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A recap of some important facts about tip4commit that weren't clear to me when this all started:

1) That they collect a 1% service fee on donations.

2) That they donate 1% of a project's pool for any given committer, which leads to this exponential decay where they never quite have 0 balance for any given project.

If enough donors use tip4commit, that is potentially a lot of bitcoin pennies that is just sloshing around their server.



3) unwanted / rejected / opted-out donations will be returned to the 'project pool' instead of the donor, it's unclear what happens in cases when a project has no participating developers (default), is itself opted out, or has all opted-out developers

4) donors are not informed that the projects they're supporting may not receive or accept donations this way

5) donors are actively lied to, see:

https://tip4commit.com/github/django/django

and

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8545377

has a django rep trying to opt them out of the program, there is no ambiguity whether they like, let alone want to or will receive donations this way


> If enough donors use tip4commit, that is potentially a lot of bitcoin pennies that is just sloshing around their server.

I recall reading that they have 55 BTC "sloshing around their server" at the moment (no easy way of checking this on their website but seems reasonable looking at the top projects' funds).

By todays exchange rate, that's 18k USD, which is being handled with very little actual transparency. It is a genuine risk that the people behind this project will run away with 18k$ worth of BTC (or claim they were hacked).

I don't like this idea very much and I certainly would not like my projects to be up there.




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