We’d like to raise your awareness for a fundraiser to the benefit of Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr and his wife and children. Living in the Tampa Bay, their home recently was struck by hurricane Irma, which was the most intense Atlantic hurricane to hit the US since Katrina in 2005.

Before we go into how much we hope to raise and for what damages, let’s go over a few ways in which Luke has contributed to this community:

Created one of the very first mining pools in 2011, and in 2014 released BFG miner, open source freeware to help others operate their Bitcoin miners. Both initiatives contributed significantly to helping Bitcoin stay decentralized.

On March 11, 2013, Luke was the first to warn others that the Bitcoin blockchain was splitting and to call for emergency measures.

Despite his interest in mining, Luke has always supported individual Bitcoin users, as was illustrated by his work on User Activated Soft Forks to help support SegWit activation.

With 321 commits to Bitcoin core, he’s currently ranked by github as 7th most prolific core dev.

Even though he’s most known for extensive code review and testing, Luke has contributed significant improvements to Bitcoin, such as figuring out how to deploy SegWit as a soft fork and BIPs 22 & 23.

In short, over the past 6 years, Luke has donated many thousands of volunteer hours to improve Bitcoin and has made important contributions that helped it become the +$40 billion platform it is today.

And now with this fundraiser, we’d like to give something back. In the hurricane, Luke’s house suffered the following damage:

a broken bedroom window

unstable electricity situation: his generator failed repeatedly and so he has no backup for inevitable future power outages

His internet is unstable due to storm damage to the neighborhood

broken water line

large fallen down trees in the yard

roof damage to side building

propane piping & tanks damaged

damage to the front door

https://twitter.com/LukeDashjr/status/907204325755236352

Luke does have home owners insurance, but it’s unsure how many of the claims will be approved and there’s a deductible of nearly $5,000.

In the past week, Luke has offered housing and support to an extra family with five children whose Sarasota property was badly damaged. He reported last weekend that those people have found a home now.

Our goal is to raise five bitcoins to help him with repairs and recovery. All donations, large or small, are equally welcome. If you’d like join us to support Luke and his family, here is a Bitcoin address for donations: 1Cyc4X8ES9Qvsqc8FBupLdTLKnbxo6wmUj (verification)

Thank you,

Tuur Demeester and Eric Lombrozo

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Addendum

Since our goal of 5BTC was quickly achieved (thank you!!), we’d like to add a stretch goal: Luke would like to get cable service in his street, allowing him to have faster and especially more reliable internet. Right now the internet becomes unreliable when there’s an electricity black out. Where he lives, cable requires a wire to be pulled through the entire street, which the cable company charges around $12,000 for . So our stretch goal, with your help, is to raise another 3.5 bitcoins.