We're back! 300+ Listings and Counting

We never truly disappeared, but there's been a severe drought of blog posts for several months. In this time, https://donatemonero.org reached over 300 listings (309 currently!), in part from submissions from the community, and in part from silent outreach done by us in the background (because not every single thing needs a dedicated blog post). This represents some pretty crazy growth, given only it was only April we were at 250.

We are also doing some interesting things with web scrapers, and have found quite a lot of success in pulling Github repos that currently accept Monero (these are not represented on Donate Monero yet, there is a lot of projects to go through), and projects that do not accept Monero but accept other coins (which can then be targeted for outreach). Every email sent requesting Monero is still done in a personalized manner, as spamming people's inbox with worthless nonsense is not a good look for outreach.

We also redesigned the Donate Monero site! The new look with actual logos feels so much cleaner, even if gathering logos for projects is slowly stripping away our sanity. In the future we also plan on having something that automatically scrapes donate pages to ensure the address provided on our page is a valid address.

We also noticed some interesting things while doing our outreach. We discovered a large amount of Crypto donations are going through a processor called The Giving Block. Outreach to get them to add Monero as an option would allow for hundreds of places that currently do not accept private donations to suddenly be accepting of Monero. This includes things as broad as the American Cancer Society, but also organizations like the Signal Foundation. The problem is these would be donations managed by a third party that immediately converts everything back to fiat for the organization, which runs quite contrary to the counter-economics we are actually going for. Currently Donate Monero listings are about 90% direct Monero addresses, which is an extremely good sign for actual adoption as a currency, rather than everything going through a centralized processor like many places accepting Bitcoin use.

Back in April we attempted to get EFF to accept Monero. While this did not succeed, (they refused to migrate to a new platform that allows for Monero donations, we suspect they are using direct deposit addresses on a CEX, and there isn't really any CEXs that actually have Monero as an option to replace their current system), we discovered that EFF technically does accept Monero. EFF-Austin, a sort-of cousin to normal EFF with highly aligned goals, has accepted Monero donations this entire time. So we officially would like to declare EFF-Austin as more based than normal EFF.

The next part is going to be dropping the collectivist writing. This specifically is me talking, Absinthium, the person who has wrote all of the blogs and manages all of the sites currently (it is a goal of mine to distribute power to multiple people other than myself, hence Monero "coalition", not Monero "one idiot that blogs and writes emails sometimes"). I have very few hard boundaries on things I list on Donate Monero. While it doesn't bring me much joy listing things like The American Nazi party, I would much rather not de-platform someone simply for having a different opinion than me. But lines have to be drawn somewhere. So far, I have refused to add 2 things to the directory: an AI-RP site designed for child abusers to act out abusing children, and a Matrix instance designed specifically for posting underage drawings of children. If you have a problem with either of these decisions, go create your own directory. An entire JSON of all updated projects are listed at https://donatemonero.org/projects.json

Again, I draw very few lines. But I have had friends and family in my life that have gone through sexual abuse, and listing these would make me vomit. I hope my somewhat arbitrary lines can be accepted for now, maybe in the future when it is not just me managing these things they will end up being removed. Either way, transparency disclosure done. I have more emails to write.