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Is personal funding viable?
- kiba 14y agoI see that it supports credit cards, but it doesn't support bitcoin.
- whit537 14y agoWeigh in here if you'd like to see that: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/14 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/14
- kingkilr 14y agoYes, that could be related to the fact that bitcoin isn't something anyone with any familiarity with economics should take seriously. (For the purposes of this comment "familiarity with economics" should be understood to mean: has so much as shopped in a grocery store).
- whit537 14y agoMind saying more or linking? I keep hearing strong opinions against bitcoin but haven't heard details.
- kingkilr 14y agohttp://www.quora.com/Bitcoin/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-idea/answer/Adam-Cohen-2 http://www.quora.com/Bitcoin/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a... is a pretty good summary.
- whit537 14y agoThanks, linked on the ticket.
- rjsamson 14y agoThe biggest problem I have with bitcoin is that the fixed bitcoin supply and decreased rate at which coins can be mined rewards hoarding behaviors. If you know that the bitcoins you have in your account today will be worth more in the future, you have a powerful disincentive to spend.
- kiba 14y agoIf you know that the bitcoins you have in your account today will be worth more in the future, you have a powerful disincentive to spend. That's only if you're a scrooge and don't like spending anything. Since bitcoin started, I spent bitcoin on hosting and domain, t-shirt, musics, development bounties, writers, and other things that I forgot to mention. I never spent a bitcent on mining hardware, though. You have to remember that humanity is a not a paper wealth maximizing function. We don't exists to horde money, but to spend it doing things that we like.
- natrius 14y ago"We don't exists to horde money, but to spend it doing things that we like." Deflation increases the incentive to hoard cash. People respond to incentives. Economies based on deflationary currencies end up suffering from problems caused by this. You may not agree, but pretty much every economist does.
- kiba 14y ago
- kiba 14y agoYes, that could be related to the fact that bitcoin isn't something anyone with any familiarity with economics should take seriously. You justify <things you don't like> with <anybody with expertise will hate>. This is a total non-starter. (For the purposes of this comment "familiarity with economics" should be understood to mean: has so much as shopped in a grocery store). Very low standard it seems. I shopped in a grocery store.
- coderdude 14y agoThen you'll know that you can't spend Bitcoin at a grocery store because it's some crap that people made up and not actual currency. Edit: My comment isn't US-centric, obviously, since I don't know where any of you hail from. Trolls.
- kiba 14y agoThen you'll know that you can't spend Bitcoin at a grocery store because it's some crap that people made up and not actual currency. It's a currency because people actually use it as a currency. It doesn't mean universal acceptance. Did you ever tried spending yen or peso in an American supermarket? If you ever been to porcfest this year, you will know that a lot of vendors actually accept bitcoin along with precious metal.
- executive 14y agoexcept you can spend BTC in some grocery stores. problem Batman?
- kiba 14y agoIf you know the name of the store, I would like to know.
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- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- olalonde 14y agoNo need to take Bitcoin seriously. You can simply convert your BTC donations to USD as soon as you receive them.
- sgornick 14y agoWill PayPal allow GitTip to escrow the funds? If not (and likely not, considering PayPal does not allow for their payment network to be used for "pre-sales"), then GitTip can only charge for the actual amounts tipped (and claimed by the donation target). Right now, let's say I'm willing to tip $150 per year. I can then donating $0.25 to ten people. Since I carry no balance myself (from received tips), that means every Friday I get a charge for the amount I tip. So I would see a charge of $2.50 (10 X $0.25) plus $0.30 plus ($2.50 X 3.9%) = $2.90. So that is a 16% payment network fee. Certainly this can be optimized, but Bitcoin doesn't have such high fees. The sender pays the fee, and even then it is a fraction of a penny. And the conversion from Bitcoin to USDs is generally under one percent. Cash (USDs) can be received once each week by GitTip as an ACH direct deposit (using BitFloor) or through Dwolla (using Mt. Gox, Intersango or Camp BX) so easy cash-out methods are covered. And there are no chargebacks. So regardless of your politics or what you want to use as a store of value, Bitcoin solves problems very well. Especially for micropayments problems like this.
- juanbyrge 14y agoWhat's wrong with them getting jobs?
- whit537 14y agoThey're potentially less free to pursue their vision for how to make the world better, because they have to answer to corporate interests.
- mibbitier 14y agoCorporate interests aren't always bad. I'd say most of the time they are pretty much aligned with making the world better. The title asks "Is private funding viable?". The answer is no.
- whit537 14y ago> Corporate interests aren't always bad. True, and Gittip couldn't exist without corporations: http://blog.gittip.com/post/25215503687/corporations-and-open-ones http://blog.gittip.com/post/25215503687/corporations-and-ope... Can we do even better than "most of the time pretty much"? > The answer is no. What makes you say that?
- kingkilr 14y agoWe have jobs right now, it's not like we're hobos. But if you ask any open source developer what's stopping them from adding cool new feature X, fixing bug Y, or starting project Z that they're excited about the answer distribution will look like: 25% - I haven't needed that yet 75% - I don't have the time .00001 % - That is completely technically infeasaible (Numbers may not add up to 100 after rounding). I'll write on my personal blog later today why you should care about all of that, but that's the view from 10,000 feet.
