Bitcoin Forum

As most people assume, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency are in the tech industry for trading and investing in order to make a profit on the market. However, if you consider the alternative which is philanthropy, a few companies are quite profound at doing just that.

Using Cryptocurrencies to Fundraise
Many charities are experimenting with cryptocurrency donations and some of the most prominent names involved are Red Cross, Save the Children, United Way and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. There is a clear ascension in number of donations with cryptocurrency. One of the biggest funds for donors, Fidelity Charitable, holds more than 69 million dollars worth of crypto donations as of 2017.

More recently, a number of programmes and schemes in the world of crypto philanthropy have come to notice. Such platforms embrace crowdfunding sites like BitHope for donating Bitcoin to your charity of choice. Other apps like GiveTrack and Alice are used to trace the movement of funds from account to charity, all on Blockchain, and confirm that select foundations have received allocated donations.

Non Profit Specific Coins
Besides making donations with Bitcoin and tracking its progress on applications, there are a number of coins created by organisations for their social and ongoing projects. There are coins for exact purposes like the one created by Charity: Water, called Clean Water Coin for raise money for the charity that works to supply clean drinking water to people all over the world. Another called Pinkcoin, is a coin that alerts traders use it to donate to specific charities as well as get a return on their funding. This coin is registered as a major cryptocurrency contender and does well in the market.

Foundations for Crypto Donations
An anonymous philanthropist has recently created a charity foundation that aspires to donate 5,057 Bitcoins.  The charity is called the Pineapple Fund and has reached out to numerous contributors who have collectively given away 56 million dollars to 56 chosen charities. The creator, 'pine' holds the slogan, “Because once you have enough money, money doesn’t matter.” as a justification for his contributions.

With this use of Blockchain, a more credible process of donations to charities can be established. Most people have little trust in the working of bog charity organisations, speculating that these use a sizeable portion for their operations and little goes into the actual relief funds or projects. However, with a Blockchain system these doubts can be resolved with transparency in transactions, decreased operating costs, and overall efficiency in the process. These cynical ideas can be undone and lead to increased donations.

In a few years, with the success of Bitcoin and Blockchain technology, these foundations can all have their own set of cryptocurrencies or coins to maintain the flow of donations digitally. An exchange can be created on a token system focused solely on the purchase and selling of these coins by traders and donators. This may even create a new approach to philanthropy where charities as well as philanthropists profit from trade of foundation specific coins for the improvement of those in need. Gathering funds could be made easy for Non Profit organisations by mining of tokens.

Although the future holds so many possibilities, there are still limitations that stand in the way. Blockchain is a relatively new and unexplored system that still has a lot to be discovered by a majority of the public before it becomes mainstream. Most countries have not defined their legal stance on the trade of Bitcoin and many people do not have enough grasp of its operations. Thus, it will be a while before crypto philanthropy is recognised and utilised for donations and fundraising.

Absolutely! We have spent a lot of time researching this issue and naturally it is most prominent for younger generations that have grown up with constant news of exploitation of charitable giving, although the culprits are largely the third-party fundraising companies that charities use. These guys can charge the charity up to 17 times the value of a monthly pledge they obtain from the general public, and the charity has to pay this upfront which makes it harder for the smaller charities in their donor acquisition efforts since they do not have the funds to engage in these sorts of promotions.

There is so much more blockchain can do to revolutionise the giving experience though, but a lot of the current blockchain projects seem to not fully realise the potential here. Most of them are essentially keeping the current giving paradigm and just enabling charities to accept blockchain payments, offering a public ledger and smart contracts that release funds in stages. Don't get me wrong, it is a good start but there is so much more that can be done, especially in addressing the lack of engagement from Millennials who have 50% less engagement with charities than Baby Boomers according to the Blackbaud 2016 Giving Report. With current life expectancy and aging donor behaviours, charities have about 10 to 20 years to address this or the amounts received will plummet.

Thanks for the insightful post on philanthropy in the cryptoverse :)

Most recently, I came across the charitable crypto-currency project for the first time. This project is Humancoin. My opinion is that all organizations of this kind should move to blockchain technology to show the transparency and honesty of their actions. Then people will have more confidence in them, and this will attract more money to this industry.

I think that the days to the e-money extremely developed, the next few months it always has a clear direction, strong.Long profit for all players wise in this market.

"to this industry"?What industry?Cryptocurrencies in general or the non-profit charity organizations?I wouldn`t call the charity fundraising organizations an industry.I don`t know how the blockchain will make their transactions transparent.There are many ways to steal all the donated funds and use them for other activities.

I cannot see why we need some "Pump n Dump" charity coins to encourage Philanthropy in Crypto currencies. Why not use Bitcoin? I have also seen these RhinoCoin type projects with their own tokens and I think it is useless to invest in that. The Pineapple Fund was one of our most successful Philanthropy projects and they just used Bitcoin.  ::)

If you want a bigger target market, then go for the coin with the most users. <Bitcoin>  8)

well, the future of cryptocurrency is good for a billion years, it will survive until the universe exists. but the point is, future of philanthropy charity programmes seems to be dull until they don't realize the direction of cryptocurrency. seems like each time they publishing new philanthropy programme they throwing a brand new coin to coin market regarding that. that is extremely pointless if someone needs to gather people around their charity programme why can't they use much more stable coin which already exists in the coin market. the summary is for god sake why can't they use BTC instead of some useless brand new coin

If peoples wanna do charity and works for needy peoples than than they can make a ICO or a Crypto coin and do marketing if peoples invest in their project than their investment's some part goes for poor and needy peoples so this the method we can do charity also philanthropy is possible if we earn from trading than we can give some share of our profit for charity.

I think the future crypto market will continue to grow with the benefits of blockchain technology.
But to use this technology in charitable donations I think they are not feasible, because it will take some form of non-transparency.
That idea would not be feasible.

A charity project with cryptocurrency is something that is very possible, because blockchain technology can be applied in various interests in the world digitally. The use of cryptocurrency for charity project transparency will make it easier for managers / parties responsible for reporting financial use to donors even in real time. So that concerns about misappropriation of funds can be minimized.