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?
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.
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).
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.
Monero is much more private than any other donation method besides mailing someone cash.
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.
