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How to CORRECTLY fundraise for counter-government protests

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TLDR; Use a BIP47 hosted on a static IPFS for BTC and BTCPay on Onion for BTC-LN. Then tumble donations.

Whether peacefully protesting Trump or Trudeau. If you are working against racism, fascism, or tyrants, if you struggle against power, expect power to respond. I don't think relying on the "gentler nature" of your opposition is a winning strategy. Deferring to rule-of-law as the arbiter can take years or decades to release funds, if ever. So how to finance peaceful resistance may be a harder problem to solve than most imagine. Here are some common ways that those with power can silence those without:

Coercion

The obvious pressure is simply coercion where public pressure or threats of audit (IRS) may cause sites to pull campaigns. The donation site owners may be steadfast, but that is not always a guarantee.

Social Media Revocation

Donation site owners with social media accounts could easily be frozen by Twitter, youtube, facebook. There are a few decentralized social media sites that may help and those should definitely be in your distribution. Mastadon, Bitshute, and BitMessage, I believe claimed a decentralized network.

Browser Blacklisting

The next major dependency are the three largest browsers, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. All three maintain an "Unsafe Site" list that these fundraisers could easily be added to if those browser foundations choose to do so.

CA / SSL Revocation

Moving down the line, donation sites often use a certificate authority. If the CA bowed to pressure, they could revoke the site's SSL certificate. It would be similar to a browser blacklist.

DNS Revocation

Donation sites often use large domain registrars like GoDaddy. I know GoDaddy has no problem revoking registration for any site or cause that they are pressured to remove.

Web Network Hosting

Even if Let's Encrypt, GoDaddy, and the Browsers choose to ignore social pressure, unless a donation site is housing their own network-edge and server infrastructure, whichever company serves their networking and server hosting could pull the plug.

Blacklisting

If you manage to get through all the censorship and do amass fund, spending those funds can be problematic. Pressure can be put on exchanges and banks to prevent FIAT from being withdrawn, or prevent blacklisted addresses from finding an "off-ramp".


So with all the danger's outlined, I'll go through some of the countermeasures. I don't endorse any of these, just outline what is out there.

BIP-47 Bitcoin payment codes

BIP-47 allows for a type of Diffie-Hellman key-swap voodoo where a base58 string called "payment code" (similar to an XPUB) can be published on your site. The protocol allows for a key mixing that will privately, peer-to-peer, produce an agreed on bitcoin address that the owner of the payment-code controls. The "key space" for all addresses that can be made is 232. So it would be very difficult for an entity to enforce a blacklist that large. In short, BIP-47 cannot be blacklisted. I believe Samurai Wallets are the only one's supporting either send or receive to BIP-47 presently.

Web Archive

Whether you self-host your donation site, or use a centralized donation service, ensure you have web-archive services crawl your site. archive.org and archive.today are two of the largest web-archivers. Having a copy of your donation page with the BIP47 payment code will help prevent complete censorship. But keep in mind, archive.org WILL take sites off the archive if ordered to do so. archive.today is a bit more anarchists in their beliefs AFAIK.

Mirror Services

You may not need to commit to GoFundMe, GiveSendGo, or TallyCoin for centralized donation sites, best to put the same base donate.md file on all three. Best to include a BIP47 payment code on your template.

Self Host

As you further down the list, self-hosting becomes important. The main problem with self-hosting is DDoS protection, since most any single server can trivially be taken offline. Also relying on any DDoS service like Cloudflare is problematic since Cloudflare can easily remove DDoS protections if pressured to do so. IPFS (mentioned later) is probably the best DDoS resistant self-hosting solution.

Decentralized Social Networking

Take some time to find some decentralized social networking platforms. I know Mastadon and BitChute used to both be partially or fully peer-to-peer. Another messaging app for DMs would be BitMessage. Apps like Signal are good, but since they rely on phone numbers, they could likely revoke access if wanted.

BTCPay Server

Just like self-hosting fixes many of the problems in the hosting stack. BTCPay server fixes many of the problems in the payment stack. One of the great advantages with BTCPay is that it allows clean hosting of BTC-LN donations. These donations are quasi-anonymous so should be encouraged when collecting donations. BTCPay will also accept alt-coin donations. Unfortunately neither BIP47 or CreditCard support is available in BTCPay today.

Alternate Networks (Onion, IPFS, I2P)

Given how much centralization is in most IPv4 or IPv6 solutions, some newer and better solutions have come to light. I2P, Onion and IPFS are three such types of network. Each with their own pros and cons. IPFS is nice since any IPFS user can pin your site. So something as simple as a single donate.html site pinned throughout the network would become unstoppable. I2P is similar, but the pinning is implicit based upon how often the information is accessed. A major drawback to these is that hosting back-end services like BTCPay won't work. Onion is the only alternate-network that would work with BTCPay AFAIK.

Cleaning donations

Since most any non-BIP47 shielded address could be blacklisted, you should anticipate cleaning any donations you receive. Tumblers like Wasabi, Whirlpool, and JoinMarket can help anonymize your coins. These are definitely RTFM products, so take a moment to learn how to manage and insulate clean UTXOs so that they don't mingle. If your left with amounts too small to tumble, you can use a non-KYC BTC to BTC-LN exchange. Something like FixedFloat would likely work. But any centralized service, even a non-KYC one, is risky.


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