I have claimed my tokens, but decided I would like to donate them to some nixpkgs-related cause. Can somebody tell me a wallet address for me to transfer them to?
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The safest way to do so is to donate the funds to the NixOS OpenCollective (https://opencollective.com/nixos). The Foundation does not maintain a wallet as this would be complicated from a finacial/legal/tax perspective.
This brings up an important question, the Starknet wallet described as for the binary cache has had about $40-$50k go through it and has been cashed out. What is the status of these funds?
Looks like Mercury donated about 9k EUR to the Open Collective, thank you! S3 Cache Long Term - Open Collective
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That’s precisely the problem: I don’t want to convert it into EUR myself and was hoping somebody else wants to do it anyways.
Edit: Ah, nice, the link you posted contains addresses.
Edit: Ah, nice, the link you posted contains addresses.
Yes @pimiddy, there are addresses, but if I understand this correctly, these are not addresses controlled by the NixOS foundation. And it seems the foundation only received a small fraction of the $40-$50k that went through them.
Individual donations from what I can see on the OpenCollective link are quite limited compared to that amount. So it would be unclear to me to what or to whom one is donating here.
Apart from the obvious question what you are giving up in return when getting the tokens in the first place. That alone is a bit of an oddly free giveaway.
So it appears a bit odd to say the least.
IIRC, the address mentioned above is controlled by @RaitoBezarius (yes, not the foundation). But you know whom to ask if you have concerns about it.
I asked @RaitoBezarius about those funds 3 months ago here, where I got the answer
I am travelling right now and I don’t have access to the accounts to give this information, I am planning to provide a public update on what has been received and what should be the next steps to proceed.
I asked again the next week here, where I got the response
Yeah, sure, just to give a quick update, there’s nothing done so far with the fund that were donated for the binary cache. Ideally, I will put the discussion with the cache WG today to see what are the priorities and what makes the most sense.
Two weeks later I asked again here and got the response
As you may know, the situation right now requires my attention and the attention of some cache WG’s members to be redirected to that other thing until it’s tackled and then we will be able to return to those topics, in the meantime, the WG didn’t even meet today and the meeting is cancelled until we find a new date that can accommodate my calendar.
And after asking whether I should just open an issue in the foundation repo:
I don’t think opening an issue in the infra tracker is a good idea (especially now that the build infra is almost defunct). I think you are demanding immediate transparency when we did not process yet this stuff, I would appreciate it if you could wait on the teams getting back to work and us being able to sit down and analyze the needs. The transparency will follow through with the consequences of those actions. If you are afraid or worried about something, please feel free to raise it explicitly.
To this day I haven’t heard anything about where that money is…
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Got one of these emails yesterday, I seriously do not trust it. I was interested in cryptocurrency for like 20 minutes but with how many scams and bad omens there are, I ain’t going to trust this one. On one hand, I’d love to get paid for my contributions. But having things like GitHub sponsors, Open Collective, and Patreon is better imo.
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FWIW, the funds received are still pending any decision. To the best of my knowledge, various teams still didn’t meet on how to use better that money.
I cannot really do something with money that is not mine.
That money is still sitting in an exchange account.
I don’t think it’s okay for over $40k to just sit in your personal account for so long without any transparency. You advertised those funds to go towards the binary cache, so I think it’s most appopriate to donate them to the S3 Cache Long Term OpenCollective, especially with the foundation struggling with some binary cache costs recently!
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I think you are confusing things. Not all money sent was for the purpose of the binary cache, so I think you and others are misleading by saying 40k has been dedicated to this.
Also, I would be glad to forward the subset of that money to the Foundation but it has been explicitly earmarked to buy hardware to self host the cache among other things (please re-read the pad).
I think anyone is free to contribute to Jeff Bezos’ retirement fund, this initiative was explicitly towards setting a sustainable future of NixOS. I understand that not everyone is interested into this but @Infinisil you jumping on me this way is very unwelcome and unprofessional. I know you are not a volunteer of the project and you are paid by commercial interests to work on things.
This is not my case, I am a volunteer and I do my best in my free time. If you want to suggest a constructive way to solve the situation, please do advise but I must remind you probably that if I donate this money to the Foundation under my personal name, I am also liable to prove the provenance of this money. Some folks donated anonymously and do not wish to reveal their identity. If you want to take the legal liability for that among many other things, let’s talk about it.
In the meantime, I don’t think pressuring me this way is the good way to get things done. I don’t understand why you keep acting this way.
