Bitcoin Forum

I e-mailed Bram Molenaar this afternoon suggesting he should put a donation address on vim's splash screen so people who loved vim could help him help children in Uganda.

In his response he basically said that he didn't really know Bitcoin, that he thought not much people used it, and that he didn't think it would stick around.

So basically what I want to do is to collect some donation promises.

So if you love vim and want to promise some amount, whatever it is, just state it here.

I'll start and promise to donate 5 BTC

EDIT : There's also a Reddit post (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1eh4r2/bram_molenaar_should_put_a_bitcoin_address_on/) that you may want to up vote :-)

TL;DR : Vim donations address : 13UUaGK8ZDLxjY7RYu2bKEabqjww2KDyxD

Donated : 6 BTC
Pledged but not received yet : 5 BTC

I am a vim maniac!  I am always jumping between about 12 vim sessions, and do 100% of my coding with it.  I'm in for 3 BTC!

I used to do vim, but nowadays I use sublime text 2. Anyway I'll put 1 BTC.

I am planning on learning vim in the near future. I think the more people see this post the better.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newest (https://news.ycombinator.com/newest)

Submitted this there. Lots of vim users. Hope it helps.

I'll pledge 1 BTC. I can't live without vim :)

I am in for 1 BTC also, this guy has done a lot for the open source community, working @ Google , Charityware specialist!

As bitcoin is such a great way to send funds everywhere in the world. Lets give him a taste.

Great idea!

I pledge 1 BTC.

Okay so I got a positive answer from Bram Molenaar (a few days ago actually).

For the time being I will be collecting the donations and handle the exchange part.

So people who have pledged, and trust me, may already send their donations to 13UUaGK8ZDLxjY7RYu2bKEabqjww2KDyxD

If you want to have your name published on the Vim website you'll have to sign a message with one of the addresses sending the donation.

I asked Bram Molenaar if he could confirm this in any way and will update the thread accordingly.

TXID: b5778dbeba8a164b1c6538317068b531d4415dba1564390b0111cf5b27d11c50

I will PM you the signed message.

eh, that doesn't really bring much awareness to BTC..

I donated to SDF because they are interested and accept bitcoin, not because they're like "eh, what's that? oh people pledged money? sure just gimmie the money, I don't give a crap".

Think about the overlap in Unix geeks/Vim users. I believe it's big. I also believe that having a Bitcoin address on the splash screen of Vim (where you already get prompted to donate to kids in Uganda) will be a curiosity-igniter for some geeks that didn't know about Bitcoin, and a reason to think again for those who previously dismissed it as scam/ponzi.

Ok, I want to pledge some too. But first I would like to know how many BTC is needed in total, before he puts a donation address on Vim. Do you know? Any guess?

You don't need to pledge anymore since there is now a donation address, you can donate directly.
I don't think there is any amount needed per se, the more the better, it goes to kids in Uganda (see http://iccf-holland.org)

Giving money to africa= throwing money in a black hole. Local war lords will use it to buy moar tanks, rifles, weapons etc  ::)

Oh, I totally missed that. Thanks for pushing this through (vim is great, I use it every day and btc makes it easy to donate (yes I am lazy)).

Sometime money goes into weapons and sometimes not. For everyone who wants to do a little research before donating, this could be a good entry point: http://iccf-holland.org/

Pretty broad assumption you seem to be making.

Probably watched too much "Lord of War" and never actually went to Africa.

According to ICCF Holland's website, they invest the money directly in local infrastructure like a clinic, rather than sending it indiscriminately to some dubious middleman.

It's good to be skeptical, and it's true that a lot of corruption goes on, but that does not mean you should dismiss every single Africa charity by default.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123758895999200083.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1369041/Peter-Mandelson-Africa-aid-wasted-created-army-beggars.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/katineblog/2009/mar/26/water-projects-wasted-money

I spend most of my day in VIM, absolutely love it. Donated :)

Yes, I am aware of this problem.

I too believe in "Trade not Aid" but that doesn't mean I need to be a fundamentalist about it.

I am also against governments giving out aid, because them being governments, they tend to give it to other governments, which in poor countries are often not more than glorified criminal gangs.

Giving to private charities with a local presence is a different story though.  There is nothing wrong with aid in certain situations, eg. when a real emergency is being addressed.

The thing is you're dealing with the guy who makes vim here. It's pretty damn safe to assume he knows what he's doing and he isn't blindly sending thousands of dollars to some garbage charity.

VIM.

I hate to play devil's advocate, but how does making VIM qualify one to vet charities for effectiveness?

A lot of people barely even consider that, or they see the projects the charity is doing and ASSUME they are effective. I'm not saying this charity isn't effective, I'm saying that being the VIM guy doesn't necessarily qualify him to be a good judge of that. 

