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Comment by daghamm | Hacker News Reader

But maybe they can negotiate a better deal for their payments?

Doubtful. It's 100% funded by its own Liberapay page.[0] It's the second-most donated to recipient but at about $650 a week, that's not even enough to hire a full time dev let alone the business skills needed to pull something like that off

[0] https://en.liberapay.com/Liberapay/

That's more than median dev salary for most European country.

https://helloastra.com/blog/article/average-software-develop...

That's about $33.8k a year. Before taxes and with no benefits

The numbers in your source also contradict your statement, but point taken that European dev salaries are much nominally lower than American ones. It's still obviously not enough to pay a dev and business expert

EDIT: wow I just checked and the weekly amount they receive just went up to ~$875!

They don't even have the ability to group transactions together for US payments (or payments in Australia, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, and others [1]) to lower fees, so I think any hope that a project like this would have any leverage is misplaced.

[1]: https://liberapay.com/about/global

I asked Stripe back in 2018 if we could expect their unexplained same-region limitation on transfers to be lifted. They said it would be lifted soon. It's 2025, the limitation still exists and I still don't know why.

Payment processing is dominated by a massive monopoly, leaving no room for negotiation. The industry is controlled by global elites and financial powerhouses who gatekeep access. Only stablecoins have the potential to disrupt this cycle and offer an alternative.

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