On December 13, 2017, a mysterious entity known as the ‘Pineapple Fund’ was announced via the subreddit r/Bitcoin. An anonymous philanthropist promised to donate more than USD $80 million worth of bitcoin to various charities, and asked for reader feedback on who this money should go to. Within days the story was picked up by mainstream outlets and promoted by myriad cryptocurrency blogs.

Less than one month later and the question must be asked: is this Pineapple Fund assisting Big Brother? Are the dual cloaks of anonymity and philanthropy being used to hide an ingenious transference of wealth by conspicuous entities? Are there political/financial motivations at play, and who really stands to gain from these extravagant donations?

Do the values and goals of the beneficiaries of the Pineapple Fund align with the values and goals of the broader cryptocurrency community? If bitcoin is in any way supposed to avoid the specter of mass surveillance, centralized intelligence, and debt-slavery, why is the largest bitcoin philanthropist today donating money to organizations with explicitly antithetical intentions?

In a more sensible world we might expect that these questions would have already been asked and answered. This is not the case. It seems that in the burgeoning world of blockchain technology, and the mania of cryptocurrency price rises, questions about legitimacy and due diligence would only take up time which could be better used to spruik, to speculate, and to s***-post tired memes about ‘lambos’ and ‘going to the moon’.

Which is to say that what you are about to read is not being discussed anywhere in the online world of cryptocurrency. It ought to be, and you’ll soon see why. Bitcoin was once sold as a solution to the problem of big government; it is now being used to ‘drive innovation’ in technology designed specifically to track every single transaction made by entire communities-and worse.

Here’s the evidence:

As of 6-Jan-2018 the Pineapple Fund has pledged donations to sixteen separate charities. The single largest donation has gone to GiveDirectly. Here is how GiveDirectly describe what they do:

We use mobile payments technology to send your donations to extremely poor families in the developing world in the most capital efficient way currently possible.

2. GiveDirectly’s two founders, Michael Faye and Paul Niehaus, are the co-founders of Segovia, a tech company which ‘provides a secure, reliable platform so you can serve new markets in days — not months’.

3. GiveDirectly just so happened to contract ~$280,000 worth of work to Segovia in return for access to this technology, according to GiveDirectly’s 2016 Form 990. That is, the ‘not for profit’ GiveDirectly paid $280k to the commercial company Segovia, and both GiveDirectly and Segovia are run by the same men: Michael Faye and Paul Niehaus.

Already the learned reader will see a problem: if this is not a conflict of interest, then what is? A ‘not for profit’ organization (which generates revenues via donations) decides to contract hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work out to the private sector, and out of all the companies to whom they might award the contract, they select a company created by the same men who founded the very same ‘not for profit’ organization contracting out the work!

But this isn’t even the juicy part of the Pineapple story.

4. GiveDirectly lists three ‘lead funders and partners’: GiveWell, Good Ventures, and Google.

5. GiveWell and Good Ventures are two sides of the same coin: they operate out of the same office and even share staff. From GiveWell’s site:

Staff of the two organizations share office space. Good Ventures currently holds the lease on the office space and donates GiveWell’s share. Staff of one organization may sometimes represent the other organization in meetings and other settings. Staff of one organization will sometimes perform work in support of the other organization… The two organizations are close advisors to each other and therefore exchange information relatively freely.

6. Good Ventures was created by Dustin Moskovitz, a billionaire who made his money as a co-founder of Facebook.

This means that Good Ventures and GiveWell are funded by a man who helped create Facebook. Therefore when GiveDirectly lists Google, Good Ventures and GiveWell as their three ‘lead funders and partners’, what they are effectively saying is that they are backed by Google and Facebook.

Again, the learned reader will see a problem: why is the Pineapple Fund making its largest single donation to a ‘charity’ which is already backed by the largest companies on the earth today (and/or the billionaires they spawned)?

But wait, there’s more.

7. GiveDirectly has also been sponsored to the tune of $500,000 by the Omidyar Network, as promoted by an article on Medium. The Omidyar Network is a ‘not for profit’ created by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay. This sponsorship is explicitly designed to trial ‘universal basic income’ in Kenya.

This means that GiveDirectly is funded — directly or indirectly — by Google, Facebook, and eBay. The ‘charity’ which recently received the single largest donation from the Pineapple Fund to date is backed by money from Google, Facebook, and eBay.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Who else receives substantial donations from the Omidyar Network? According to their 2015 Form 990, the answer is this: a litany of ‘microfinance’ and ‘microinsurance’ companies who somehow ‘help the poor’ by assisting them go into debt. Look at page 49 of the cited document:

i) $2 million to ‘MicroBuild I LLC’

This is a program-related investment to accelerate the growth of housing microfinance to improve the shelter conditions of the poor…

ii) $2.5 million to ‘MicroEnsure Holdings Ltd’

This is a program-related investment to relieve the poor and distressed by enabling the Company to develop its business of designing and offering microinsurance products for the poor…

There’s much more where those came from; I recommend you check out the relevant Form 990 for yourself. Look at the companies given money by the Omidyar Network, and look at the explanations offered as to why.

