Marketing

Florian Effenberger wrote:

Might be worth checking what other FLOSS organizations do and how they handle the administration of this, so we find a way to proceed.

If you look at the donation page of Blender Foundation, they have direct wallet addresses for all of their various coins: https://www.blender.org/foundation/donation-payment/

I have no idea how they convert the coins to EUR, but apparently they do not rely on companies like BitPay.

Of course it should be possible to build an automated setup using the API of a crypto exchange. It would automatically sell coins deposited to the wallet in the exchange. Maybe Blender has done something like this (they started accepting bitcoins in 2013).

What interests me is how to handle the wallet. I'm not comfortable in
having that on one's individual desk or a server, which is one of the
reasons why we use BitPay. ;-)

However, I'm no expert, so if there's a good solution to have a shared,
safe and secured wallet somewhere, happy to learn.

Florian Effenberger wrote:

What interests me is how to handle the wallet. I'm not comfortable in
having that on one's individual desk or a server, which is one of the
reasons why we use BitPay. ;-)

However, I'm no expert, so if there's a good solution to have a shared,
safe and secured wallet somewhere, happy to learn.

Just to be clear, I was not proposing we do it like Blender. It was just a data point on the question of how other orgs handle it. It was my speculation that the wallet resides in an exchange and the selling is handled automatically through an API, which would not be much different from using BitPay.

Italo Vignoli wrote:

Before making any proposal, I am trying to understand the environment, as there are dozens of different opinions on cryptocurrencies and wallets. While searching the topic, I have stumbled into donation-related services such as Liberapay (mentioned in a message), which can be used to extend the reach of our fundraising efforts, and I have created a different Redmine task [#2461].

Liberapay & co can be used by individual contributors to get additional income. If some LibO contributors decide to get into them, it is possible for us to promote their profiles in the same way GIMP does: https://www.gimp.org/news/2017/01/16/pippin-patreon-fundraising-started/

I don't see a point in using Liberapay for TDF directly.

Beluga Beluga wrote:

I don't see a point in using Liberapay for TDF directly.

As TDF uses PayPal already, it might make sense to look into recurring payments: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/paypal-payments-standard/integration-guide/subscribe_step_1/

We already use PayPal recurring payments, but there are people who do not want to use PayPal. In addition, we are looking at extending the reach of our fundraising efforts, and Liberapay has been suggested by one of these people. We are just looking at options, and not making any decision (this will be made by the BoD).

Florian Effenberger wrote:

• "I ran into information that puts CoinGate into a better light than BitPay: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7jt8iv/thank_you_coinbase_blockchaininfo_bitpay_thanks/ So BitPay still has not integrated the Segregated Witness update for Bitcoin:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SegWit Like that Reddit rant expresses, it is causing problems in the network and high fees. CoinGate, however, has supported SegWit since it became available. If you want to evaluate, I can ask CoinGate about the maximum limits."

Ok, looks like BitPay did eventually get on the SegWit boat: https://blog.bitpay.com/segwit-wallet-compatibility/

Chatted about this with Simon, I'll add an update on our plans to this ticket soon