EFF donations and the Bitcoin Faucet

[Gavin Andresen]

Cindy Cohn, legal director at the EFF, called me a while ago to figure out what to do with the bitcoin donations they were sent, and what to do with coins that might be sent to their donation address in the future.

Ideally, they'd like to return them, but that can't be done-- bitcoin has no "return to sender" function. Returning to the last-address-the-coins-were-sent-to doesn't work because people use shared online wallets and can, and do, send their coins to new wallets and delete old wallets.

The EFF is firm in their decision NOT to cash them in (they'll be coming out with a blog post explaining their reasons very soon), and after talking over several possibilities the idea they liked best was to redistribute the coins via the Bitcoin Faucet (and have any donations that trickle in get passed back out via the Faucet).  The reasoning is that anybody who donated bitcoins to the EFF would also support the mission of the Faucet-- to promote bitcoin by giving people new to the currency a little bit to start.

Other options for what to do with the EFF donations (like setting up a non-profit entity to take the donations and... do something with them...) were rejected as too complicated and/or costly.

I'll need to do a little bit of thinking about how to handle the EFF coins safely (just dumping them all into the Faucet's wallet is not a good idea; I would hate for them to get lost if somebody managed to hack the Faucet's web-facing code). Whatever I do, I will make sure the process of moving the coins from the EFF's donation address to the Faucet is absolutely transparent.

[S3052]

Gavin, and EFF, this is the best solution in my p.o.v.
Wonderful and thanks.

[Montpelerin]

I suspect this decision was made so as not to let their position regarding digital currency (esp. bitcoin) appear to be biased.

We shall see.

[lemonginger]

I feel like at this point the faucet will just be abused :/ sad but true

What about using the coins to seed a "bitcoin foundation" fund? I realize that a new organization was rejected as too complicated right now, but the faucet will just be a mad dash of people trying to grab all the cash they can. Can the coins just be held "in trust" until some future date?

[epi 1:10,000]

I think opensource ecology would be a worthy recipient with no detrimental political implications.  It fits the open source for good ethos. They take bitcoins

Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization
http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html
http://opensourceecology.org/

[bitplane]

How many do they have? I suggest using them as bounties for EFF-related projects. Devs and campaigners can work for BTC, while they get useful work done for "free"

Or donate it to the TOR exit nodes project

[Jack of Diamonds]

The faucet is dead as an idea now.

It was created ages ago to give people their first "feel" in the bitcoin world by handing out a few cents.

Now that it's price has risen and CPU mining became infeasible, people have enough motivation to screw over the system and try to profit by exploiting the faucet as efficiently as possible.

Hell, might just as well put a dollar faucet in the middle of Somalia & see how that turns out...
In the end it's just a few pirates and warlords with all the 'experimental' cash and the common man is left with a dry faucet.

A lottery or a donation to a real charity after converting it to cash would be better

[BitcoinPorn]

The faucet is dead as an idea now.

It was created ages ago to give people their first "feel" in the bitcoin world by handing out a few cents.

Way interesting post.  I have been "into" Bitcoin for a few weeks now.  Was in on Gox.  Now I'm "in" TradeHill (or at least pending).  But that faucet, well damn, just heard about it this morning from the Newbie forum, and I have to say that gave me that first 'feel' of Bitcoin, and after having my information possibly stolen this weekend and having to change a lot of online things, it was nice to show up and see a place where they are just handing it out to ensure people get some.

This Faucet needs to exist to counteract the fear that it could all be gone.

Or not.  Either way I liked it and I guess even used it for the true purpose just today, thanks Gavin

[dayfall]

I prefer the faucet stay up and running.  I doubt anyone will seriously scam it for 0.001.  Just make sure it is secure or don't put all of it in at once.

I just donated 0.5 and it is already down to 0.23.  That does seem odd.

[unk]

gavin: the deliberation and sensitivity to ethics here is encouraging. you're one of the few in the bitcoin community that i'd trust to handle this well and transparently.

if the faucet turns out for whatever reason to be unsuitable, another option is for the eff simply to retain the bitcoins without selling them. i'm not sure if that would address the concerns they have with selling them, but for whatever it's worth, that's been my own response to early-mined coins for a collection of personal, legal, ethical, and practical reasons. i simply keep them, not sure that i'll ever sell them.

