Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023

I was looking at neovim's donation footer at the bottom of their site and saw a bitcoin donation address. Thought I'd check how much in donations they've gotten. And I saw this massive 10 Bitcoin donation from back in…

320 points•jakemanger•14 days ago•277 comments•

#neovim #x2f #bitcoin #donation #x27 #bitcoin donation #sitting #since

I was looking at neovim's donation footer at the bottom of their site and saw a bitcoin donation address.

Thought I'd check how much in donations they've gotten. And I saw this massive 10 Bitcoin donation from back in 2023 (worth $800,000 now...)

From the activity history, neovim last sent bitcoin out of the address in 2019 so it's been max 7 years since they've definitely had access.

Does anyone from the neovim project know about this? Seems like a pretty significant amount of funding to have sitting there. Hope it can come to good use as I use neovim daily.

https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1Evu6wPrzjsjrNPdCYbHy3HT6ry2EzXFyQ

277 comments

ashkankiani13 days ago

For a reference point, when I was unemployed and between jobs, I got involved with Neovim for fun, and after some contributions, I eventually tried some full(ish)-time paid work. I wrote the native lua LSP client (:h vim.lsp, and the nvim-lspconfig repo) for Neovim in a few weeks for about $3k USD (circa 2019)? This amount could fund quite a lot of work to be sure.

justinmk12 days ago

> wrote the native lua LSP client ... in a few weeks for about $3k USD (circa 2019)

That extrapolation is missing the 1000s (thousands) of commits + person-years of work spent on maturing vim.lsp since those few weeks.

Hope to see you around again norcalli.

ashkankiani12 days ago

Yes, sorry, I should've said "first version of the built-in lua lsp." I basically laid down the foundations of a house and you guys built the rest of it, haha. No one wants to live in just the foundations except for the brave ones who can imagine the future shape of the house.

I'm slowly starting to come out of my shell again.

commandersaki13 days ago

Thank you, built in LSP is invaluable.

matesz14 days ago

I’ve read so many news stories of people gone missing who had been know to have sole access to bitcoin wallets with large amount of bitcoins in them.

I wonder how people at large crypto exchanges handle that. Perhaps shamir share the access to the pkey password and store parts at secure places like a bank? And make official access protocol akin to dnssec, but simplified?

jackb404014 days ago

I worked at a crypto exchange, yes we used shamir shares. But probably not as sophisticated as you're thinking, there was basically one big "break glass" text document with all the keys. And then a hand-rolled software on each person's laptop to distribute the plain text and run / practice the 3/5 recovery ceremony. So anyone losing their device would be equivalent to someone quitting and require its own ceremony to reissue a key, but I don't think that ever actually happened.

We explored using smart contracts to have logic perform the 3/5 consensus rather than a cryptosystem, but that was never rolled out while I was there. Social recovery wallets in general did not take off, which was a big learning moment for me that very few people actually cared about the technology and what they really wanted was an app with as many gambling features as possible that uploaded their keys to google drive.

IAmBroom14 days ago

> Social recovery wallets in general did not take off, which was a big learning moment for me that very few people actually cared about the technology and what they really wanted was an app with as many gambling features as possible that uploaded their keys to google drive.

People who are not HN-profile never care about the technology, and always care about usable, convenient features. The shocker is: most HN-profile people feel the same way.

Also see: https://m.xkcd.com/2501/

ecesena13 days ago

A better solution (than Shamir secret sharing) are threshold signatures.

The difference is that with Shamir you have to reconstruct the private key in one place before you can sign. With threshold signatures multiple servers can collaboratively sign without ever reconstructing the private key in a single place.

For chains like Solana, Aptos, SUI that use ed25519 (schnorr signature), there's a pretty clean solution called FROST.

For Bitcoin and Ethereum/EVMs that use ECDSA it's a bit trickier but there's been a lot of research recently, so there are solutions.

imhoguy14 days ago

Worse when crypto exchange bosses go missing https://archive.is/lPpRz

TheSkyHasEyes13 days ago

Or this. https://www.osc.ca/quadrigacxreport/

krageon14 days ago

Large exchanges handle this very simply: If they have the keys, it goes to the inheritor(s) once they get a court order. If they do not, it goes nowhere

slipwalker14 days ago

but what sort of people keep their bitcoins on the exchange ? the whole point is about not being seizable by dirty governments...

seymon14 days ago

I hope they still have the private key.

osigurdson14 days ago

It is an interesting fact about Bitcoin in general. There are 21M tokens in total AND some percentage are lost every year. Run this simulation long enough and there will be very few active Bitcoins remaining.

bryanlarsen14 days ago

21M is the theoretical cap. At the moment there are 20M and more are constantly being mined. Miners have to convert bitcoin into real currency to pay for their electricity both for mining and transaction fees. This means that there is always a supply of bitcoin for sale. Which is fine if there is still demand for new bitcoin, but who's buying bitcoin these days? It has underperformed both the S&P 500 and gold over the last 5 years. I expect bitcoin inflation to continue. (AKA the bitcoin price to continue to go down).

jackb404014 days ago

Worth pointing out that the monetary policy of bitcoin is not written in stone; all you need to change it is a majority of hashpower. The current chain of bitcoin mainnet includes hard forks, like this one due to miners' manual intervention over a software bug that was exploited: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...

Roark6614 days ago

Seems pretty silly to build in deflation into a currency. It incentivises putting your money in a mattress for 100 years.

derangedHorse14 days ago

Tail emissions and infinite divisibility are proposals to address this.

eru14 days ago

Well, they are infinitely divisible in principle, so it doesn't matter too much.

(At the moment, there's a smallest fraction you can send on the network, but they can change that.)

jakemanger14 days ago

Really hope so too. Would be devastating

orliesaurus14 days ago

Eventually with quantum computing we will be able to recover those wallets right? (Technically)

tigereyeTO14 days ago

That depends on whether the public key has been exposed.

Bitcoin addresses encode the ripemd160 hash of the public key, so by default when payments are made to new addresses they are not quantum crackable.

But when someone spends from an address they publish the public key to the chain as part of the spend. From then on, any new deposits sent to the same address are at risk of quantum attack

thih914 days ago

Technically it might be more profitable to mine extraterrestrial diamonds.

rbreve14 days ago

at this point bitcoin will be worthless

wavemode13 days ago

well, I just emailed the project just to see if they're aware of it

part of me feels like this is most likely a defunct wallet and nobody involved with the project has the keys anymore

jakemanger13 days ago

If so they better take it off their site footer so donations don’t get wasted. Let us know if they respond

tosti13 days ago

At least a part of it should go to Kibaale Children's Centre imho.

xanthine13 days ago

I got the Bram Moolenar reference.

jakemanger13 days ago

Loved the time of Bram’s belligerent dictatorship (BDFL)

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277 comments

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