Payment Option: Cryptocurrency

[eljefuri]

I would like to donate cryptocurrency to assist with Elementary's development. It would be nice if you included actual custodial wallet addresses on the get-involved page. If you prefer a non-custodial wallet, I suggest setting up a Coinbase account and look into setting up one of their payment buttons for donations.

Please remember that many people around the world do not have access to something like PayPal or the Visa/Mastercard network. And, increasingly, individuals are choosing to purposely opt out of such monopolistic platforms in favor of the global, open alternatives that are being offered by free software-based blockchain networks.

Thanks for your consideration!

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[lewisgoddard]

We did originally support this with #978 but then Stripe dropped support and we didn't find anything to replace it. Maybe @danrabbit or @cassidyjames have numbers on how many payments were made with that, but I think the decision was it wasn't enough to be worth pursuing.

Side note: BountySource is used to make bounties on elementary issues and I'm pretty sure it takes cryptocurrency now.

[eljefuri]

@lewisgoddard Yes, I am aware. However, a centralized, proprietary platform like Stripe (or Coinbase for that matter) is not required to be able to accept cryptocurrencies. A wallet is effectively a keypair for a given network which can be generated by completely free software.

About how many payments were made with it: I'd argue strongly that a metric like that is not important considering the negligible cost of creating a wallet, and the possible signaling returns. But for what it's worth, your single largest donation was made in a cryptocurrency, on behalf of the community of a decentralized free software network (Ethereum) that plays literal host to hundreds of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets.

Demonstrating that you are on the right side of history with this will engender support from what is an increasingly wealthy and powerful community of people who share your general aims with respect to privacy, freedom, and open source. It's worth it.

[eljefuri]

Re: Bountysource, they have supported Bitcoin for years, but with CanYa's acquisition they will clearly be doing quite a lot more. Recently they added support for Ethereum ERC20 tokens, and I suspect because of the CAN token model, they may completely focus on cryptocurrency some day. The problem is that at the moment, they cannot handle mixed crypto/fiat bounties so I feel a bit terrible monopolizing issues: This effectively closes them off to (majority) fiat donors. When they fix that I will use the platform again. Meanwhile, I am doing it manually in cases that seem especially important.