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Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

I think the filtering stuff should be hidden by default, it looks like you have to pick a country plus I don't know what an exit vs guard is.

Also bitcoins only is really exclusionary.

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Bitcoin is perfect for this. Each relay can publish a Bitcoin address, and the subsequent distribution by OnionTip can be confirmed by looking at the blockchain to see who they split the donations between. TOR enthusiasts and Bitcoin holders probably overlap an awful lot.

You could do this without a middleman, though. Can't you set up bitcoin transactions with multiple outputs?

Bitcoin is perfect if the goal is that 99% of the world can't donate.

It's pretty simple to get bitcoin today. Especially now Circle has launched.

Circle only works for ~4.5% of the world population.

Is there a method of making donations to anonymous benefactors that more than 10% of the world population can contribute to, that doesn't require having local collection-points in each contributing area?

Now that I think of it, that'd kind of be a neat nonprofit startup: do what the Salvation Army does, putting lots of collectors on lots of corners--but instead of the collection being associated with a specific charity, people would be given a little envelope to put their money in and write what charity it's intended for (with some pre-printed envelopes handy for major ones, likely.) The company would centrally collate donations, and send cheques each month to the recipient charities. A recipient charity wouldn't even have to sign up for this; they'd just start receiving money (sort of like what happens with royalties when people listen to a song on Spotify.)

I took you up on that, took about 15 minutes for circle to tell me they're USA-only.

You're certainly right in the case of the general population. That being said, amongst those who know about Tor and actively use/support Tor, I'd imagine the amount of bitcoin fluent people is significantly higher.

Most of the world (with some countries excepted) can donate they just have to do an extra step of acquiring Bitcoins.

It this worth it to maintain anonymity? Convenience over security isn't really in the spirit of tor..

I imagine that more than 1% of people who are aware of Tor have bitcoins or can easily obtain them.

I'm only replying to you but your sentiment has been expressed by others replying to me.

I think we can divide people into three groups:

1) uses Tor + Bitcoin

2) is aware of Tor and may support their goals, in exactly the same way a person without cancer may support an organization seeking to cure cancer

3) don't know/care

You guys are very quick to dismiss that middle group which includes the audiences of the biggest mainstream news and tech news sites:

IB Times, Gizmodo, NPR, Vice, ABC News, BoingBoing, ThinkProgress, Washington Post, Ars Technica, Telegraph.co.uk, PCWorld, USA Today, Computerworld, Lifehacker, Popular Mechanics, BusinessWeek, Wired, ZDNet, The Register, EFF, PBS, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Forbes, Venture Beat, The Next Web, eWeek, TIME, BBC, NBC, RT, Fast Company, The Verge and The Wall Street Journal.

https://www.torproject.org/press/press.html.en

In addition, this was built at the Dublin Bitcoin Hackathon, so I assume the authors are explicitly interested in promoting bitcoin use a bit more as well.

> Also bitcoins only is really exclusionary.

It's also the only way to run something like this for many privacy advocates.

Perhaps they should allow users to (optionally) donate via PayPal then pay offer BTC-only payouts to node operators.

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