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Please remove mitsuhiko/*

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Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#251

Post by ortusdux »

art2 wrote: post #194

What is staggering is that one would assume that this service was created with the aim of helping open source developers, but when the developers ask personally to make a reasonable change to how the site is functioning, the owners decline. So the reason the site exists is something different. I don't think it's fraud. It's probably the weird culture of the (younger) part of the Bitcoin community, for whom the Bitcoi…

>It's hard to rationally explain why liking Bitcoin leads to liking tip4commit's approach

A currency only works if people use it. A good way to support bitcoin is to expand adoption. It seems to me that the creators of tip4commit have blinders on and only view the project through bitcoin colored glasses.

The issue as I see it is that the bitcoin movement mirrors the technology's decentralized nature. There is a general optimism and push towards adoption, but no real methods or direction towards that goal. It's a rather organic, evolving system. Things that have helped adoption have been repeated and things that cause a backlash are squashed and learned from. The latter is what I would say is happening here.

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#252

Post by zaroth »

bewaretheirs wrote: post #171
randallsquared wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can there be taxation consequences unless you act to set up a bitcoin address and accept the offered tip? If you've done all that, I think it's clear you know what you're doing. If you don't do that, then the money (apparently?) returns to the project you committed to, from whence it came. The only way there could be tax is if you receive the money, and that can only happen by you deliberately becoming involved.

In the US, if a payment is "available" to you, it must be reported as income at the time it becomes available. Failure to cash a paycheck doesn't mean you don't owe tax on it. See IRS publication 525, page 2, "constructively received income": http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p525.pdf There's some fuzziness and legal room here but the safe thing would be to declare it as income.

Yes, it's true you're supposed to pay taxes for money earned in the year it was earned, not just when you happened to deposit the check. That has little to no bearing for this situation.

First, the money isn't available since it hasn't even been sent to you. Until you sign-up for the service, and provide a bitcoin address for the funds to be sent to your private key, they are not available. But more importantly, since you have no business relationship with the person giving the money, I would think the best characterization for the income is a tax-free gift (up to $14,000 per giver). But IANAL, and this isn't tax advice.

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#253

Post by scotty79 »

DanBC wrote: post #250
scotty79 wrote: post #249

So basically main point of opposition boil down to: 1. "Don't use my project name to collect money for me!" Why not use your project name? Did you trademarked it? If not, then it's just public information and you can't control how anyone chooses to use it. No one is collecting money for you. The guy just collects money and promises to give it to you if you ask. Until you ask it's his money. 2. "Don't spam!" Well, spa…

> No one is collecting money for you. The guy just collects money and promises to give it to you if you ask. Until you ask it's his money. Did you see the bit of US tax law helpfully posted elsewhere in the thread?

I just did. What a bizarre construct. Totally unenforceable. You'll get 'civil forfeiture'-d 50 times at random before IRS will charge you with that and wins. Besides it's not uncashed check. It's verbal (or even virtual) promise made by person in another country. If Nigerian prince offers you 500000$ you just need to claim do you have to pay taxes on that?

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#254

Post by scotty79 »

zorpner wrote: post #193
isgood12 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes absolutely no sense to me. If I get an offer from a bank that $200 is available to me if I open a checking account with them, then do I have to report it as income even if I don't open an account or perform any action to go after it?

The money is not available to you if you receive a contingent offer. Once you accept the offer then the money becomes available to you.

Same for tip4commit. You need to accept the their offer to give you money. Until you do, money is not available to you.

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#255

Post by hack_edu »

exo762 wrote: post #232
hack_edu wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would the project be sustainable, or more fair, if it allowed project maintainers to whitelist currencies, and manage that integration for them? That seems more appropriate and follows the the spirit of giving that the project encourages.

Tip4commit using USD? Bitcoin is hasslefree. If you want tip4commit to use USD or gold or any other silly thing - go for it. Clone tip4commit, put all integration in place, see payment systems eating 30-40% of your donations.

OK, so yes. We agree that it is unsustainable if the effort is put forth to make your product actually convenient for the volunteers whose shoulders you sit on.

Meanwhile you insult us by simply saying "fork it." That doesn't get money donated on my behalf out of your Bitcoin wallet. I suggest y'all stop bickering and actually start helping. The burden to clean up your oversights is on no one but yourself.

We know you built the project in good faith, but it needs serious tweaks. At this point you're being a nuisance, at best, to the very creators of projects your site is deployed upon! If they were in your situation they would have fixed this, shipped it, and have written a detailed postmortem by now.

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#257

Post by Ologn »

williamcotton wrote: post #242
Ologn wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Bitcoin does fail, a large part of the blame will be one the shoulders of so many software and IT people who make a flash decision that Bitcoin was "tulips" or a "ponzi scheme" Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme. That people think they have any value shows they have a fundamental misunderstanding of value. This group might include a lot of people, but the number of people who owned over-priced houses in 2008, or dot-com…

It is valuable because it is a shared public data store with equal access read and write privileges. Data stored in it is available, partitionable and eventually consistent. It works due to the economic incentives of being rewarded for validating transactions. Prior to Bitcoin there were no shared public data stores that satisfied these requirements. Bittorrent and Freenet are not guaranteed to have data availability…

I understand what you're saying. The only problem is what data is in that decentralized, available, secure data store. The only data allowed in is self-referencing data. Most people don't care about the Bitcoin data store. If I could access, say, Gutenberg.org books in that data store, or something of that nature, I and others would find more value in it.

On the other end of that, processing, not data, there are distributed processing projects out there finding the optimal golomb rulers, looking for pulsars, how protein folds etc. There could be value in a distributed project processing these and other projects. All of Bitcoin processing is self-referential though, it does not allow for this potentially more valuable processing.

What you're describing would be valuable, but not if the only data storable is self-referencing. People don't buy 1 terabyte disk drives that already store Bitcoin blockchain history. They pay for hard drives because they will store the information they want to store and retrieve on them.

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#258

Post by eropple »

Cakez0r wrote: post #239
eropple wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those projects are in the public domain. This is completely wrong. > If there are purposes that you don't want your project to be used for then forbid it in the license. This is completely inapplicable. > If I was denied the chance to receive a donation for a contribution I made to an open source project essentially because the "project owner" doesn't agree then I'd be very annoyed. Start your own project.

Thank you for taking the time to post this enlightening rebuttal.

The first two are incontrovertible facts. If you don't want blunt responses, don't pretend a right to your own facts.

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#259

Post by csdrane »

demetris wrote: post #18
ubernostrum wrote: post #5

I do not normally rant, but tip4commit and its ilk are some of the most infuriating people in the world to deal with, since they're opting other people's projects into something that has all sorts of legal/taxation consequences and think that "we have no way to remove you once you get opted in" is an acceptable answer. I'd push complaints further up to GitHub, since I'm sure something in the way this works violates t…

Maybe contacting their hosting provider could be an additional way to approach the problem, since, from what I can tell, the messages they send to contributors are spam.

Not sure how the process works, but what about getting their domain added to Spamhaus's lists? [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spamhaus_Project

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#260

Post by scotty79 »

chakalakasp wrote: post #42
sfk wrote: post #14

If open source parasites like tip4commit don't learn, the next logical step is to trademark projects and send DMCA notices without wasting any further time. Also, with this kind of sleazy behavior, the advertising clause in the BSD license suddenly becomes very appealing again.

I don't think DMCA applies to Trademarks, it is a law that specifically pertains to copyright. The two areas of law are quite different.

Yeah. I noticed people treat DMCA as "don't do anything I don't like with what I'm involved with" law.
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