[ThePhysicist]

Well that's an interesting website, but honestly I think it's not possible to fund fundamental research using crowdsourcing: For example, the last group I worked in consisted of about 6 full-time researchers, 4 PhD students and about 3-6 master students / interns. The salary and infrastructure costs there probably already amount to more than 1 M$ / year. In addition, expenditures for electricity and other required materials (in our case liquid helium) amount again to several 100k$ / year. And this is just what keeps the lights on, doing actual research projects typically requires again several million dollars per project over the course of 3-5 years. To raise that amount of money through crowdsourcing seems very unrealistic and would put the scientists at the "mercy of the masses", so with all due respect I think it's not a viable idea.

There could be other interesting use cases for this kind of platform of course: I think in research education this could be a great tool to collect money for student projects at schools and universities, which in the long term will benefit science a lot by producing more scientists :) I just think that funding professional, institutionalized research is and should stay the job of the government.