> If they wanted to give me money, their email shouldn't have set off Gmail's spam filter... they could have also converted their scamcoin themsevles and donate

> If they wanted to give me money, their email shouldn't have set off Gmail's spam filter... they could have also converted their scamcoin themsevles and donated to my patreon. False positives in spam filters notwithstanding, the gist of your view is reasonable and many have asked why "just contribute to my Patreon if I have one" isn't done. A brief consideration of the mechanism/logistics reveals that this approach wouldn't scale to hundreds of thousands of contributors in unknown jurisdictions. The point, after all, is long term sustainability in automating payments to opensource contributors into perpetuity. It can't and shouldn't be assumed that there will always be people on hand to do the paperwork as opposed to having systems interact with established APIs. That said, if Patreon/Github accept cryptocurrencies, you'll soon receive airdrops that way, as normal donations. Stripe Payment links will be used in a similar way in time. The other major problem is legal: distributing dollars globally is not a simple process and would expose many contributors to regulatory burdens that have been documented extensively elsewhere. (e.g. in the simplest case, requiring each recipient to file a W-8BEN or something similar.) Again: the point is to pay opensource contributors in an automatic, scalable, "uncensorable" way, for their entire lifetimes. The focus thus far has been on building "smart contracts" that do this. It's an experiment and only time will tell as we see who benefits, who doesn't, and who opts out altogether. > they could have also converted their scamcoin themsevles Perhaps. But the point is to pay you in the currency of their network, as distinct from US dollars, because the companies/DAOs believe in the value of their network and asset. Just as public companies often do with the shares they issue, these blockchains also provide reliable liquidity (in this case, in the form of permissionless liquidity pools) for their "scamcoin" that you can use to convert your holdings to USD or any other currency. Alternatively, you could use a U.S. regulated exchange like Coinbase. But don't feel that you're being forced to accept payment. There are many who have refused, on principal, to claim various airdrops over the past several years. They don't need or want the money and that's fine. But there are many others for whom payment for their free code is proving useful. All I'm pointing out is that this effort is underway in order to find out how to make opensource sustainable.