A guy raised Bitcoin worth $59 MILLION and spent nearly all of it helping homeless people
In February 2013 an Army veteran named Jason King started a homeless outreach in Pensacola Florida called Sean's Outpost, named after his best friend, a local reporter murdered a year earlier
One month later he posted a single pitch to the Bitcoin community: "Donate 1 BTC and we will feed 40 people"
Bitcoin was trading at $50 and each meal cost around $1.25
Within 12 hours he had enough for 80 meals and the donations never stopped
Pensacola had just made homelessness basically illegal
Sleeping outside was banned and King was told that handing a freezing person a blanket counted as helping commit a crime
So the Bitcoin community bought 9 acres of forest for $89,000, with the mortgage paid in Bitcoin, giving homeless people a place where they could legally sleep and naming it Satoshi Forest
King paid homeless carpenters in Bitcoin to build $7,500 tiny homes for other homeless people, while others learned to use Bitcoin wallets
They started earning money online and one even saved enough to move into his own apartment
By late 2014 the charity served over 120,000 meals and became the largest meal provider for the homeless in the entire county
The charity's own records show it raised around 943 Bitcoin, with 532 coming from King and his wife's own pockets, now worth roughly $59 million
Almost every single coin became a $1.25 meal or a bed in the forest
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To those responsible for the theft of bitcoin from the Liquid Network:
Blockstream will not pay a ransom for the return of stolen funds. Taking assets without authorization and withholding their return is a crime, not responsible disclosure. It is not white-hat activity. It is theft.
We have engaged in good faith in an effort to secure the return of stolen user funds and protect the broader Bitcoin community. That effort should not be mistaken for acceptance of the actions taken nor of the terms being demanded.
We will not be a party to the precedent that open-source software developed for the good of the Bitcoin community should subject its developers to paying a ransom that far exceeds their economic participation.
Bitcoin is hard money and can’t be minted without costs, Bitcoin doesn’t haircut users to pay a ransom.
To the Bitcoin community:
We are fighting for what we believe in, for the users whose funds were taken, and for the principles on which Bitcoin was built.
The community has demonstrated incredible resolve with teams of people dedicating their time in support of each other to identify and patch vulnerabilities in each other's products and systems. We are all driven by the mission that Bitcoin is the single best asset, for every person, company, and institution on the planet to invest, use, and build on. The world is a different place with the advancements of AI, and the Bitcoin community has responded with force to combat that threat.
Damage has been done, battles have been lost, but on the whole the Bitcoin community is gaining ground in the war with bad actors.
We want to thank the community for those efforts, for your support in hardening the network, helping users recover funds, and for your support in our assertion that crime does not deserve rewards.
To those holding the stolen bitcoin:
There is still an opportunity to resolve this responsibly. The bitcoin can be returned and we can revert to the standard of white-hat principals.
However, if the funds are not returned, we will pursue every lawful avenue available to us. We will work with law enforcement, exchanges, service providers, forensic specialists, and other relevant parties to trace and recover the assets and identify those responsible.
More importantly, Bitcoin is transparent by design and the community is made up of the most sophisticated engineers, cryptographers, and white-hat hackers globally. Transactions do not disappear, and neither does the evidence they leave behind.
We will not pay for the return of stolen property. We will not abandon our users. The Bitcoin community will not stop pursuing the funds.
Return the bitcoin.
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