I know a low of people in even higher positions than "the VIM guy" who blindly donate to Susan G. Komen for the Cure (pink ribbon campaign) without realizing that they are a bunch of corrupt shills for the cancer industry more interested in confusing people about cancer and causing secondary cancers rather than actually preventing it. Corporate behemoth. Being someone in a high place doesn't mean you automatically get +100 spidey sense when it comes to charities.
Some charities aren't even corrupt, they are just ineffective. Looking at their websites you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell the long-term effect of their projects or whether there are more effective ways to spend that money.

The best "give money to Africa" charity I have found is one that teaches subsistence farmers agriculture techniques geared to growing in drought/desert conditions, and gives them specific varieties of fruit trees that grow excellently in drought conditions. This yields results. Building water treatment plants and clinics and schools is a very western approach as we're kind of skipping past the most basic needs.

You make good points. I just expect the guy behind vim to take the time to choose a reason able charity before soliciting donations from the public. I could be wrong of course. If it were some random person on bitcointalk or something similar I would be much more skeptical. My thinking behind it isn't so much about him being someone in a high place, but more being someone analytical and detail obsessed.

For reference.  I'm donating money to Bram Molenar.  His work has made my life 100x easier.  It's up to him to do with the money whatever he wants.  If he wants to donate the money to a charity in Africa, that's his decision.  Having made that decision publicly may change people's inclination to donate (knowing the money will ultimately go to whereever he designated), but it doesn't change my decision. 

Also, I realize that my thinking in this case is wrong in general. And that's it's probably a good idea to question and discuss every charity, regardless of who chose it. Even if only to have similar discussions to this one so that people such as yourself can bring to light some of the issues with popular charities and their lack of effectiveness.

I'm a huge fan of Vim.  Just donated 0.3 BTC

I just sent my pledge of 3 BTC: 

http://blockchain.info/tx/445d905e56c08456b0423faa77118f6c3307d629a08e7f09ea75050328b3bd3d

I assume you can trust the owner of the transaction, because I made sure it came from my own donation address.  I hope that is sufficient identity for you (you can match the address to the one on my homepage:  https://bitcoinarmory.com/).

what is "vim" ?

It's a text editor for programming that has a pretty steep learning curve.  It's terribly confusing if you don't know how to use it, but becoming proficient at it means that you can code for hours at much higher efficiency, without your fingers ever leaving the keyboard (mouse not required).

I've been using it for years, and at least partially attribute my success in developing Armory to it.  For me, it's like converting brainwaves directly in code modifications :)


P.S. - Maybe this helps out a frustrated newbie:  one of my biggest gripes with VIM that almost made me give up on it when I was learning, was the seemingly asanine decisiion to use the "ESC" key to exit insert mode, since it forces your left hand to leave the home keys, all the time.  I later found out that you can use Ctrl-[ to exit insert mode, and that was what I needed to be happy.  If you hated because of the escape key, give it another shot now :)

I like vim much, and would like to donate too. But I'll rather wait for the btc address to be shown somewhere officially, for example here: http://iccf-holland.org/donate.html or http://www.vim.org/sponsor/index.php

Sure, as long as you rate me on OTC afterwards :-)

Bram said he would publish it on the vim mailing list, I didn't subscribe so I don't know if he did it yet, he asked if he could publish the address on the ICCF website which I advised him to do.

Either way, if you can't wait to donate you can e-mail him directly and/or ask Mike Hearn for confirmation (he helped convince Bram, they know each other IRL, they both work in Google's Zurich offices).

What does everyone think I should use to get the funds converted ? Since BC isn't back up yet I'm thinking about either Bitstamp or OTC (my heart goes towards OTC :D)

QFT. This is good advice. I'm a happy user of `setxkbmap -option caps:swapescape`. I noticed the other day that google chromebooks go so far as to replace capslock with a kind of quick-search button.

So who pledged and didn't donate? I can easily count 12 BTC pledges and some extra donations on top of that?

FTR : http://iccf-holland.org/bitcoin.html

Hey, doesn't this make the charity a candidate for Bitcoin 100 now?

That's $1000 to them unless I'm missing something.

What's that ?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52543.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52543.0)
http://bitcoin100.org/ (http://bitcoin100.org/)

I was after an executive summary, not a couple of links I could've googled up :-)

Basically any charity that accepts bitcoin will receive $1000 dollars in bitcoin. Currently run by Rassah and edd(possibly others, I don't know) of this forum.

Bitcoin100 donated the money: https://blockchain.info/tx/bb4065bde85cee9a1da489f11d0633e64da96926ab55ff962c5ec130169b7c6d (https://blockchain.info/tx/bb4065bde85cee9a1da489f11d0633e64da96926ab55ff962c5ec130169b7c6d)

Thanks Rassah and edd.

Wow, nice.


FTR

Just curious how you'll decide when to cash out and transfer for him?

I'll probably convert when it is necessary that the money be sent to Bram.
No real interest in converting before.

The funds have been converted and sent to ICCF.

I think the more people see this post the better