/tx/d893352488aedbd229e908acd10bd2650ce6254a32e2f6ddfc84f18c0e3e666e#o0
[3] http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg60zczsg2011-08-13zeg2011-09-13ztgSza1gSMAzm1g10zm2g25zv

It's more like $50 to $50,000.   Common sense will tell you most people paid that when the price was closer to $50.   ;)

You are surprised only because you don't know how much expensive can be a pizza.  :P

Very true. When you can get a VIP tag for the price of 1/200 of a pizza, it is a bargain lol. :D

We wouldn't necessarily need to make VIP status cost the same as it did in 2011 in terms of fiat as $50 would not go as far as it would today since there are many more users using the forum's resources today.

I would suggest to maybe lower the price for VIP status to maybe $500 or $1,000 as this would probably pay for the same amount of bandwidth and hosting in terms of time.

This has been discussed countless times already, and theymos' answer is a "no".

OK cool.   The last donation in 2011 was only $50......so I guess bitcointalk is rich now   :P

Yeah, they are. There was a debate about it, but theymos said it is a No.

The forum likely spent a lot of the bitcoin that was donated on server hosting and bandwidth so all the donations of 50 BTC are likely spent.

With the price of a single bitcoin increasing every year, I think there should be a third category for people who donate a lesser amount, e.g. 1 BTC. Or perhaps different tiers such as bronze donator: 0.01 BTC, silver: 0.1 BTC, gold: 1 BTC, and platinum: 10 BTC. Existing donators would be given platinum status and VIPs would remain as VIPs.

is there a place that users can view the forums current financial status (like the monthly income, likely from advertising, expenses, and assets and liabilities if applicable)?

This thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155000.0 shows how much bitcoin the forum has and where the bitcoin is, and it was last updated in March 2014. :)

Really, from a business perspective, it makes no sense for them to keep the price that high, because nobody is donating now. Why are they not just scaling it to dollar value?

Because when donations were introduced it was said that the price would be pegged to BTC not $.  Anyways, it's not like the forum needs more money.

the forum is able to make enough money off of ad sales so they really do not need donations anymore

At the rate bitcoin is going down, you'll all be able to donate again shortly!  ::)

HAHA very funny. Hopefully the price of bitcoin will not fall that low, although if it does it would make for quite the buy.

Also if the price of bitcoin did get that low the forum would likely be more pressed for donations as the value of it's existing bitcoin will be lower but it's expenses will be priced at a constant amount in fiat.

Donations were for people who were early adopters to Bitcoin and would usually have a lot of Bitcoins in their wallets to be able to donate.

It's not fair for the people who donated earlier for this to happen.

Ah, the heartwarming gratitude of later generations. ::)

Laszlo, who bought a couple pizzas for 10.000 BTC, an idiot.
Donators and VIPs who funded this forum in times of financial need, morons.
Miners who made the network strong with their time and investments, lunatics.

Thank you so much for the kind words ;)

Yeah, it's easy for people to say now in retrospect that those people are foolish or whatever, but they donated to something they felt needed the money at the time and for a service they probably valued. I'm sure many now regret that decision, but some will not and still be glad to be a part of this forum in some way or another. Regardless of that, most of those donators still probably have more coins than all the naysayers put together so they might not be all that angry about the fiddy coins  :D.

the rate was much lower back then.

so it's not relevant in my opinion