BountySource Salt Fundraising
Posted: Thu Aug 20, 2015 2:19 pm
We've discussed funding a bit on IRC, but I'd like to get some discussion happening here too.
We would very much benefit from a fundraiser campaign. Some people have suggested Lighthouse, while others have suggested BountySource.
BountySource has invited us to join their new fundraiser platform, BountySource Salt. Salt is designed to provide monthly income to open-source projects, and is in beta invite-only status at the moment. Salt fundraisers can set multiple tiered monthly goals, but get to keep the money even if a goal is not fully reached. You can see the existing projects that have signed up for Salt at https://salt.bountysource.com/ . The BountySource staff have been very responsive whenever I talk to them, which is encouraging. Salt doesn't charge any fees for fundraising if the money is spent on BountySource bounties. The bounty recipient can spend it on additional bounties for free, or can withdraw to USD, Bitcoin, or Ripple for a 10% fee. We can also withdraw for a 10% fee if we don't want to spend something on a bounty. For reference, Indiegogo charges roughly 13% once fees are applied. Donors can pay in USD, Bitcoin, or Ripple. I think allowing both USD and Bitcoin payments is a major benefit, because there are a lot of people who can only use USD, while there are also a lot of people who strongly prefer Bitcoin. Salt also gives us a significant amount of transparency regarding what we're spending the money on (since the bounties are public), without the graph analysis privacy problems of exposing everyone's Bitcoin transactions. In addition, Salt removes our obligation to pay taxes on bounties that we award, since we're not holding the money ourselves.
For deciding the goals, I would lean toward picking the most significant goals outlined in indolering's grants. UNO commitments and associated lightweight clients, Armory support, Unbound integration, Firefox/TorBrowser TLS integration, and Tor/I2P integration seem like reasonable starting points.
The drawbacks would be the 10% fee on withdrawals, and the fact that BountySource could, in theory, seize our funds. 10% fee isn't much, particularly given that taxes would probably be higher than that if we're holding the funds ourselves; Indiegogo costs more, and Software Freedom Conservancy would charge 10% in return for tax exemption. I also think it's unlikely that BountySource would seize funds -- they're enthusiastic about Bitcoin and have actively encouraged us to use them, so I doubt that they would do to us what PayPal did to WikiLeaks. Hypothetically, the US government could send them a court order to seize our funds, but given that we're not doing anything remotely illegal and that the US government has been pretty favorable to Bitcoin businesses, I don't think this is at all likely. (There's also the fact that the US government could just seize money from the bank accounts of myself, indolering, and Ryan, or arrest us, if they wanted to play that game -- going after BountySource doesn't get them much new.)
Why not use Lighthouse? It's all-or-nothing fundraising, which doesn't really match our needs (we can still get things done with partial funding, it's just slower). We could use standard Bitcoin donations (which NMDF does), but this is limited because it can't accept USD and because exposure is very low (Salt gets much higher exposure, and BountySource spends effort on publicity, which we basically get for free).
BountySource admits that documentation on Salt is sparse (that's why it's in beta, so that they can work more directly with the projects using it). If anyone here has questions on details of how Salt operates, let me know and I'll pass them on to BountySource.
So... thoughts on this? Is Salt something that we should look into more? I'm happy to handle the majority of the work on this if we do it.
We would very much benefit from a fundraiser campaign. Some people have suggested Lighthouse, while others have suggested BountySource.
BountySource has invited us to join their new fundraiser platform, BountySource Salt. Salt is designed to provide monthly income to open-source projects, and is in beta invite-only status at the moment. Salt fundraisers can set multiple tiered monthly goals, but get to keep the money even if a goal is not fully reached. You can see the existing projects that have signed up for Salt at https://salt.bountysource.com/ . The BountySource staff have been very responsive whenever I talk to them, which is encouraging. Salt doesn't charge any fees for fundraising if the money is spent on BountySource bounties. The bounty recipient can spend it on additional bounties for free, or can withdraw to USD, Bitcoin, or Ripple for a 10% fee. We can also withdraw for a 10% fee if we don't want to spend something on a bounty. For reference, Indiegogo charges roughly 13% once fees are applied. Donors can pay in USD, Bitcoin, or Ripple. I think allowing both USD and Bitcoin payments is a major benefit, because there are a lot of people who can only use USD, while there are also a lot of people who strongly prefer Bitcoin. Salt also gives us a significant amount of transparency regarding what we're spending the money on (since the bounties are public), without the graph analysis privacy problems of exposing everyone's Bitcoin transactions. In addition, Salt removes our obligation to pay taxes on bounties that we award, since we're not holding the money ourselves.
For deciding the goals, I would lean toward picking the most significant goals outlined in indolering's grants. UNO commitments and associated lightweight clients, Armory support, Unbound integration, Firefox/TorBrowser TLS integration, and Tor/I2P integration seem like reasonable starting points.
The drawbacks would be the 10% fee on withdrawals, and the fact that BountySource could, in theory, seize our funds. 10% fee isn't much, particularly given that taxes would probably be higher than that if we're holding the funds ourselves; Indiegogo costs more, and Software Freedom Conservancy would charge 10% in return for tax exemption. I also think it's unlikely that BountySource would seize funds -- they're enthusiastic about Bitcoin and have actively encouraged us to use them, so I doubt that they would do to us what PayPal did to WikiLeaks. Hypothetically, the US government could send them a court order to seize our funds, but given that we're not doing anything remotely illegal and that the US government has been pretty favorable to Bitcoin businesses, I don't think this is at all likely. (There's also the fact that the US government could just seize money from the bank accounts of myself, indolering, and Ryan, or arrest us, if they wanted to play that game -- going after BountySource doesn't get them much new.)
Why not use Lighthouse? It's all-or-nothing fundraising, which doesn't really match our needs (we can still get things done with partial funding, it's just slower). We could use standard Bitcoin donations (which NMDF does), but this is limited because it can't accept USD and because exposure is very low (Salt gets much higher exposure, and BountySource spends effort on publicity, which we basically get for free).
BountySource admits that documentation on Salt is sparse (that's why it's in beta, so that they can work more directly with the projects using it). If anyone here has questions on details of how Salt operates, let me know and I'll pass them on to BountySource.
So... thoughts on this? Is Salt something that we should look into more? I'm happy to handle the majority of the work on this if we do it.