[Noisebridge-discuss] question about bitcoins (featuring Noisebridge accounting!)

[Andy Isaacson]

On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 08:08:30PM -0700, Danny O'Brien wrote:
> TL;DR: How do I find out how many BTC have been donated to Noisebridge?


Here's what I would recommend, given the limitations of Bitcoin-QT and
the rest of the mainline wallet software packages, and the fact that the
donation account isn't currently kept in a standalone wallet.  I had the
same problem with the Noisetor donations address.

1. always record every donation conversion you have made.

2. count how many BTC were donated to the Noisebridge address.  You can
use blockchain.info or use Bitcoin-QT's "export transactions as CSV"
then use awk or a python script or a spreadsheet to add up the inbound
transactions.

3. subtract #2 - #1 to find out the current balance of the donations
account.

4. convert the balance.  Record in the same place as #1.

For Noisetor, I've sent an email to the list every time I do a
conversion.  (I should do another conversion, it's been a while.)

If you don't have a complete accurate record of every conversion per #1,
the situation gets more complicated.  We might still be able to figure
it out though.

The #2 system for counting donations has one pitfall -- if one of the
"change" transactions generated by your wallet software looped back to
the donations address (godammit), then that value would be counted
twice.  I don't know how to address this scenario.  It could be detected
by a little bit of blockchain spelunking but I'm neither going to do
that manually nor write the code to do it automatically.

-andy