We can see that the ‘philanthropic’ Omidyar Network, founded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, is funding companies who assist the poor to go into debt. We can see that Omidyar is also supporting GiveDirectly to trial ‘universal basic income’ in poor, African communities. We can also see that GiveDirectly’s key funders are Google and Facebook.

Did somebody say ‘datamining’?

Now let’s take a look at what Segovia are developing. Recall that Segovia is the private company which was contracted by GiveDirectly to the tune of $280,000, and that the same two men founded both GiveDirectly and Segovia.

Via TechCrunch (link)

There you have it: A user interface which plainly displays a unique ID, legal name, place of residence, profile photo, field notes, staff contact (i.e. payment supervisor), and payment history.

Big Brother couldn’t have asked for better.

And now it all becomes clear: what is being funded, developed and trialed is a comprehensive, online database to document and track the financial particulars of select individuals, like something out of a dystopian sci-fi. The funding is coming from Google, Facebook and eBay.

Anybody who cannot connect the dots here may be beyond help, but allow me to share one more piece of evidence. The following is taken from the FAQ page on GiveDirect’s website, regarding their roll-out of ‘universal basic income’ trials.

Do recipients need to have a mobile phone to participate? No. Households need at least a SIM card to participate, and we give SIM cards to households that do not already have one. We also give recipients the option of purchasing a phone from us at bulk rates in order to make it easier to communicate with them. When recipients choose this option we deduct the value of the phone from their transfer. Historically the large majority of recipients in both Kenya and Uganda have chosen to buy a phone.

So the trial subjects are offered free money, and all they have to do is connect to the digital network, which they are also ably assisted with by way of a new phone. Once they have gotten themselves online, these once-impoverished people can now take up microfinance and microinsurance options, and maybe even purchase something from eBay.

If this sounds cynical of me, listen to the words of Michael Faye himself, one of the two men who founded both GiveDirectly and Segovia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og_pMkHhHVI

Faye says it right there: his technology allows ‘every social program in every country to manage a sales pipeline’, and ‘digitize the data, digitize the transaction’.

Notice too that the video above is hosted on the Omidyar YouTube Channel. Omidyar (eBay) hosting a video, which features the founder of GiveDirectly/Segovia, who is funded by GiveWell/Good Ventures, who are in turn funded by billionaire Dustin Moskovitz (i.e. Facebook) and Google.

Digitizing data, digitizing transactions, so that every social program can manage a sales pipeline.

It couldn’t be too much more obvious what is going on here.

Which brings us back to the Pineapple Fund, whose largest single donation to date is a $5 million pledge to GiveDirectly.

Of the many questions I would like to ask the person(s) behind the fund, one would be this:

Why are you donating money to GiveDirectly, a ‘not for profit’ which:

a) Contracts work out to a private company run by their own founders,

b) Is funded (directly or indirectly) by Google, Facebook and eBay,

c) Is developing and rolling out Big Brother-style finance-tracking systems,

d) Will assist impoverished people to go into debt?

I have tried to contact the Pineapple Fund directly. Approximately two weeks ago I sent an email to their specified contact address, detailing some of the findings of my research. I received a brief, 14-word reply, and that was it.

More to come…

What I have detailed in this article is only the tip of the iceberg. If you take the time to go through the Form 990s of the sixteen ‘charities’ to whom the Pineapple Fund has pledged so far, you are likely to make some remarkable discoveries of your own. I hope that some of the people who have taken the time to read this piece will do just that.

In the meantime I will continue to document my own findings on johnlebon.com, where I share unique research and analysis with a small but growing audience who appreciate independent, investigative journalism. The piece you just read is an abridged version of a feature piece recently published on the site.

If you feel that the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology deserves thorough scrutiny, and would like to see more material like the article you have just read, then I encourage you to check out this page.

As for the Pineapple Fund, it is regrettable that the person(s) behind it chose not to respond to my courteous and cordial email. Perhaps in time they may revisit that decision. I hope so. If their intentions are pure then this may all be a case of ‘oversight’, a failure to do due diligence in selecting beneficiaries of the fund. With much of the promised $86 million yet to be pledged, we as interested observers can assist the Pineapple Fund by doing research like that presented in this article.

The Pineapple Fund is being championed by many in the bitcoin community as a beacon of the good which can be done with crpytocurrency. Many have now begun donating some of their own bitcoin holdings to the Pineapple Fund because they believe in the idea and want to see it grow. The question is, do the goals and values of GiveDirectly align with those of the cryptocurrency/blockchain community?

Or is the Pineapple Fund supporting the development of the very kind of Big Brother tracking systems which bitcoin was originally supposed to help humanity avoid?

Disclosure: The author of this article has small holdings (<$1,000 USD in total at time of writing) in various cryptocurrencies including BTC, BCH, LTC, and XRP.