[sillysaurus3]

I wish the myth that people donate to BTC addresses would hurry up and die. There are few examples of projects that receive significant donations, as far as I know. I'd love to be proven wrong about that, but when I looked at a bunch of donation addresses 6-12 months ago, no website or project got more than spare change from it.

There have been some high-profile donations made using BTC, but that's not the same thing. Rich people will give large donations regardless of the format. It wasn't because of BTC, but rather because they wanted to donate.

Some of the donation addresses received huge amounts of BTC. These obviously weren't from donations. Probably from the account holder shuffling their own money around.

I wouldn't be surprised if BTC donations were far less frequent than, say, "likes" on YouTube videos. For the average video with half a million views, ~20,000 likes isn't uncommon. And people only do that because it's free. So if, for any given "thing that half a million people look at," only about 200 of them actually donate, you can see how pitiful the returns are compared to ads. But putting up ads to profit from copyright infringement is blatantly illegal, whereas BTC donations aren't. Yet nobody will take BTC donations seriously for the same reason no one considers panhandling a sustainable living.

It probably sounds like I'm bashing Bitcoin, but I'm only trying to point out a surprising phenomenon. BTC donations seemed to have a lot of potential, yet fizzled. The reasons why are important to study.

[morsch]

Very few people have actual BTC to donate -- this is the big one. Some of those may be holding BTC as an "investment" and may be unwilling to part with it. Depending on how they hold their BTC, there may be significant friction involved in spending it, ie. in almost all cases I expect it's more difficult than entering PayPal or credit card details.

And as you note, it's not like people are super eager to donate using other methods. (And while some might say that a site like TPB, which attracts "freeloaders", is even less likely to get donations, I'm not convinced -- folks might consider TPB both a service worth paying for as well as a cause worth supporting.)

Of course, the upsides remain. It costs you nothing to post a BTC address on a site, especially if you're already handling BTC. There is no interaction with payment providers and all that jazz. There are no immediate fees. Payments are "anonymous" for both sides, with the usual and serious caveats involved in BTC transactions[0].

[0] E.g. some dude being able to audit your total donation amount from the public ledger. :) Did you write up anything from that research? It's an interesting idea.

[yownie]

It's very frictionless to spend it, effectively it acts digitally analogous to cash.

> in almost all cases I expect it's more difficult than entering PayPal or credit card details.

Best way to find out is to try! Generate and post an address here in the next 15-20 and I'd be happy to prove this wrong. (at least from the senders end)

[frabcus]

There's lots of friction on spending if it's in an offline wallet.

[yownie]

yes, so don't?

we're talking micro tipping level amounts here, 100 Euros or less stored on any modern smartphone or laptop.

[yownie]

I can't "prove you wrong" but have a personal ongoing commitment to donate small amounts monthly to projects I enjoy and like. It may be that you're judging the success of Bitcoin as a micro tipping option a bit too soon as it's just very recently been cropping up consistently on various mediums as an alternative option.

Lately it's even easier to justify as the price remains lower, spending a few Euro/Dollar's worth just for the novelty of sending such low amounts without any friction to someone I don't know anything about except I like their work.