Starknet Cryptocurrency "contributions"

As you ramble on through life, brother,
Whatever be your goal,
Keep your eye upon the doughnut,
And not upon the hole.

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Funny that it is no. 42 in this thread, awesome timing.

To check your claims without using their servers:

This just wraps access to the JSON files that were mentioned in #33 for convenience.

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While I’m from the US and thus not eligible to claim this(nor would I personally want to, as I believe cryptocurrency as a whole is a bad thing), I just recieved a spam email with a telegram link from the domain dailay [dot] news. Please be on the lookout and report this email to namecheap(where the domain is hosted) if you get one.

At least that’s a temporary thing. They stated that offer expires at June 20 2024 .

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US persons are not legally eligible and should be cautious, this offer might be a violation of Article 1744 - Code général des impôts - Légifrance

Summary from: France – New Offense of Providing Instruments to Facilitate Tax Fraud | King & Spalding - JDSupra

new Article 1744 of the French tax code, which creates the offense of making instruments available to facilitate tax fraud and punishes natural or legal entities making available “free of charge or for a fee, one or more legal, tax, accounting or financial means, services, acts or instruments, with the aim of enabling one or more third parties to fraudulently evade the assessment or payment of all or part of taxes .”

For Nix users who want to donate their tokens to @edef, I wrote a short guide for the security-conscious and lazy:

  • Use https://starknet-check.glitch.me to check if your username gets any tokens.
  • Start a minimal VM containing just Firefox: firefox-vm.nix · GitHub
  • Follow @edef’s instructions here.
    • It will ask “Public data only” read-access from Github.
    • If you get misformatted key :( from edef’s website, just send the URL directly to @edef e.g. here via Discourse private message (click the user name), or Matrix, or any way you like.
  • Revoke the GitHub read-access authorization here (convenience link).
  • Turn off / delete them VM.
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I got a similar e-mail today from a Gmail account.

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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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thanks for posting this information @Infinisil

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?