That's because it isn't a technology problem but a legal one.
Re:Why don't you accept donations?
by softwarebeware on Monday December 06, 2021 @05:21PM
(#29466464)
Exactly. Sure you can set up and accept money quite easily using any number of methods. The problem then comes in of how you are legally classified with each governmental jurisdiction that each donation happens to fall under, and now you're in a mountain of registrations, reports, audits, licenses, and other red tape.
You make it sound so complicated but even 14 year old teenagers on TikTok can make it work -- everything from Venmo, Patreon, buy me a coffee type sites, Amazon wishlists. Unless you're pulling in crazy amounts of cash there's really no legal red tape for person to person gifts.
Re:Why don't you accept donations?
by franga2000 on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @03:20AM
(#29470177)
Sure they do, but it's not strictly legal. Everyone just kind of lets it slide. A gift is no longer a gift if something is expected in return (like Patreon exclusive perks) - it's a service and you can't provide a service as a regular person. Many of these creators should really be setting up companies or registering as self-employed (I'm not too familiar with the English terminology for this stuff) and then paying all the required taxes and other fees.
As soon as we're no longer talking about just teenagers on TikTok, but instead about everyone on the Web, regulators are going to want to make sure it's used legally. And we're not talking about one, but theoretically all the jurisdictions at once. Having an open standard for that sounds impossible to me and having a defacto standard corporate service (like if Google Pay became the "standard" for web payments) sounds worse than nothing.
Regardless of how you access it you just take what you've been paid and add it to 'other income' when filing your taxes.
If you're getting "big" donations, stripe or paypal will send you a k1 if you make > 20k. Otherwise there are not really any other administrative things to worry about.
And what if you’re not in the US? The author of uBlock is in Quebec (or so says their GitHub profile), and various jurisdictions might have different rules on donations.
For anybody who needs a FAQ about where the donation button is the absolute worst case difficulty for any jurisdiction is calling an accountant to have them do it for you.
Accountant = administrative workload. At least for me, so I imagine that may be the case as well for the author of ublock.
Re:Why don't you accept donations?
by vikingerik on Monday December 06, 2021 @04:00PM
(#29465642)
Bitcoin is pretty close to this, right? Anyone can publish a Bitcoin address and accept donations with no friction.
Re:Why don't you accept donations?
by andrewxdiamond on Monday December 06, 2021 @04:59PM
(#29466253)
The payment technology is less of an issue. Consumers been able to send small amounts of money all over the world for a decade or two. It’s more about the regulatory framework around taxes and income that make this difficult
You still should pay your taxes on Bitcoin you earn. Tax evasion is easier, but not when your address is on the top of your project's website.
There's still friction. Do you know how to do your taxes on international income, CGT, discounting transfer fees, etc? There are services which will do most of that for you, but that's still time to export/import the transactions, ~$50 to get the summary, some more time to deal with actually putting that info on your tax return.
Realistically that's probably 3h of work in a year, but I'd probably pay a bit of money not to have to do it.
For small donations (e.g. $5) the transaction fee off Bitcoin can be larger than the amount.
GitHub has GitHub Sponsors program. It's pretty much zero friction.
It's absolutely shameful that over three decades into the internet age, we still don't have zero friction ways of accepting, sending and accounting for money on the internet.