Fact is, the Lemmy ecosystem needs money to handle the growing server reqirements as more people migrate as well as the development cost of new features (I know Lemmy is OSS but the devs should still get some compensation for their effort).
Seeing how much some reddit users love awards so much that they cant stop giving money to Reddit to award posts protesting the api change, this could be a great way for users to voluntary support the ecosystem. It can be easily ignored by users not caring about them (clients could even add an option to hide them), but users liking the feature can go wild and this time the money goes to volunteers keeping this alive instead of greedy admins, power mods and investors.
Though there would be some big organization questions attached: attached:
- Which server handles the payment? A centralized one, the one where the post was made or the one where the user giving the award account was created.
- How will the money be shared between the Devs and the individual instances in a way that is fair but cant be abused easily.
Monero would be the obvious choice of cryptocurrency for this community. No public ledger. Like the lemmyverse here, no currency is powerful until many people use it, so instead of resisting, which simply reinforces the status quo and keeps the companies in control, dive in and help grow the ecosystem, like you’re doing here!
Regarding your last question, I could ask those about cash. Crypto is a lot like cash, and if you lose it you’re kinda screwed. You just need to learn how to keep a hardware wallet safe.
I would hesitate to draw too many parallels between lemmy and crypto. Speech, ideas and social media is one thing, currency and transactions another, and I’m not sure applying the same philosophy to both is necessarily wise. Traditional currencies and banking have had centuries to work out problems; they may not be perfect but I don’t see a fundamental need to throw them away and shift massively to crypto. Of course I could be wrong, so I’m not against experimentation, but we do need to experiment prudently and be open to critique :)
True, which is why most people keep their most of their cash in banks: it’s more secure there and if anything happens you can always sue the bank if it comes to that. With a hardware wallet, what recourse do you have? Even if you take all the precautions you can, no system is completely foolproof, and as an individual it takes a lot of time and effort to do that yourself.
Yes, most people keep their cash in banks. But when they go out, they put some in their pockets to tip etc. that’s all I’m talking about here, tipping creators, but everyone thinks if someone brings up crypto, they’re trying to get you to change your philosophy or withdraw all your money from the bank. This is overreacting.
Do you use Venmo?
It’s because there are a lot of crypto entrepreneurs (who have a vested interest in the thing) who talk about it like it’s the inevitable future of the economy, which is it’s own kind of exaggerating.
I’m not in the US so I don’t use Venmo, no.
PayPal? They’re all the same. You can think of crypto, especially as offered in the Strike app, as like a Venmo competitor. You just plug your credit card into the app, same as with Venmo and PayPal, Cash App, Zelle, etc and when you want to tip someone crypto, you just go type $5 in and it pulls $5 from your account and converts it to bitcoin at the rate at that minute and lets you send it right away. No middle man, no fees, no lost value due to a drop in bitcoin price, just like Venmo, with all the advantages in privacy and custody that crypto offers.