rns.recipes

Mark, maybe you might consider doing a monthly "state of reticulum" post (like I said I'm new to the project so idk if you may already do this)? Highlight some of the changes / improvements as well as outline the health of the project including your needs for support? Making a habit of it might make it easier to ask for help when you need it as well as give people a place to look regularly. Just food for thought.

Just another data point here, but this thread got me to do my first ever recurring, nothing-in-return software donation! Knowing your income makes a big difference for me because yeah I'm struggling too but less than that. It's easy to assume other people have got it covered, or that the amount I can afford to give won't make a difference, and knowing income helps with both.

All amounts amount to the difference! :)

One battle at a time, folks. Appreciate the spirit but I am no purist. I just happily donated via credit card. Better make sure Mark survive longer!

I'm pretty new to Reticulum. Thank you, Mark, for creating and sharing this technically elegant, well thought-out, and much-needed system. I've set up a repeating donation through Liberapay.

Mark I would recommend also listing an IBAN if you have one.

There are way less fees to send an international bank transfer from a country outside SEPA with something like Wise or Revolut than it is to use a platform like Ko-Fi or Liberapay with a debit card, where there are international transfer fees imposed by both Stripe/Paypal and most institutions here in the US, which is either as a percenf , Percentage or a flat fee.

While sending money from something like Wise requires an account and ID verification, the fees come out to less than 1% for intl transfers for things that are lower volume, less than $1000 USD.

The fee for a $25 USD transfer on Wise is $1 USD. On Ko-Fi or something similar, using Stripe, the fee is somewhere around $6 USD or something like that. There is an International Service Assessment fee from the card network, which for Visa is 3%, combined with Ko-Fi's fee, and whatever else your institution charges (US primarily but may apply to other non-SEPA countries as well)

It is also not reliant on harmful, centralized payment processors like Stripe.

Also note that Wise/Revolut, etc, are not "wire transfer" services. Most wire transfers have fixed fees that are usually pretty crazy. They just do a direct ACH debit from your account and send it through their own payment rail, which is much safer, and requires nothing on the payment recipients end.

@Mark (when you're back) Could you also consider adding PayPal as an option on Ko-Fi? Even though it's not exactly ethical, it's the only place I have the means to donate more than I currently do.

Maybe there is the possibility to receive an iban from another organization, so you dont need to publish your personal one? Someone like tor, or idk. Or you can create some organization yourself of course.

An IBAN would be very welcome but maybe it is not possible.

Big thanks to everyone who decided to donate. It's better to donate
using a credit card than to not donate - don't let you distract by
my personal measure of "ethical" - every donation is already ethical.

But I, I must admit that I still have problems to reach my goal to perform a
transaction without any big US company involved. I think using the
ways Mark offered only crypto fulfils this (potentially). So I
invested a large amount of time to find a way to buy Monero currency:

Companies like kraken are also either US comanies taking fees, or I
can only pay them via credit card or whatever which again doesn't
work.

I went through the complete list in getmonero.org. The closest one
was bisq - a peer to peer trading platform, doesn't look too bad. But
in contradiction to what they say, don't expect anonymous transfers
(lots of people have copies of the blockchain, and when the crypto
gets broken - which already happend once! - everything is maximally
public). I can live with that - but the frontend is a CPU eating
sluggish Java program, and I still only found a way to get monero via
exchanging bitcoin, and bitcoin then again comes with its own problems
because it is old and not well designed and then... I gave up. Is
anyone using this? Do you have better ways? Help to get started
would be very, very apprechiated! Digging through all of this stuff
only to find that it is all nonsense is not a good time invest.