Vitalik Buterin just donated $54M (in ETH) to GiveWell
Buterin’s donations also included about $4M in ETH to MIRI and two much larger donations to what might be considered EA-adjacent organizations/funds: $330M to the Methuselah Foundation, an anti-aging nonprofit, and $1B to the India Crypto-Covid Relief Fund. Those last two donations were mostly in the form of more novel cryptocurrencies whose value immediately dropped precipitously once news of the transaction spread, though, so it’s not clear to me what the final value to the charities will end up being (although it will still be massive).
For perspective, $1 billion is almost double what the Lilly Endowment (the US’s second-largest private grantmaking foundation) gives away each year.
He also donated ~$2 million to the Charter Cities Institute. Here is an 80k podcast episode with Mark Lutter and Tamara Winter from the Center for Innovative Governance Research, which is how the Charter Cities Institute was called at the time.
Also important to note that he still has $9bn in Shibu coins left and some more in others.. might not be over. And Covid India prob will get $500m-1bn+ out of it given the liquidity of Shibu.
We know he’s been active on lesswrong in the past. Is it possible he’s been reading the posts here?
Multiple people connected to the lesswrong/ea investing groups tried to contact him. We both contacted him directly and got some people closer to Vitalik to talk to him. I am unsure how much influence we had. He donated less than two days after the facebook threads went up.
We definitely tried!
What Facebook threads are you referring to?
Groups are not public. Here is an example from ‘EAs in crypto’. The original thread was in ‘highly speculative EA investing’. The EAs in crypto thread got the most engagement.
note: Anthony Deluca is my deadnmae (I wasnt out when Greg wrote this comment. he didn’t deadnmae me), Greg is a well-known EA.
Amazing! It seems not-totally-crazy to think you may have had a hand in this :)