As long as there is a means of exchange of value (or valuable objects in themselves) and a physical or digital way to move them and pass them from hand to hand, there will be donation, gift and also something even more basic such as commercial exchange. As such, donating and gifting and trading are natural and spontaneous acts of economic life.
Discounting the one that uses cash, the most popular way to donate or make crowfunding hoy It is through digital platforms such as GoFundMe, Donorbox or Fundly. The most common way to send it may be PayPal.
These businesses act as middlemens or intermediaries between donors, beneficiaries, issuers and recipients, helping to facilitate paid access to products and financing for individual or group causes.
In what has been fairly or unfairly called technofeudalism by the economist and writer Yanis Varoufakis, these digital platforms (or digital lords, as critics would like to call them, in clear reference to the feudal lords) are owners of the “digital territory” through from which these donations and payments pass to reach their recipients, who would be “vassals” in multiple plots of the World Wide Web under the obligation to rent the right to use the “land”.
These platforms are useful, necessary and allow access to financing, donations, payments and even remittances. Nevertheless, The need and dependence of users to make donations and businesses online are highly questionable.
Naturally, these platforms that act as intermediaries must capitalize on their business by charging a percentage for the service they offer. GoFundMe, for example, automatically deducts 2.9% + EUR 0.25 for each donation. DonorBox, for its part, works according to a free subscription model and a professional and personalized one, the latter of which is priced at USD 139 per month. A flat or fixed percentage rate of at least 1.75% is applied to all subscriptions to the total amount for each donation received.
In reality, any digital payment gateway such as PayPal or Venmo can be used to make donations to legal entities or companies. These present the same problem (or advantage, depending on how you see it) as in other digital services companies: the presence of an intermediary that connects donors with donees or buyers with sellers and charges for their services.
I reiterate once again the existence of these platforms is useful and necessary. I also think that users they urgently need an alternative if they did not agree with the potentially unfair clauses and service policies of said platforms. The clear alternative is Bitcoin, which can help decentralize the natural act of sending and receiving payments and donations.
Why is Bitcoin a serious alternative to send payments and donations?
Bitcoin for sending and receiving payments and donations is not a romantic proposition. Its use cannot be attributed to the need to wage a digital guerrilla war, where the objective is to bypass the checkpoints installed by the feudal lords and escape from their seigneurial justice officers, the King’s creditors.
Bitcoin has several real uses for sending donations, starting with their rates. A curiosity is that donations were one of the first use cases for Bitcoin, as demonstrated by the historic WikiLeaks saga. Use the network peer-to-peer (P2P) Bitcoin payments are economically convenient. This is because the Bitcoin network does not have a flat percentage rate, that is, a percentage deducted from the total amount proportional to the amount sent.
On the contrary, it is a fee system that is manually adjustable by the user, who can offer the amount they want for the service, although the success of this transaction depends on the proposed fee being competitive to be taken into account by the miners. of the network and included in a block.
At the time of writing, a high priority transaction in the Bitcoin mempool pays 10 sats/VB, which is equivalent to USD 1.28. A low priority (7 sat/VB) the fee is USD 0.90. According to an on-chain metrics page, the average historical price of a bitcoin transaction is 0.000013 BTC ($1.22).
This fee, which is subject to change based on Bitcoin network demand and has reached $30 or more during times of exceptional congestion, remains considerably cheaper on average than that offered by any payment intermediary.
Of course, Bitcoin is especially useful for sending donations and trading when network demand is low, which is most of the time, as can be seen in this rate chart from April 2022 to date.
The Bitcoin network, which is a distributed system between validators, miners and users, and therefore not controlled by any specific body or entity, also protects the sending of donations and payments from being blocked or frozen by intermediaries and their compliance policies. potentially unfair.
Bitcoin is and will be safe until proven otherwise
Only in an unlikely, unprecedented and non-definitive case could the Bitcoin network be centralized in a few hands and exert censorship through miners of the transactions of network users. However, being a system distributed throughout the world, Bitcoin is in reality (and will continue to be in potentiality) thousands of times less prone to censorship than any business or company that pays and donates funds, whose systems of infractions and penalties for users tend to be arbitrary.
It is true that the participation of physical intermediaries and specific and recognizable legal entities allows states and governments to protect donors from financing fraudulent schemes or causes such as terrorism.
Bitcoin, being a pseudo-anonymous system and susceptible to less traceability (although it does have it), guarantees the freedom of use of funds, but not strict control of who receives them or for what. Its system is based, therefore, in natural lawthe first of the types of law, and functions as an act between two people that occurs prior to the will of the legislators, and that is dependent on the good faith and will of the participants.
Bitcoin is therefore cheaper and safer to send donations, pay and fund good causes. Simply investigate the integrity of the cause or person you want to finance, request a bitcoin address and send, paying a minimal fee, the amount of money you are willing.
Because of these qualities and because of the ease that the Bitcoin network provides, it seems strange that the BTC payment system has not so far dethroned the world’s remittance companies. But that is a topic for another opinion piece.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to its author and do not necessarily reflect those of NoticiasVE. The author’s opinion is for informational purposes and under no circumstances constitutes an investment recommendation or financial advice.