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Comment by AsyncAwait | Hacker News Reader

If you want to support GIMP on Patreon, here are direct links for the key developers:

one thing killing me, because credit cards are involved, with $1 it ends up with $0.35 + 2.7% + 5% fees. So for small monthly contribution of $1 developer gets $0.59...

there is clearly market for something more efficient...

It seems like cryptocurrencies could help here, if only the friction was still lowered significantly.

There's still money being lost; when you buy coins, and when the developer sells them. Unless they can pay their usual expenses using cryptocurrencies, they'll need to sell, at a loss (even if possible less than CC).

In practically any monetary transaction, there's some overhead and thus money being lost, (3rd parties involved, price volatility etc.) and so the question then becomes, how much money is being lost? Cryptocurrencies offer lower overhead in this regard, at least for now.

Liberapay is a libre alternative for Patreon (with anonymous patrons and no reward) with much lower fees for bank transfer/automatic debit [1], as it is funded via donations

[1]: https://liberapay.com/about/faq

And you can start pledging to a project before they have joined. https://liberapay.com/on/twitter/GIMP_Official/

Can the devs send IBAN/PM it to me? I hate to pay some third party %charges? I am in France itself would like to make a Bank Transfer

See the bottom of page http://film.zemarmot.net/en/

> "there is clearly market for something more efficient..."

https://en.liberapay.com/

What about a system that holds X amount of donations in escrow until the amount hits a certain threshold, then releases the total amount in one actual (bank/payment processor) transfer. Might mean lower fees.

Such a service could also have a "release funds now" option for emergencies where you'd accept paying hiked-up fees.

A problem is that there is a limit on how long you can wait to make a credit card charge before your first verification charge expires. If that makes sense.

Basically there's no way to determine the card has 3 months of $1 on it when you want to make the charge and if you make it earlier you pay the fees.

Extremely good point.

I was just thinking about the intermediary->payee bit. I forgot the payer->intermediary bit, and that this is a credit card charge too.

Now I realize I mentally modeled the whole problem incorrectly. Thanks for pointing that out.

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