Can you donate bitcoin to charity?

Yes. The IRS treats virtual currency such as bitcoin as property. Its FAQ says a donor who gives virtual currency to a qualifying charity under Internal Revenue Code Section 170(c) does not recognize income, gain or loss on the donation.

How is a crypto donation deduction calculated?

Per the IRS FAQ, if the donor held the crypto for more than one year, the deduction is generally its fair market value at the time of the gift. If held one year or less, it is the lesser of the donor's basis or fair market value.

Do crypto donations over $5,000 need an appraisal?

Yes. IRS Chief Counsel Advice 202302012 (January 2023) concluded that a donor claiming more than $5,000 for donated cryptocurrency needs a qualified appraisal, and that an exchange's listed price does not replace it.

What does a nonprofit have to file after receiving crypto?

The IRS FAQ says charities treat crypto as a noncash contribution, report it on their Form 990-series return and Schedule M if applicable, sign a donor's Form 8283 for claimed gifts over $5,000 when asked, and file Form 8282 if they sell the crypto within three years.

Are crypto donations public?

On transparent ledgers like Bitcoin, sender, receiver and amount are publicly visible. Zcash's documentation says fully shielded transactions encrypt the addresses and amount, while viewing keys let the owner share details with auditors.

Impact · Policy

The 2021 Child Tax Credit cut child poverty nearly in half — then Congress let it lapse

By C∞A∞I∞O · Published Nov 4, 2026 · Last updated Nov 4, 2026 · C∞A∞I∞O is not affiliated with any government body, university or funder named here. This is general information, not legal, tax or policy advice.

In 2021, the United States ran the largest one-year reduction in child poverty ever measured — and then switched it off. The expanded Child Tax Credit sent monthly cash to nearly all families with children, and child poverty fell by roughly half. When Congress let it expire at the end of 2021, child poverty more than doubled within a year. The evidence is now about as clean as social policy gets: direct cash to families with children is the highest-ROI anti-poverty tool we have measured. New AI-era funds should fund children directly before they fund more studies.

Key facts

The American Rescue Plan's expanded Child Tax Credit paid up to $300 per child per month from July to December 2021.
Columbia University's Center on Poverty and Social Policy estimated monthly child poverty fell about 46% while the payments ran, with child poverty at its lowest recorded level.
After the credit expired in December 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau reported child poverty (Supplemental Poverty Measure) jumped from a record-low 5.2% in 2021 to 12.6% in 2022 — more than doubling.
The IRS distributed the payments automatically to roughly 61 million children, using tax records rather than a new application bureaucracy.
Research found no meaningful drop in parental employment attributable to the payments.

What the 2021 expansion actually did

The Child Tax Credit has existed since 1997, but two design choices limited its reach: it was not fully refundable, so the poorest families — with little or no federal income tax liability — got little or nothing, and it arrived once a year at tax time. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 changed both. From July to December 2021, eligible families received up to $300 per month for each child under 6 and up to $250 per month for each child aged 6–17, paid by the IRS in advance. The credit became fully refundable, which extended it to the families who needed it most — the group the old credit structurally excluded.

The delivery mechanism mattered as much as the money. The IRS used existing tax records to reach about 61 million children, with a simple non-filer portal for families outside the tax system. There was no new agency, no application gauntlet, no means-testing bureaucracy to build. Cash moved, and it moved fast.

Child poverty fell by nearly half — then more than doubled

Columbia University's Center on Poverty and Social Policy tracks monthly poverty in the U.S. Its analyses found that while the monthly payments ran, child poverty fell by roughly 30% in the first month and about 46% at the peak, reaching the lowest levels ever recorded — with Black and Hispanic children seeing the largest percentage-point declines. The Center estimated that in December 2021 alone, the payments kept roughly 3.7 million children out of poverty.

Then the program ended. Senator Joe Manchin's opposition sank the Build Back Better extension, and the last payment went out on December 15, 2021. The Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure — which counts cash and in-kind benefits and is the more honest gauge of hardship — showed the result: child poverty fell to a record-low 5.2% in 2021, then more than doubled to 12.6% in 2022, the largest one-year increase on record. Roughly 5 million children fell back below the poverty line in a single year, not because of a recession or a war, but because a payment stopped.

That is about as close to a controlled experiment as social policy offers: one variable — monthly cash — switched on, measured, switched off, measured again. The effect sizes line up on both sides of the switch.

What the money did, and what it didn't do

The most common objection to direct cash is that families will not spend it on children. The spending data says otherwise. Studies of the 2021 payments, including work summarized by Columbia's Center on Poverty and Social Policy, found families overwhelmingly spent the money on food, housing, utilities, clothing and school supplies — with spending on alcohol and tobacco showing no increase. Parents with the least saw the largest relief.

The second objection is that guaranteed cash reduces work. Here the 2021 expansion was a live test, and the employment effect was small to nil: multiple analyses found no meaningful decline in parental employment during the payment months. Compare that with the cost of child poverty itself. Researchers have long estimated that childhood poverty costs the U.S. economy on the order of $1 trillion per year in lost earnings, worse health and higher crime — roughly 5% of GDP. A program that cut child poverty nearly in half for roughly $100 billion a year does not need heroic assumptions to clear a benefit-cost bar. It is one of the highest-ROI anti-poverty interventions ever measured at national scale.

Why this matters for AI-era funding

A wave of new money is forming around AI — safety funds, public-benefit funds, and fortunes larger than the annual budgets of mid-sized countries. The default instinct of institutional funders is to fund research, convenings and pilot studies. But child poverty is not a knowledge problem. We ran the study. It was called 2021, it had 61 million participants, and it produced the cleanest before-and-after data the field has: cash to families with children cuts child poverty roughly in half, and removing it doubles child poverty within a year.

Every additional year spent commissioning more evidence is a year in which roughly 1 in 8 American children lives in poverty — a condition we already know how to relieve, with a delivery mechanism (the IRS) that already exists and already proved it could move the money. The marginal dollar spent on another study of child cash transfers buys almost no information. The marginal dollar sent to a family buys food, keeps the lights on, and measurably reduces the chance a child grows up poor.

If a new fund wants maximum measurable impact per dollar, the sequence is backwards from convention: fund children directly first, then study whatever remains genuinely unknown. The 2021 Child Tax Credit is the proof that this works — and the 2022 child-poverty spike is the proof of what happens when we stop.