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Comment by angelgonzales | Hacker News Reader

I’d love too but I dislike using payment processors as middlemen for online transactions! I see you’re using Stripe which is one of the worst processors because they opaquely block all sorts of transactions. It would be great to use a system like this to promote and fund open source projects and fuel cottage industry without having to include megacorporations. Make a mail cash option for people who don’t want to show their papers to a payment processor!

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thanks for the feedback & you raise a valid point, we'd love to look at additional payment options :)

Thought about this in a conceptual way some years ago [1] and the best option seems to be to let the developers decide how they want to be paid, i.e. have a `thanks.dev` file in the tree of the package with JSON-like data, e.g.

  "payment": "iban", "data": "IBANCODE"` or 
  "payment": "link", "data": "https://..." or
  "payment": "cryptoCoin", "data": "0xb3..." and so forth.

Of course, the problem is there are many different ways of giving thanks, so a protocol is required, that's the hard part actually in this space, standardization.

[1] https://github.com/ly3xqhl8g9/delicense

The best case is that this works.

The worst case here is a lot of fraud for the people who shared their details.

Why would there be fraud? The IBAN/payment link/crypto wallet/etc. is only one way: anyone can deposit, only one can withdraw. Everyone knows the IBAN for donating to Greenpeace, but only one can sue them [1]. As for the file itself, not being changed by a third party, the distributing program can check hashes of current payment method vs. previous and notify accordingly.

[1] https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/succession-greg-sue-green...

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/jan/07/personalfinanc...

these things are still possible, you don't even have to know as much detail as this person gave out

Funny, but that seems more of a mistake on the bank side, and given that the article is from 2008, I am not surprised. Lots of things went wrong in 2008 on the banks side. Nevertheless, in principle, having a public IBAN is harmless.

> Make a mail cash option for people who don’t want to show their papers to a payment processor!

Consider using Monero for such a purpose. I've gotten paid in Monero. It pretty much just works.

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