Based on this document, under Howto 3.a, the address 0x17549d7ce007ddc10821084693888bb180e9775a355a45417062d85eb14c215 was meant to serve as a collection point to fund the binary cache. And based on my findings, 28438.41 STRK has flowed through this account. At the time the donations were collected and exchange for currency, the conversion rate was higher than it is today and there should be on the order of $40k - $50k.
If it is not that much, then how much is there?
There’s a whole section at the end about it which is more precise. As for the exact numbers, I am on my phone so I cannot grab them but it’s closer to 15-20k than 40k.
Is that 15-20k of STRK or a converted currency such as USD or EURO?
It’s in EUR, yes. (Something for the 20 chars limit)
How is that possible?
- All but one of the transactions happened between 2024/02/22 and 2024/03/04 (source).
- My 28438.41 STRK figure does not include the most recent transaction on 2024/06/16 of 111 STRK.
- The STRK → EUR conversion rate was between 1.62 and 1.82 at that time (source).
Given 28438 STRK converted at the prior rate of 1.6 (choosing the lowest of that time range), there should be approximately 45,500 EUR.
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It’s sufficient for 5 donors or so to say they want their donations back or they don’t want to donate to the binary cache and it gives you the result.
Exactly as @djacu says, I’d expect everybody to have donated to that address to have expected it to go exclusively towards the binary cache.
Among the three points under “What we will do with the funds”, the first two aren’t even for the binary cache. And the third point is only tangentially about the binary cache. And any of this is no reason that would prevent you from giving it to the foundation.
I think anyone is free to contribute to Jeff Bezos’ retirement fund, this initiative was explicitly towards setting a sustainable future of NixOS. I understand that not everyone is interested into this but @Infinisil you jumping on me this way is very unwelcome and unprofessional. I know you are not a volunteer of the project and you are paid by commercial interests to work on things.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the topic, there’s no reason to bring my employment status into this, I won’t debate this.
This is not my case, I am a volunteer and I do my best in my free time. If you want to suggest a constructive way to solve the situation, please do advise but I must remind you probably that if I donate this money to the Foundation under my personal name, I am also liable to prove the provenance of this money. Some folks donated anonymously and do not wish to reveal their identity. If you want to take the legal liability for that among many other things, let’s talk about it.
This is the first time I’m hearing about this, and I’m surprised that you don’t have a plan for that, because afaik the entire premise of the pad was for somebody else to figure out how to make it work.
So how about this: Make the donation to the foundation while providing all receipts from the exchange, so that the funds can be tracked down to come from the public Starknet address here.
In the meantime, I don’t think pressuring me this way is the good way to get things done. I don’t understand why you keep acting this way.
I think it’s very justified to be worried about where so much money is going after over 4 months, no? You made yourself responsible for those funds, I expect some accountability.
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Not including the most recent transaction (2024/06/16 of 111 STRK), there were 27 transfers of STRK to the account previously mentioned. It would take either the top 9 donors or the bottom 21 donors to say they do not want their donation to go to the binary cache to reach the range of 15-20k. Just as a function of amount, at least half of those donations would have to have have explicitly opted out from their donation going to the binary cache.
The wording in the document says
a. To fund the binary cache, send it to 0x17549d7ce007ddc10821084693888bb180e9775a355a45417062d85eb14c215
It does not say “see below for what we will do with the funds” and as @Infinisil mentioned, the first two are not for the binary cache.
I am in agreement with @Infinisil that the funds should be donated to the foundation with receipts from the exchange so everything can be tracked and transparent.
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I had a private conversation with @RaitoBezarius where I dug into the details a bunch more, here’s the main points that I found out (and @RaitoBezarius confirmed that it’s okay to share):
- The address was used even before the pad was written, when @RaitoBezarius was privately reaching out to people
- The pad was initially written by @zimbatm (who was on the board), @zimbatm trusted @RaitoBezarius to accept donations on that address
- The pad is written ambiguously on what the funds sent to that specific address will be used for
- Almost everybody that sent to the address has talked to @RaitoBezarius about the intent of the transaction. Though the pad did not indicate that people should talk to @RaitoBezarius beforehand, so some funds are truly anonymous
- The address was not only used for donations, but also to exchange the Starknet tokens for other currencies (crypto and non-crypto) for people who didn’t want to touch Starknet
- This situation makes it tricky for @RaitoBezarius to be fully transparent about the address without disclosing who the funds came from and what they intended them for
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