this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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I'll start, I donate to a few regularly via Github sponsors. I like that it's recurring. I also donate one-off to ones as I come across them, but generally donate regularly to software I use regularly, particularly if I somehow am using that software to make money. I really like the idea of a portion of my donation going to upstream libraries, though tbh I'm not confident if Github sponsors does that or not.
I mostly donate w Bitcoin, except Github sponsors since they don't take it. I also donate to a few orgs like EFF and OpenSats which are OSS-adjacent or help OSS tools I like exist. When I see apps I like have published a new release and they announce it on nostr, I usually send them a bit via zap as well, but most apps I use aren't on nostr.
@makeasnek When I found out how easy it is to send Bitcoin on F-Droid, I started sending a couple of bucks each month to the apps I use. I wish donating was always this easy, more people would do it.
Wait, what? You can sponsor projects through fdroid? How?
Aren't there better coins with better privacy (which might be a helpful property , because being known as a generous person might make you a attractive target to charity scams attempts) and also much lower fees (monero? nano? , which reportedly has no fees) and faster transactions times? (if we are using digital currencies, we might as well try to support the best project by using it).
Look, I love privacy and I agree Bitcoin needs more of it. Many developers/OSS projects would have trouble using XMR, the off-ramps are few and far between. Bitcoin's privacy continues to get better and you can achieve significant degrees of anonymity with techniques like coinjoin etc. Lightning is pretty opaque, all the data on chain is who you opened your lightning channel with, not ANY of the transaction data between you and any other party (and remember, a single lightning channel can route payments to any other lightning user). And you can run a lightning node/wallet on an android. Long-term Bitcoin could absorb Monero's entire market cap by simply copying its privacy features into a future protocol upgrade, which I hope it does as it has with experimental protocol changes first tried on other blockchains. And the Bitcoin community seems very pro-privacy.
Monero has no functional L2 and only has "low fees" because it doesn't have the tx volume to get higher fees. Bitcoin has had a functional L2 for 5+ years now. Lightning fees are usually a penny or two per transaction, if sending large amounts, an on-chain tx is still only like $1.50 most of the time. Settlement on Monero takes minutes instead of less than a second on lightning, not that it matters for this particular use case. It doesn't have nearly the network of developers, users, or other people in the ecosystem backing it. Monero also has larger variable-sized blocks. Larger block sizes = more hardware requirements to run a node = more centralization. Bitcoin already had that debate and every other debate and chose decentralization at every turn. Monero chose bigger blocks just like Bitcoin cash did. Bigger block is not a scalable solution while remaining decentralized. No thanks. All of humanity's transactions shouldn't be stored on the blockchain for eternity, that is incredibly inefficient and needless. Nano has similar problems with design, no way to compensate those who run the infrastructure for the network, and pretty much nobody using it, and probably a massive pre-mine.
There are some fundamental problems to blockchain, digital currency, or decentralized ledgers. If you want a decentralized ledger, space is your biggest limitation. If you want more space, you get more centralization. Every other coin chose more space for "lower fees" or "faster transactions", Bitcoin chose decentralization at every possible turn (at the cost of having less space) and will continue to do so. For me, that is bar none the most important factor. And now it also has "fast transactions" and "low fees" thanks to L2s.