
Do not donate to me (2013) - paulintrognon
http://blog.futtta.be/2013/10/21/do-not-donate-to-me/
======
Tharkun
He's Belgian. Belgian taxes are awful. If you want to accept 'donations' for
software, you have to be self-employed. This comes with a boatload of hassle,
including paying national insurance contributions of 20%. (which are
calculated based on your income from three years ago). And given that the man
has a day job, he'd also be looking at a 50% tax rate for these donations. So
a 100eur donation would net about 40eur and a bunch of paperwork.

Not worth the hassle unless we'rw talking at least thousands a year.

~~~
AnaniasAnanas
This is one of the few situations where cryptocurrencies come in handy.

~~~
kurtisc
Money laundering?

~~~
gjm11
It's tax evasion, not money laundering. The two are quite different things.

Tax evasion: You get some money. (Legally or not; the tax system doesn't
care.) You are supposed to pay taxes on it but don't want to. You find a way
not to, e.g. by hiding the income from the tax authorities.

Money laundering: You get some money by illegal means (theft, blackmail,
whatever). You want to be able to use the money without having the authorities
notice it, get suspicious about where it came from, and discover your crime.
You find a way to pass the money from place to place so that by the time you
actually do anything that might be noticed, it's difficult or impossible to
trace it back to anything illegal.

[EDITED to add:] Also different from both: tax _avoidance_. You get some
money. You don't want to pay taxes on it. It turns out that the law actually
allows you not to, and you take advantage of that. But this feature of the law
is unintended, or blatantly unfair, or clearly the way it is because of
someone lobbying on behalf of people in situations like yours.

~~~
tim333
Tax avoidance doesn't have to be unintended or unfair. You can avoid income
tax in the UK for example by investing in official schemes like SEIS. Or in
this case he could accept crypto but forward it to charity and argue the money
was not his but customer charity donations.

~~~
gjm11
Yes, perhaps I should have said something like "looks unintended or unfair".
Usually something only gets called "tax avoidance" when it has something
loophole-y about it.

I suspect your second suggestion would actually get classified as tax
_evasion_, though.

------
snazz
This seems like a very fair policy if the developer doesn’t need the money, as
in this example. However, as a user, I hope that setting up a recurring
donation keeps the project going and provides motivation to its author.

~~~
endorphone
This particular trend -- not only not asking for contributions, but openly
denying them (often in advance, and when none were ever offered) for a better
cause -- is a rising tendency across virtually all of Western society. Watch
any challenge with a monetary prize and invariably they'll turn the sad music
on and demand that the contestants regale a tale about the old grandma in the
old country, or the kid's club they want to donate to, etc (obviously not the
hot tub they really plan on buying, or the better SUV). If a kid has a
lemonade stand they can't just want to buy a WOW membership, they have to
promise that it is for some good cause. Etc.

Honest giving is great, but undermining the value of work to do so isn't
always constructive. In this case presumably the hypothetical people who would
have given him cash are also in a good place financially.

~~~
chongli
Your analysis is good but there is one element you're missing: chargebacks.
People who accept a lot of donations get hit with chargebacks from time to
time and they can be so difficult to deal with that they actually cost the
recipient money.

This is a common complaint among people who take donations for a living, such
as Twitch streamers. If you ask any streamer, they will tell you they prefer
Twitch "bits" over any one-off donation specifically because bits are non-
refundable.

Unfortunately, there are people out there who go around donating and then
doing a chargeback just to troll streamers they don't like. It's a really
frustrating element of the system which happens to be set up to prefer the
customer over the vendor in all disputes, making it ripe for abuse.

~~~
Aeolun
It seems like any dispute involving a donation should pretty much be lost by
default. It’s not as if anyone delivers an inappropriate product for a
donation...

~~~
colechristensen
What if someone steals my credit card and "donates" $1000 to a nazi political
party?

