Ask HN: Receiving crypto(with Coinbase) to fund OSS? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Receiving crypto(with Coinbase) to fund OSS?

2 pointshutzlibu5 comments

I have a (quite big) OSS project I am about to publish, and want to make at least some money with it through donations - and since that usually works out quite limited, I want to offer as many funding channels as possible, to at least get something in the end. So I also want the crypto option, but do not want to have the extra work of setting everything up and securing it.

So I want to add some crypto wallets on the "funding page", of where people could send crypto to me.

Coinbase seems like a good solution as it seems, I could receive virtually all the different crypto coins through it. But it is a bit confusing as it seems a new wallet gets generated every time I click "receive" (for privacy reasons). So I would assume, that all those wallets are still connected to my account, but I want to be sure and the coinbase support is useless.

So has anyone experience with it, or other recommendations on how to proceed?

I don't really know about Coinbase, so apologies if this advice is not welcome.

What I think is that most people would donate Bitcoin anyway so supporting many different cryptocurrencies wouldn't necessarily increase the likelihood of a donation that much. With this assumption just setting up BTC is enough and this is very easy to do.

You literally just have to generate a key pair, which is done automatically by the Bitcoin client. Your public key will be your address, which you will post online to receive donations; and your private key will of course be used to authorize transactions. The only two things you'll have to do to secure it are 1. keep the private key private 2. don't lose it. Just make multiple backups and print it on a piece of paper (or many).

This way you don't have to go through all the hassle of interacting with Coinbase, including ID verification etc... until you actually have received funds that you want to convert to USD.

As I said, apologies if this is not what you were asking but since you also mentioned "other recommendations" I took the liberty of suggesting this.

Also, consider that when you use Coinbase you don't have access to your private keys. It means that should Coinbase decide that you are no longer entitled to access for whatever reason, you'll be left with no power over the funds.

Thank you for you advice.

"What I think is that most people would donate Bitcoin anyway so supporting many different cryptocurrencies wouldn't necessarily increase the likelihood of a donation that much. With this assumption just setting up BTC is enough and this is very easy to do."

But my reasoning is, that I know quite some people have different niche crypto lying around, hoping they will be worth something at some point, so instead of giving nothing, they might give at least them. And maybe they will be worth something, so I would happily take them all.

And I am only casual following crypto, but it seems, that ethereum is a serious player as well.

"Also, consider that when you use Coinbase you don't have access to your private keys. It means that should Coinbase decide that you are no longer entitled to access for whatever reason, you'll be left with no power over the funds. "

And of this I am aware of, but since I am a EU resident, not aware of any crime or money laundering, I suppose there is no reason to blacklist me. They have a reputation to be aware of (and I suppose I could make some noise, if I would be screwed over) - and I am more scared to be honestly, to make a mistake with the wallet generation. But otherwise I probably would be fine with a bitcoin wallet and etherium. I consider it.

I understand your reasoning. In this case, yes, Coinbase could be an easy way to set this up. You can set up your own wallets, but doing that for every crypto requires you to download multiple clients and manage multiple key pairs so it becomes messy.

If you want to try it, you can download so called "light" wallets that do not require the complete sync with the blockchain, which can otherwise take hours/days. I'm aware the Dogecoin client has a version with this light sync, and probably other cryptos too.

Good luck!

You may find some luck with https://block.io/docs/

They accept dodge ;)

Erm, to be honest, on first look, I have no idea what they are offering and how they work? But I will look into it.

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