Waaay early on when cryptocurrencies were regarded as being possible alternative currencies it may have made sense, but now as they appear to have become more like extremely questionable investment products/securities, I’m left confused why anyone still has donation links for them alongside alternatives that provide, y’know, usable money (e.g. Ko-fi/Liberapay/etc.).
Are the donation links I’m seeing just a web artifact like the occasional Google+ share icon on some sites, or is there something more at play?
I have absolutely no interest in owning cryptocurrency but if anybody wanted to donate some ETH or BTC or USDC or XKCD or MPH or whatever to me, I’d take it, sure (and then exchange for real world money, obviously). Why would you reject free money? Especially if you’re a smaller project that doesn’t get too many donations anyway.
Why would you reject free money?
Because it’s as likely to be worthless as worth anything at all? One of the many problems with cryptocurrency is its volatile valuation…Which is a knock-on result of its failure to function as a currency at all for the most part. It’s a lot less like free money and more like free arcade tokens to an arcade that’s as likely to be shut down for health & safety as it is to have any functioning machines at all.
Yeah, I should probably qualify and say “one of the bigger, more stable currencies”. From what I know about this stuff, which isn’t very much admittedly, those seem worthwhile if you don’t plan to keep them anyway. I don’t care about volatility if I’m not hodling, do I?
They are being treated just like every other method to send someone money. They aren’t using them as investment products, just transaction tools. I’m sure most are pulling the money out of the cryptocurrency as soon as they receive it.
Removed by mod
My thinking was mainly that due to the values being volatile and the trend of people being encouraged to treat it as an investment instead of currency that it just wouldn’t see many donations anyway. On the rare occasion someone may have donated, it may be such a minimal amount that it may not even result in much of anything after whatever processing fees may be involved.
At least with more widely used currencies there’s the accepted use of them primarily as currencies and there may be fewer conversions/processing fees involved (albeit this may vary & I suppose this may be where crypto finds its space).
You realize that every form of donation platform takes fees right?
Yes, but from my understanding, at least depending on the cryptocurrency involved, this can be either similar to those or worse at times. With the more popular cryptocurrencies in particular it seems to lean towards worse.
Monero is much more private than any other donation method besides mailing someone cash.
Mail stil has to go to a physical address, it’s also not trustless as the mailman could pocket the cash. Monero addresses aren’t tied to a real world location, just whoever knows the key and there is no mailman to trust for delivery.
Cryptocurrency now is closer to being a real money alternative than ever before. Many banks are considering creating their own central bank digital currency to rival some of the benefits cryptocurrencies offer.
Anyone who still has an address up keeps it because
- It costs nothing to own a crypto wallet/recieve funds
- Cryptocurrency has no borders so anyone can donate
- Crypto currently counts as an asset and often isnt taxed until cashed out into a fiat currency.
There’s a project I’m using that has a lead dev from Russia, so for him that’s the only way to receive money. Crypto has been overwhelmingly overtaken by grifters, but there are still uses that just made easier by a decentralized currency.
Since you don’t want to use cryptocurrencies no one else should /s
I’ve donated plenty via crypto so haven’t seen it as an issue, if the receiver is cool with it then why not? Also for me it’s better than anything PayPal related, I’ve been banned on their platform so whenever I see any PayPal/Venmo links I just don’t donate since it’s impossible for me.
And of course if the receiver doesn’t want crypto that’s fine too, but hopefully they are accepting donations via some method I can donate with. The whole point is to be able to accept donations via some method both sender & receiver can work with.
I’ve donated over 300$ in crypto, which is 300$ more than I would have without those links existing
Was that because you otherwise couldn’t have via $ like something to do with nationality, or you just happened to have it sitting around from being an early adopter…?
Your perception of the status of cryptocurrencies seems to be from within a bubble.
So because Wall Street says it can’t be money that means it isn’t?
Well yea. Money is a unit of denomination, a means to transact, and a store of value. Crypto is none of those three
It is if at least two people say it is. Rocks with holes in them were money once, but nobody today would agree it is so today it isn’t. If say least two people agree that something is money then it is by definition regardless of what a Wall Street sociopath says.