- whit537 14y agoFor the record: http://alexgaynor.net/2012/jul/04/why-personal-funding/ http://alexgaynor.net/2012/jul/04/why-personal-funding/
- ForrestN 14y agoI think that it will be quite difficult to make this possible exclusively from individuals. Unless there were a threat that the projects will stop, or an offer of doing more that's pretty clear, most don't have a strong incentive to give. Something like kick starter helps to solve this in a way tipping doesn't. What about a sponsorship component? Facilitating companies sponsoring a programmer? Their github page gets a logo or something, and they get a bit check each month. It's not a new model. Skateboarding, for example, which has no practical use aside from entertainment, often works this way I think. Many skaters earn their living from sponsorship and make next to nothing from competitions or whatever else. If there were a major github competitor (maybe there is, I'm not so much in a position to know), the rivals might also pay these figures to work on the projects they control on their platforms. It helps Github immensely to have all these projects on its platform.
- boralben 14y agoI think sponsorship is a great idea. Look at the success Meetup has had with this strategy. The nice thing about sponsorship money is that once a contract is signed, the revenue will be consistent month to month. The payoff for the sponsoring company will be the good reputation it gets from that developer ecosystem. There could even be a way to connect this sponsorship to recruiting developers from that ecosystem as employees (the bonus being that they are already familiar with this project)
- whit537 14y agoI made a ticket for this: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/106 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/106
- jlarocco 14y agoThis seems really strange, to me. Isn't it basically working around an arbitrary, self-imposed restriction to give code away? As a developer, if I want to make money from one of my projects, I'll charge people to use it or to buy a copy. If I can't sell enough copies to fund development, I don't see how I would ever be able to fund development with "tips." As a user, I don't mind paying for software, and I don't think many people do. Most people realize that it takes time and skill to create a piece of software, and that the people creating it could have spent that time doing something else.
- awsum 14y agoYou just don't getting open-source right.
- pdeuchler 14y agoThis is pretty cool. Hopefully this will encourage more people to not only develop more for open source, but also encourage those open source heavy developers to possibly invest more or all of their time.
- MrFoof 14y ago>Is personal funding viable? Here's a question: What verifiable documented successes exist in the world? The one that always comes to my mind is Dwarf Fortress. It's not open source, but Tarn Adams has gone with the donation-ware model since January of 2007. I've been tracking those numbers since, and recently have attempted to start getting data on community size where that's also verifiable: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhPaW9RBi5v4dGFYZ05PVTY4dGxxSVBVVXUzY3dkTFE https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhPaW9RBi5v4dGF... >Instead we should expect a few people to tip a lot, and a long tail of people to tip a little. Based on anecdotes, this doesn't surprise me, but I'd certainly be curious to have a look at hard data. I know in the case of Dwarf Fortress about 1% of Bay 12's income is from one person: me. Additionally, I'm aware of other big tippers as well. However to get back to my original question, if folks could provide links or other sources to other successful donation-funded endeavors that aren't humanitarian efforts or fitting the typical charity mold, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
- whit537 14y agoLove seeing data, MrFoof! Thank you. To me those numbers establish Tarn Adams as a successful example of personal funding. I want to see a culture of people funding each other. I want Tarn Adams to have been ahead of the curve.
- Draiken 14y agoUnfortunately I think only the internet stars have even a chance of living like this... The irony is that these superstars normally already have huge paychecks :/
- astrofinch 14y agoAgreed. This system rewards getting attention from the public, not necessarily adding lots of valuable features.
- whit537 14y agoYeah, this is the most serious criticism I've heard so far.
- joeyespo 14y agoOn the other hand, this could be an incredible opportunity to pay it forward. If they're accepting the tips, they're participating, which is then just a few clicks away from funding others by providing bigger tips to promising projects.
- jay_kyburz 14y agoHey Whit, kill the weekly payment thing and make tips one off payments. Have a look at the freemium model that is all the rage these days. Apparently players hate subscriptions and would much rather pay for one off consumables. Also, allow tips of any size. $2048 or $4096 would not be crazy.
- whit537 14y agoSounds like a fork. :-)
- TimJRobinson 14y agoI love this concept! Another idea that could work well is partnering up with some influential bloggers / open source evangelists and holding an international "Feed a coder" day, which brings awareness to the open source community and asks people to make a donation to their favourite projects / libraries / Wordpress plugins on that day. There are a lot of Wordpress Bloggers out there who would be happy to donate to their favourite plugin authors but just haven't and this could push them over the line (this is just one community I'm quite involved with).
- whit537 14y agoYes, please! How do we make this happen? Are you on GitHub? Can we move this conversation there? https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/109 https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/109
- prawn 14y agoLooked at one of the suggested profiles and they'd clocked under $4 and I thought "That's not even a beer." Made me think. What about a site along similar lines - FridayBeer or whatever - that perks up via social media and supporters at the end of each week. You're having a knock-off drink in the final hours of your working day, or heading off to the pub and the site asks who or what made a difference to your week. Someone's work on an open source project meant that you continued earning a living. Maybe someone else was out there volunteering in the muck while you had it comparably easy in your office. Perhaps it's just a Twitter user or HN commenter who shared an appreciated article you might otherwise not have seen. Shout a beer or, if you're generous, a carton/case. I think I've seen virtual buy-a-coffee or shout-a-beer sites, but can't remember them being a regularly scheduled thing that makes you consider who you'd like to thank in that moment.