~~~
nulbyte
Chargebacks are for disputes, not fraud. Provided the merchant did not incur
liability by doing something immensely stupid and insecure, the bank is on the
hook. If the perpetrator is caught, they will pay restitution to the bank.

~~~
joecot
> Provided the merchant did not incur liability by doing something immensely
> stupid and insecure, the bank is on the hook. If the perpetrator is caught,
> they will pay restitution to the bank.

Source? As someone who helps support an online credit card gateway, in my
experience it is the merchant who has to shoulder the cost (plus an extra
penalty fee) of the transaction. Perhaps there are different chargeback
policies for card present transactions for physical products, but for online
(and therefore card not present) transactions for digital products, I have
always seen the merchant have to cover the cost of the chargeback (plus fee).
There's a process for disputing the chargeback, saying the customer absolutely
made the purchase and got what they were asking for, but almost every time the
card would side with the customer, because there was no physical product.

This is one of the reasons when card companies pushed for chip cards,
merchants pushed back for chip and pin like cards used in Europe -- to cut
down on fraud, which they end up paying for. The only system I've seen where
the cost of a chargeback is on the bank instead of the merchant is if the
merchant has setup 3D-Secure/Verified by Visa with their products, giving the
banks and card companies the opportunity to have an extra login for making the
purchase. However, those verify pages are made by the _bank_ , not the credit
card company, and are widely unreliable. I tried to set it up for our payment
gateway, only to find that some of the banks had completely broken systems for
it, leaving customers at an error page instead of buying the product.

~~~
SyneRyder
> The only system I've seen where the cost of a chargeback is on the bank
> instead of the merchant is if the merchant has setup 3D-Secure/Verified by
> Visa...

Verified By Visa is a nightmare, and was killing conversion rates by up to
60%. [1] I'm not sure if it's still the case, but when it first came out
Amazon refused to integrate it.

[1] [https://econsultancy.com/verified-by-visa-a-conversion-
rate-...](https://econsultancy.com/verified-by-visa-a-conversion-rate-killer/)

~~~
joecot
Yes, that was definitely also part of the calculation. We expected clients
would not use it, because every extra step destroys conversation rates, but we
wanted to at least provide the option.

... But even providing the option was a non-starter, because of how many
different banks had completely broken systems. We ended up ditching the
feature entirely.

------
johannes1234321
When I look a different Patreon accounts of people I know, where I have a
rough understanding of their dayjob and life situation I often wonder about
the sums.

The sums listed are often too high to be ignored, but too little to call it a
job, even jut part-time. Few hours a month.

Me that would put in a strange situation. I would get the feeling of having to
return some work for that, which takes the fun out of some projects, but
doesn't pay the bills. (especially if I add time for accounting, declaring
axes on it etc.)

Of course my view dosn't transfer to others and I understand that many people
have a need for a more diverse income sources and eve low recurring (monthly)
Patreon payments are planable, giving some base line, but I understand the
author's point.

~~~
9dev
> declare the axes

 _Forrest shivers in fear_

~~~
johannes1234321
Somewhere I lost a t, it seems

------
aboutruby
Why not accept donations then redistribute them to those causes?

Also I recommend [https://www.givewell.org](https://www.givewell.org)

~~~
m000
A number of reasons. First, you may end-up paying some middle-man twice.
Second, you may have to declare any donations as income and be taxed for them
(more paperwork for you). Third, in order to reclaim the tax you paid for the
donations, you will probably have to distribute them to charities within your
(already rich) country.

~~~
kingosticks
And having accepted the donation, some confused doners will think you owe them
something. I think it's important to entirely remove that possible
misunderstanding.

------
gowld
This stinks but also looks like a startup opportunity. Add a badge to your
website to take donations via DonateMoney.com, which provides appropriate tax
paperwork services in many jurisdictions, shows donors where their money goes
(taxes, etc), and provides an option to revert donations if the total donates
doesn't meet a convenience threshold within a specifed time range (3-12
months).

------
praneshp
Needs 2013 tag.

