I now see that my misunderstanding was about who exactly the users were and who the provider was. My opinion of provider was only GCE, AWS, etc. while the commenter I believe when talking about providers included users of those services (who again were providers of serverless services).
The "alpha proof of concept" enables a certain amount of sandbox playability that no other game can replicate. Even in short play sessions, I've had an insane amount of fun figuring out if I can do things that simply wouldn't work in other games, and plenty of others on YouTube have done crazier. (A personal favorite was someone boarding an NPC ship.)
I can't speak for everyone else, but I backed an idea. I gave money to someone who wanted to assemble a game with an unprecedented amount of flexibility and realism. Whether or not that actually makes a "good game" in the end. I invested in something I want to see happen. If it does not happen, that will be unfortunate, and I will be sad. But given that what they are trying to do is borderline insane, it will not be totally shocking if they fail.
As far as I understand, at best you can subtract your donations from your income, so you won't have to pay income taxes on those donations. Even if you can subtract the donation directly from your taxes, you still lose the same amount of money.
Either way the philanthropist loses at least as much money as the taxes he would've paid without the donations.
From other comments: Vanguard's 500 index manages ~500 billion (dmoy), Gates is worth ~100 billion (kevindqc). Even so, Vanguard can't just increase their fund by 20% like that.
Right you're sorta missing the point though. Vanguard outside of the s&p 500 has another 3.5 trillion or something. They could absorb bill gates net worth.
Apparentle the Alphabay moron had his real hotmail address in the welcome e-mail they used to send and the same nick on another message board with more personal details as well. Massive OPSEC failure.
I'm sorry but if your business is running an illegal drug market and you're sending out account emails with your real name and year of birth from a non-burner email, I think "moron" is probably a pretty apt description.