[Timo Y]

It would be a better idea to put them into a bounty for badly needed projects to help solve problems of wallet theft and wallet loss for the average user.
 
Eg. A user-friendly, secure liveCD or live USB drive configured for automatic online backup.

Not that the faucet doesn't help the promote bitcoin, but I don't think that is our biggest priority right now.  I think the faucet was vital during the embrionic stage, but it loses importance as bitcoin goes mainstream.

I have already donated 5 BTC to the faucet.  If I was given the choice to donate another time, I would never have donated an amount as large as 200 BTC to the faucet (no offense, Gavin).  Those funds were meant specifically to support EFF. If they won't have them, I would rather give them to the FSF than the faucet.

Perhaps the EFF should allow people to reclaim their donation by signing with the private keys from the originating addresses?  Complicated, but doable.

[Rob P.]

I'll need to do a little bit of thinking about how to handle the EFF coins safely (just dumping them all into the Faucet's wallet is not a good idea; I would hate for them to get lost if somebody managed to hack the Faucet's web-facing code). Whatever I do, I will make sure the process of moving the coins from the EFF's donation address to the Faucet is absolutely transparent.

I would contact Gavin.  He runs the Faucet.     Gavin, I'd be all for the Developers getting all of them and/or send them to an address that Gavin you specify after you state you'll move them into the Faucet a few at a time.  That way no chance of the Faucet being abused, we see you're already making it harder and harder to double-dip at the Faucet.

The Faucet is the single biggest tool to get the general public into Bitcoins.  Users can get a millicoin and then send a microcoin back to the Faucet to see how the whole thing works.  

There's nothing more depressing than seeing a 0 balance in your client and wondering whether it's worth exploring.

[gigabytecoin]

Until we can lock down the faucet or create a more secure way of distributing them, I do not support this.

Why don't we give the community the option to make their own faucets and vote on the best ones?

[AbeSkray]

I feel like at this point the faucet will just be abused :/ sad but true

The faucet will be abused, but it won't be just abused. Scammers will manage to get their hands on BTC via the faucet, but it will also continue putting BTC into the hands of new users. I think the faucet is a great first step into the bitcoin economy and I'm happy to hear that it will be getting some more funding.

[ironwolf]

I used the faucet to get my first coins, which were 0.02 if I recall correctly. It was a good demo. I was also the first person to notice the strange pattern on BitcoinMonitor.com that turned out to be the faucet's first major case of abuse.

It's too bad the EFF doesn't want the coins but I can see why they might want to not have any appearance of bias. So given that they don't want the coins I think giving them to the faucet isn't a bad idea, but it isn't that great an idea either because some people will abuse it. I think the best that can be done is make sure that the amount of coins the faucet gives out is enough to ensure a good demo but small enough that it would be prohibitively expensive for even bad actors to bother with another faucet raid.

Any way the faucet can just give out just a tiny multiple of the minimum that can be sent with the current client? Or perhaps just one Satoshi per customer...

[joan]

I also believe the faucet is being abused unfortunately… (by the way someone proposed to make it return min(0.01, 10% remaining funds) in another thread)

[BitcoinPorn]

I like the idea of the faucet only pours based on a percentage of what is left at any given time (maybe a daily check or something).   Keeps it less worthwhile for hackers, but ALWAYS something nice for the people with no coin

[nickwit]

Well... as someone who has donated 25 btc to EFF, I am qualified to comment.


When I first started using bitcoins, The Faucet gave me .05. Id did get me started... so I do have some sympathy.

But not enough to donate 5000 times more than I got out of it.

What do I want? I want the EFF to accept bitcoins. Cash what you have... or, return to the donors accounts.

[Rob P.]

or, return to the donors accounts.

How?  Fill out a form if you donated and tell them how much?

[QuantumMechanic]

or, return to the donors accounts.

How?  Fill out a form if you donated and tell them how much?

And sign it with the private key associated with the address you donated from.  I think there's a patch that allows you to do this.

Allow this for a certain period of time before sending everything to the faucet.