Open Source Collective Is Disabling Contributions in Cryptocurrencies

delirious_owl, 2 months ago

Yeah that was like a year ago.

They didn’t say why, but I think the risk was money laundering. Like creating a project and you yourself donating to it.

rafael_xmr, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

fwiw Open Collective still manages crypto funds/grants for projects, I just saw this recently: blog.orhun.dev/open-source-funding-with-ratatui/ the Ratatui project set up a Open Collective to handle donations from the “DRIPS network” crypto

edit: also just looked more at the blog’s site and at the donation page Crypto only has Monero ;) donate.orhun.dev love it @orhun !

orhun, 2 months ago

@rafael_xmr @edisondotme Haha, thanks!

I think our case was a bit special due to the fact that we explored this option together with OC. They might update their documentation to officially support it soon.

rafael_xmr, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

That is awesome, thank you for the write up and setting the precedent with an open mind!

Their initial reasoning makes sense, with their crypto earnings being only 1.4% of the total usage, while technically having to manage the services to handle incoming payments for all different asset, and all mainstream coins having traceability as a feature making dealing with it way more complicated, so if they looked at it impartially and not politically biased they should definitely consider having a Monero only option by default, which curiously was also missing from the initial implementation, where I can send money I purchased, received or mined and no one can ever receive “tainted funds” but rather just receive digital cash, as like cash it is money that can move from various different hands without a trace, which then can all be equally spent to pay developers, goods, services, etc. and not face risk of what the real origin of funds is. It should come with the intent to be a saner option for payments rather than accepting many coins at once just for the sake of accepting it.

but I hope the Drips approach has success

delirious_owl, 2 months ago

Wut? They stopped accepting crypto. So you have a link at OC that says otherwise?

rafael_xmr, 2 months ago

As per docs they removed this option for individual users to contribute using crypto as a payment method: docs.opencollective.com/help/…/crypto but they still manage crypto assets, as shown by the recent Ratatui invoice paid by the “drips network” opencollective.com/ratatui/contributions/751695

delirious_owl, 2 months ago

How do you get them if not through contributions tho?

rafael_xmr, 2 months ago

it was explained in the blog post I shared, but Ratatui’s share come from this: drips.network/…/346259836829509772108470963678163… so the Radicle project decided to split a certain value between all dependencies the project uses, and “Drips” is an ethereum based contract that is supposed to distribute a percentage to each projects “address” but in this case how I think it’s working is OpenCollective is the one holding the keys to the address that the smart contract sends funds to, so they basically collect the amount earned and send it to the project’s owner in this case Ratatui, otherwise that would be “lost” if no one were to claim those funds, and if Drips is contract based it means there is no one holding and distributing the rewards so this is why you have to claim the funds from the contract, and it’s why it’s not a direct contribution in my mind but also the difference is the previous support to crypto was native in the OpenCollective app and this is what is now disabled, but this is just an example of them receiving and holding funds via crypto means still

itsmect, 2 months ago

The major issue is the low market share of crypto and the higher effort required to get USD. If you want USD, Monero can not fix this. So whenever you can offer your goods and services in XMR natively to lesser the dependence on fiat ever so slightly.

survivalmachine, 2 months ago

How does XMR prevent transactions from sanctioned nations?

admin, 2 months ago

How does anyone accepting cash donations prevent donations from sanctioned nations?

Also pretty sure that Ukraine has gotten a bunch of donations from Russian citizens (who faced consequences if they used traceable means of payment).

survivalmachine, 2 months ago

I don’t know. You’re the one making fantastic claims. The onus is on you to back them up.

XmrLovingAncap, 2 months ago

Why should it? If I want to send money to a person, that’s noone’s business except mine and of the person receiving it.

survivalmachine, 2 months ago

I’m not making the claim that it is. Open Source Collective had an account shut down because they received a crypto donation from a sanctioned country. They decided to stop accepting crypto because of that incident. OP has made the claim that XMR has already solved all the problems they describe. I question that claim.

admin, 2 months ago

If you receive a donation through the Ethereum anonymization contract Tornado Cash, everyone can see that and since the contract is also used by sanctioned states like North Korea, all funds going through Tornado Cash were put on a sanctions list (pretty easy since they only needed to sanction the contract address). Monero is different in the sense that it has privacy by default and while you might be able to point out that some criminals use Monero, you can’t really prove it directly with the blockchain like you can with Tornado Cash.

Imagine the government sees that a ton of people, including known terrorists were all sending credit card payments to the same guy, who mixes everyones money together to hide it’s origin (now he is the origin though) and now money from that place of origin is used to fund attacks on the government but also to donate to kids with cancer. Of course the guy will have to be arrested and all the money that went through him marked as sanctioned.

Monero on the other hand works as an independent version of cash, not tied to any nation but instead governed by cryptography and code, which are protected by the First Amendment. If a government doesn’t like Monero, they can still easily make access to Monero very complicated via laws that prevent centralized exchanges from listing it, and they do, but outright sanctioning the whole network could be very, very hard and might literally be impossible without trampling all over free speech laws.

chillband, 2 months ago

No, how would that be possible? Exchange can block you if you are you send/receive transactions from sanctioned countries.

nabio, 2 months ago

How does XMR prevent transactions from sanctioned nations?

how does cash or digital cash(XMR) prevent transactions? your question doesn’t make much sense

it would be like asking a 20$ dollar bill to stop being transacted from someone sanctioned. A 20$ dollar bill itself cannot discriminate who is using it. You give that 20$ bill to someone and they don’t know the history of that 20$ bill, you don’t know who used it before and that’s why everyone can take it, because this means they know they will be able to use it.

when something is fungible like cash or digital cash(XMR), law enforcement needs to find other ways to stop what they considered sanctioned nations or criminals or bad people or whatever.