BitBOINC

💰 What actually happens to the funds if we solve a puzzle? 💰

This question keeps coming up in different forms, so here's the real, detailed answer in one place instead of scattered across replies.

🔒 Step one, immediately: the funds get secured

The moment a puzzle is solved, the ENTIRE balance is moved to a hardware wallet (Ledger) address controlled offline, outside any exchange or hot wallet. We'll then post that address on this forum publicly, so everyone can independently verify on-chain that the full amount is there and untouched. Nothing gets spent, converted, or distributed before that.

🗳️ Step two: the community decides, by vote -- not by us

After the funds are secured, what happens to them is decided by a participatory vote, not a unilateral decision by the project. But it's not simple one-person-one-vote either -- vote weight is scaled by contribution: how much you've contributed and how long you've been part of the project. Someone who's put years of serious compute into this doesn't get the same say as someone who joined last week and ran a task or two. (Plato made this same argument a very long time ago, and it still holds: an equal vote for radically unequal contribution isn't actually fair.)

Everything gets voted on, in detail, including at minimum:
🔧 The developer's share (a floor of 10% minimum is already set; the vote decides if it should be higher).
👥 The participants' share, and exactly how it's split among contributors.
🌍 How much goes to science and nature/environmental organizations, and which specific organizations. When this actually happens, a candidate list of legitimate science, nature, and other positive-impact organizations -- both global and local (Turkey) -- will be put together first, and the community votes on which ones from that list actually get funded.
💸 The mechanics of every financial transfer involved -- nothing here is decided unilaterally, all of it goes to a vote.

🇹🇷 The real-world constraint: ~90% of this has to move through Turkey

This is where it gets genuinely complicated, and it's worth being upfront about why:

🪙 BTC or cash? Some participants will want their share in BTC directly. Others will want cash -- and if they want cash, there's a follow-up question: do they want it properly taxed and documented in Turkey, or handled another way? This itself needs a vote.

🌳 Science and nature organizations only accept cash, not crypto -- it's simply safer and more practical for them to work with. So converting BTC to fiat isn't optional for that portion, it's a hard requirement.

⚖️ Two paths for the conversion, and neither is simple

🧍 Convert it personally, as an individual -- straightforward, but a 15% tax withholding applies, and the funds pass through personal ownership before being distributed onward.

🏛️ Establish a foundation (vakıf) -- this is the option we're leaning toward exploring seriously, but it comes with real costs and real tradeoffs:
▫️ Needs a minimum of 5,000,000 TL in capital, plus purchasing an office -- no minimum staff-count requirement though, which is one thing working in our favor.
▫️ To complete setup we'd need to convert at least ~20,000,000 TL worth of BTC through proper taxation first.
▫️ Tax-exempt status can then be applied for -- but it's NOT guaranteed.
▫️ Once the foundation is established, ALL the BTC becomes foundation property. That means Turkey and the EU have direct oversight and will audit it continuously going forward. That's real bureaucratic overhead -- but it's also what actually guarantees the community's resource is protected long-term, rather than sitting in one person's control.

🌱 What a foundation would actually let us DO

If we go the foundation route, BTC gets converted to TL gradually (not dumped all at once). Turkish deposit interest rates are genuinely enormous -- large enough to cover inflation and still generate real gains on top, not just tread water -- so even the baseline "just sit in a high-interest TL deposit" option is already a legitimate income source here, not a placeholder. On top of that baseline, the real plan is to put a meaningful share into actual income-generating assets too, and run the foundation's activities off that combined income, not off the principal:

☀️ A solar power plant (GES) -- this is a genuinely well-established money-making structure in Turkey specifically: build it, sell the electricity back to the grid, and it throws off steady recurring income for years, on top of the deposit income above.
🖥️ A small datacenter -- fits naturally with what this project already is: hosting/compute infrastructure that can serve our own projects (BOINC and others) AND generate income from colocation/rented capacity on the side.
🏦 Whatever principal isn't deployed into the above still sits in high-interest TL deposits as a baseline, but it's the GES + datacenter income specifically that's meant to carry most of the ongoing activity long-term.

That combined income (deposit interest + solar + datacenter) is what funds ongoing activity -- meaning this becomes a genuinely long-term, sustainable thing, not a one-time payout:

🔬 Hire additional staff/scientists for BOINC and similar science projects.
🌲 Plant a memorial forest every month.
💧 Dig water wells in Africa.
🎓 Scholarships and equipment support for students in need, in Turkey, Africa, and parts of Asia.

Rights-holders (anyone entitled to a share) can also choose to donate their own share back into this chain instead of taking it -- anyone who does gets honorary membership in the foundation. What the foundation can eventually do is limited only by how much is actually available, which depends entirely on which puzzle we end up solving -- these are illustrative ideas, not commitments to a specific number.

🌐 One more wrinkle: not every country can receive a transfer

Sending funds to some countries isn't straightforward (China's a real example). In a case like that, if a rights-holder there wants something concrete instead -- say, an RTX 5090 -- we'd order it on their behalf and ship it. Their entitlement still gets honored, just through a different mechanism than a direct transfer.

🗳️ Bottom line

Everything above is the plan and the real considerations behind it -- not a fixed decision. The actual numbers, the exact organizations, and every mechanical detail get decided democratically, by weighted vote, AFTER we secure a real find. Deciding this in the abstract right now would just be guessing; once there's an actual amount on the table, the decision becomes a lot more concrete and a lot easier to make well.

Questions and pushback welcome below -- this is exactly the kind of thing that should get stress-tested by the community before it's ever needed for real. 🙏

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