- Joined
- Jan 28, 2019
At present the majority of site support comes in via MATI on New Project 2 at ~$1400 USD a month. New Project 2 is again entering a period of instability due to banking/processing blacklists, and will most likely continue to do so until one of the following happens:
a) Harmful actors stop harassing execs at various payment processors or banking institutions (Unlikely)
b) Dick decides that the effort of evading deplatforming becomes too much effort, or too reputationally toxic, and shutters the site (most probable?).
c) With no access to financial services, NP2 remains in limbo as present.
It would be ideal to have as many people familiar with more censorship resistant alternatives to support the website, as most outcomes are likely to lead to NP2 shuttering at some point. Thus I wondered if it might be worth experimenting with a small-scale Bitcoin merch run in the future. With the recent server run a resounding success, it could be a good incentive to get people familiar with the concept of supporting the site via BTC. It's easier than ever for a novice internet user to obtain and use Bitcoin, and once a merch purchase was made with BTC, the knowledge is now there to support the site whenever.
On the backend there wouldn't be much extra work, as open-source infrastructure (i.e. BTCPayServer) already exists to invoice via BTC and integrate with eCommerce plugins like WooComerce. This would avoid the issue of having people manually email with their orders, help order tracking, and provide increased privacy for both parties by generating individual receive addresses per order.
Potential issues that I envisage would be uncertainty on how much stock to obtain (I doubt the merch runs operate on credit), as a result it would be best to keep it very small-scale initially. Perhaps selling off surplus stock from prior runs if any remains. Or try with more stickers or something. It may well be that the risks outweigh the potential benefits, though it seemed a relatively novel suggestion to aid site funding so I thought I would bring it up.
(*unless 230 gets repealed then just use it to accept tips for streaming space-station Jannie duty)
a) Harmful actors stop harassing execs at various payment processors or banking institutions (Unlikely)
b) Dick decides that the effort of evading deplatforming becomes too much effort, or too reputationally toxic, and shutters the site (most probable?).
c) With no access to financial services, NP2 remains in limbo as present.
It would be ideal to have as many people familiar with more censorship resistant alternatives to support the website, as most outcomes are likely to lead to NP2 shuttering at some point. Thus I wondered if it might be worth experimenting with a small-scale Bitcoin merch run in the future. With the recent server run a resounding success, it could be a good incentive to get people familiar with the concept of supporting the site via BTC. It's easier than ever for a novice internet user to obtain and use Bitcoin, and once a merch purchase was made with BTC, the knowledge is now there to support the site whenever.
On the backend there wouldn't be much extra work, as open-source infrastructure (i.e. BTCPayServer) already exists to invoice via BTC and integrate with eCommerce plugins like WooComerce. This would avoid the issue of having people manually email with their orders, help order tracking, and provide increased privacy for both parties by generating individual receive addresses per order.
Potential issues that I envisage would be uncertainty on how much stock to obtain (I doubt the merch runs operate on credit), as a result it would be best to keep it very small-scale initially. Perhaps selling off surplus stock from prior runs if any remains. Or try with more stickers or something. It may well be that the risks outweigh the potential benefits, though it seemed a relatively novel suggestion to aid site funding so I thought I would bring it up.
(*unless 230 gets repealed then just use it to accept tips for streaming space-station Jannie duty)
