Waaay early on when cryptocurrencies were regarded as being possible alternative currencies it may have made sense, but now as they appear to have become more like extremely questionable investment products/securities, I’m left confused why anyone still has donation links for them alongside alternatives that provide, y’know, usable money (e.g. Ko-fi/Liberapay/etc.).
Are the donation links I’m seeing just a web artifact like the occasional Google+ share icon on some sites, or is there something more at play?
They are being treated just like every other method to send someone money. They aren’t using them as investment products, just transaction tools. I’m sure most are pulling the money out of the cryptocurrency as soon as they receive it.
Yep it can still be converted to actual currency pretty easily and it will likely never be valueless completely. So why not?
My thinking was mainly that due to the values being volatile and the trend of people being encouraged to treat it as an investment instead of currency that it just wouldn’t see many donations anyway. On the rare occasion someone may have donated, it may be such a minimal amount that it may not even result in much of anything after whatever processing fees may be involved.
At least with more widely used currencies there’s the accepted use of them primarily as currencies and there may be fewer conversions/processing fees involved (albeit this may vary & I suppose this may be where crypto finds its space).
You realize that every form of donation platform takes fees right?
Yes, but from my understanding, at least depending on the cryptocurrency involved, this can be either similar to those or worse at times. With the more popular cryptocurrencies in particular it seems to lean towards worse.
Money has pretty low transactions fees (5cents rn)and is completely anonymous for example, which can be very important depending on what donation or transaction it is.
Others have other advantages over USD for example. NANO being instant and free.
As transaction vehicles these work just fine.