from Hacker News

The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

by kenny_r on 11/2/14, 9:14 PM with 75 comments

• by geofft on 11/2/14, 11:04 PM

  I think what strikes me as the large-scale problem here is that some people are baffled by the concept that not wanting money might be a rational decision. As a completely different example of the same decision being rational, let's remember when Tarsnap wasn't accepting Canadian customers (despite a presumably sizable potential market) because dealing with Canadian sales tax law was too much overhead. Even if the path to accepting money legally is clear and well-documented, it still might not be worth it.

  Not to mention I've heard stories of developers whose motivation to work on open-source projects has gone _down_ since getting paid, since it makes it seem like work instead of a hobby.

  There is a worldview that seems to me to be prevalent in the cryptocurrency community (I don't know which direction causation runs, but there's certainly a bit of correlation) that everyone wants micropayments and microtips -- cf. the tip bots on Reddit. It's not uncommon to see the tipbots get downvoted, and the tippers to be completely confused why someone might think it unwanted or off-topic. http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/234ds8/tipping_in_...

• by wdewind on 11/2/14, 9:39 PM

  TLDR; there are two problems with tip4commit:

  1. The obvious, that they are collecting funds on behalf of other people's work and then keeping them when the funds go 'unclaimed'

  2. Even if you do want to claim it, they don't make it easy, and for someone in a complicated tax country (like the author, Austria) there is almost no way he could accept the money without incurring some kind of risk. So basically when they are keeping money that goes unclaimed it's very problematic because they don't make the money easy to claim in the first place. Obvious incentives issues.

  Point 2 is what this article is about.

• by unclesaamm on 11/3/14, 12:49 AM

  A recap of some important facts about tip4commit that weren't clear to me when this all started:

  1) That they collect a 1% service fee on donations.

  2) That they donate 1% of a project's pool for any given committer, which leads to this exponential decay where they never quite have 0 balance for any given project.

  If enough donors use tip4commit, that is potentially a lot of bitcoin pennies that is just sloshing around their server.

• by anton000 on 11/3/14, 4:45 AM

  "The vocal people in the community seem like they don't actually care about Bitcoin, but they want to see it succeed so that their "investment" makes a profit."

  Im into Bitcoin, and I agree with this view. Most specially the reddit based bitcoin community.

• by mangecoeur on 11/3/14, 2:01 PM

  It's nice to see someone who isn't on a hype-high over Bitcoin for a change. I still don't see why people think that a new unregulated currency would be somehow free of all the problems and abuses that prompted all the regulation of existing currencies in the first place - y'know, tax, fraud, customer protection, money laundering, market rigging, etc etc...

• by freework on 11/3/14, 2:08 AM

  I don't understand this whole controversy. The the amount of money donate to you is so small (like under a dollar over the course of a year) then you don't need to declare it on any tax forms. If a random person on the street gives you a quarter, you on't need to report that on taxes, nor do you have to report a 0.00017 BTC donation.

  On the other hand, if the donation is big (say in the thousands USD), I can see why someone could decide to not accept the donation because they don't wan to report it on their taxes. An easy solution to this problem is to NOT TAKE THE DONATION. If you don't take the money, you don't have to report anything. The tip4commit site supposedly states if a developer doesn't accept a donation the money goes back to the 'project pool' where it will get donated to another developer on that project.

• by muyuu on 11/2/14, 11:33 PM

  Sorry Armin/Mr Ronacher/Mitsuhiko but your "Bitcoin is Wild West" rant is unwarranted.

  Your problem has little to do with Bitcoin and all to do with the fact that a bunch of guys signed you up to their payment service without your consent.

• by baddox on 11/3/14, 1:33 AM

  > The problem was on one hand something I did not opt into (and there not being a way to opt out of) this tipping system and that it's a completely unregulated space that can cause me troubles I could have avoided otherwise.

  While I have no qualm about his desire to avoid tip4commit, I find the mention of "unregulated space" peculiar. It seems that he is worried, and probably prudently so, about the fact that this space is highly regulated, not that it is unregulated.

• by alexruf on 11/3/14, 1:41 PM

  Since I am from Germany and our banking and tax system is quite similar to the Austrian, I totally agree with Armin in each single point!

  Maybe not exactly what Armin described as a solution - but did you already check Flattr (https://flattr.com/)? This also might work for supporting OpenSource projects.

• by atmosx on 11/2/14, 11:32 PM

  I envy this guy for living in a country where you can say things like that:

  The reason I bring this up is because our taxes are very high, but I get something for that money. It might not be the perfect system and there are lots of things about it that make me furious, but I do not see a reason why I would want to stop paying taxes.

  That must be one heck of a feeling. Gives me hope for the future.

• by Animats on 11/2/14, 11:34 PM

  Well, actually you can ignore Bitcoin.

• by firepacket on 11/3/14, 5:35 AM

  This was a painful read.

  He says he "doesn't want to be educated about bitcoin" because "he's heard all the arguments", while at the same time claiming it's a "terrible currency (or not a currency at all)" without any further reasoning.

  This poor guy needs to be educated if he thinks that avoiding taxes, regulations, and credit card fees are the only applications.

  Common decency dictates that if you openly state you are unwilling to learn about something, you should refrain from posting opinionated articles about that thing.