Griff AKA Santa, founder of Giveth, inspiring all to Give

“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” — Winston Churchill

This week (until Sunday 18th of November, midnight CET) every 1 ETH you donate to Giveth, our favorite Decentralized Altruistic Community, I will match with another 1 ETH, doubling your giving power! (up to 25 ETH)

Donate right here to the Giveth DAC, using the Giveth Dapp.

It’s scientifically proven to make you happy! TL;DR? Here’s the video version:

If you sign up on the Giveth dapp and put in your email, you are officially a Giveth Maker and can review and veto what Giveth spends your donations on (more on this here).

The funds you donate will be used for further development of Giveth’s Donation Application (the DApp you will use to donate), governance experiments and social coding initiatives. If you want to discover more on what Giveth is bringing to the space, check out their site and some recent initiatives here.

Griff jokes that “when Giveth throws our monthly orgy and need to use donations to buy drugs and pay for strippers, you get to veto if you don’t like it!”

But all jokes aside, there’s nobody I would trust more to squeeze all the goodness out of your donations than the frugal founder of Giveth, Griff Green AKA Santa. A guy who hates waste so much he will proudly eat food off of other people’s plates and lick them clean, but wise enough to realize that it’s not enough to be frugal. To make an impact you also have to be focusing attention and resources on solving the problems that matter. And nothing gets more bang for the buck than winning over hearts and minds, connecting & inspiring people to get involved, spreading the love and giving back. Which is what Giveth is all about!

In fact, if it weren’t for Giveth I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t even have any ETH to give.

Time for a confession.

Until my encounter with the Giveth gang last year, I was a hardcore Bitcoin maximalist. The virulent kind that never tires of explaining to everyone how Ethereum is a temporary flash in the pan that will soon be superseded by layer 2 solutions on Bitcoin such as RSK and smugly points to the Ethereum / Ethereum Classic hardfork as evidence that Ethereum is way too centralized around Vitalik.

Then I had my virgin Burning Man experience at Camp Decentral, run by Griff Green AKA Santa, a real life (red) caped superhero, who played a pivotal role in shepherding the community response to the DAO hack.

I have my good friend Gary Lachance, of Decentralized Dance Party fame, to thank for insisting I absolutely had to come. I don’t think he realized I was a Bitcoin maximalist at the time. He convinced me that camping out with the Giveth gang at Camp Decentral would be a life changing, mackerel-floating, mind altering experience. Something I would never ever forget.

He couldn’t have been more right.

There was dust, hugs, searing daylight, freezing moonlight, an intense sense of connection and that time I saved Vlad Zamfir from dehydration. Before I knew he was a bigshot (you still owe me a collapsible cup Vlad!). I fell in love with these smart, loving, weird, generous and idealistic people who were crazy enough to think they could change the world. Under the watchful gaze of Doge, we’d give, love, and decentralize all the things. This was a tribe I wanted to belong to.

Hanging around the (metaphorical) tribal campfire, I got first hand accounts of that thing I criticized from afar — a behind the scenes view of what it was like handling the DAO hack crisis. It gave me a real taste for the the values driving the people involved.

Incorruptible people, like diamonds, are exceedingly rare.

But these are the same altruists that banded together as the WHG (“White Hat Group”) that raced against time and assumed insane legal liability to rescue over $200M of ETH exposed by the Parity wallet hack.

Hearing the story straight from the legendary and incredibly humble Jordi Baylina is something I’ll never forget. To rescue the funds they had to steal them first. Any hacker in the WHG could have “defected”, run a modified version of the script anonymously, and gained control over a life changing amount of cryptocurrency. None of them did. Imagine that! Especially on the background of all the corruption and shady characters in cryptocurrency. We all like to think of ourselves as good people, but how many of us could resist hundreds of millions of reasons to be tempted?

To make a long story short, if you care about making a difference, giving to Giveth is a no brainer. How your donations are used is transparent, you get veto rights, and I’m pretty sure that never in the history of the world has a non-profit been led by people who have shown such integrity of character and proven more resistant to temptation.

Give to Giveth here:

https://beta.giveth.io/dacs/5b37da13a239ac21b383d4da

Note, to all those who are fortunate enough to have a bit more than they need to spare and are hungering to make an even bigger impact consider joining me in either pledging this week to match donations , or increasing the donation matching cap above 25 ETH. Or both!