Donate via Bitcoin

General
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Thank you @calmh about the reponse. I see your points, about the “take it to the manager” attitude. The main reason for it was that you said “I’m not sure why there needs to be a fruitful discussion”, therefor if you don’t want to discuss it maybe another does :slight_smile: I don’t see how it translate to me only caring about bitcoin agenda.

Anyway, thank you for your input, if anyone does want to have a fruitful discussion, I’ll be happy to give my knowlage. The main points are:

  1. It is very easy to add these donations
  2. I can not see how it can harm synchthing (beside bitcoin as detriment to humanity [ if one belives in it])
  3. There are other projected added this option: LibreOffice, Wikipedia

Thanks for your comments @imsodin and @ AudriusButkevicius @ calmh I really Love syncthing good work.

@imsodin I will not punish you to much with data about POW, but just refer a paper: https://assets.ctfassets.net/2d5q1td6cyxq/5mRjc9X5LTXFFihIlTt7QK/e7bcba47217b60423a01a357e036105e/BCEI_White_Paper.pdf

Anyway, it’s great to have the responses, next time someone will want to bring it up, he could see that there is about 0.8 that oppose it, that is enough for not trying in the next couple of years (until Amazon will start to accept it at least :wink: )

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I personally have no strong opinion on the matter, but I am certain that there are people who like to donate in a (semi-)anonymous way. This is currently impossible. Having a more anonymous way of donating would not be bad, at least in my opinion, but whether this is Bitcoin or something else, I have no specific preferences.

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I don’t see why donating to syncthing needs to he anonymous in the first place.

It’s not like we keep a tally of who donated and who didn’t so that it would matter. The details of the person who donated are not public either, so it’s anonymous as far you should be concerned.

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It doesn’t “need” to be. It is just that there are people who are unwilling to give out their credit card numbers (unless absolutely necessary) and prefer to use anonymous methods. Also, those who are extremely privacy protective are not going to use a service like Stripe (or anything similar) to send money through the Internet either.

Syncthing itself is used by the privacy-cautious crowd (among others), which can easily be seen in all the forum threads about disabling global discovery, relaying, etc., which surface from time to time. How many potential donors belong there, I don’t know, but it is just something to think about.

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Given that we all live on the same planet, we should try not to turn it into an uninhabitable rock. Supporting this colossal waste of energy is insanity:

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it would be interesting to know, at least approximately, how many people would only donate using alternate methods such as bitcoin.

would you at least have interest in that?

ps: even bitcoin can’t possibly be less sustainable than any other non-automated mean, since fiat always requires more human labor.

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Well, see, here’s the thing. There are things we need to purchase day to day to live and work – food, clothes, fuel, various computer trinkets and whatnot, broadband, and so on (assuming we’re talking people who participate on this forum, use Syncthing, and would donate to us). Essentially none of those things are available via bitcoin, so I’ll assume that all of you have normal means of payment.

The set of people who “would only donate using alternate methods such as bitcoin” then boils down to those with a strong interest in bitcoin and in pushing bitcoin as a technology over other concerns. That’s an ideological point of view. You’re welcome to have that point of view. It’s not a point of view I’m interested in catering to.

So, no, I’m not at all interested in how many bitcoin enthusiasts refuse to donate unless we permit them to do so via bitcoin.

And, since I’m already seeing people join the forum just to participate in this discussion – if there suddenly happens to appear a mob of people all voicing that they’d all donate lots if only we accepted bitcoin but never otherwise … there’s a banhammer somewhere around here.

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Separate, official, moderation style notice: as mentioned previously, this will not devolve into a general discussion of bitcoin’s advantages and disadvantages vs fiat or other altcoins. Discuss that somewhere else.

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Sorry to inform you, this is incorrect. I buy my groceries using bitcoin. I tried to donate to SyncThing just now. If SyncThing won’t accept bitcoin as a way to accept donations, that’s fine. As long as you accept Visa, that’s good enough, or so I thought. I was wrong. I tried. Here’s what I did:

I wanted to donate $1.00 USD using a Visa card. I tried to buy a prepaid Visa card using paywithmoon . com, but they have a $5.00 minimum. I did not want to donate $5.00, so I bought an $11.00 prepaid card instead, spent $10.00 of it on a gift card I would use elsewhere, and had $1.00 remaining on the prepaid paywithmoon card. When I went to the Donations page at SyncThing, when I went to enter the $1.00 amount, I immediately saw a problem. I wanted to donate $1.00 USD, and the only option to donate was in Euros (€). I don’t know the conversion rates, don’t care to spend the time figuring that out, so tried putting in “1.00” hoping it would go through. It failed. Screenshot of error message.

If you don’t want to accept bitcoin donations, that’s fine. You just won’t receive any donations from me, or countless unbanked others like me. Thank you for building a great product.

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Thank you all for your opinions, I think we’ve all expressed them clearly on both sides of the issue, and I think it’s time to call this thread completed.

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