I was thinking how a bitcoin charity could fund its operations and grow even if donations dried up every now and then.
A site would be created that accepted donations which would be used to buy shares in a managed etf or index fund on glbse.
The dividends would be paid out in faucet style to help people get their first coins easily, or to promote bitcoin in other ways. As the pot grew the site can give away more and more coins and do bigger and bigger promotions, thus creating a self funding bitcoin charity/foundation. Eventually this fund could do more and more donations to such things as the bitcoin100.
This would need a rigorous constitution and transparency/disclosure as to what it is doing and being a non profit entity would need to be run by volunteers.
Is it a good or bad idea to use the system glbse has created to benefit the community in this way ? Would glbse waive trading fees for this?
Mainstream nonprofits routinely use endowment funds for precisely this - take a big lump sum, invest it into various securities and use the returns to fund recurring expenses.
Theoretically, it could be completely automated - take donations and automatically buy whatever securities have the highest dividend payouts - split between at least 2 for risk hedging.
Withdraw 50% on a regular basis into a wallet somewhere, pay out of that wallet to your faucet, use the other 50% to buy more securities for growth.
If the faucet account is running too low, liquidate some holdings at GLBSE up to a certain configured limit and warn human operators that more fundraising is required.
Obviously there's lots of tweaks to be made and human oversight can't be completely eliminated, but you can go a long way with the above kind of scheme.