Depending on how you sent money to MIRI, we’d incur transaction fees anyway (donating through PayPal using a PayPal account or CC). ACH donations have lower fees, and checks don’t have any, but both of those take staff time to process, so unless the donation was say $50 or more, it probably wouldn’t be worth it.
No fees, but also takes some extra staff time (additional bookkeeping/accounting work is involved), so there is some cost to it. If we got more BTC donations it would reduce the time cost per donation, due to effects of batching, but as it stands now, they are usually processed (record added to our donor database and accounting software) on an individual basis.
One thing that takes a significant amount of time is when someone mis-pays a Coinbase invoice (sends a different amount of BTC then they indicated on the Coinbase form on our site). Coinbase treats these payments in a different way that ends up requiring more time to process on our end.
All that being said we like having the BTC donation option, and it always makes me happy to see one come in. So if making contributions via BTC is your preference, I’m all for it :)
Couldn’t you pay $0.00, send the money to MIRI, and avoid transaction fees?
Yeah. Main reason to do it this way is fear of trivial inconveniences.
Depending on how you sent money to MIRI, we’d incur transaction fees anyway (donating through PayPal using a PayPal account or CC). ACH donations have lower fees, and checks don’t have any, but both of those take staff time to process, so unless the donation was say $50 or more, it probably wouldn’t be worth it.
What about Bitcoin?
No fees, but also takes some extra staff time (additional bookkeeping/accounting work is involved), so there is some cost to it. If we got more BTC donations it would reduce the time cost per donation, due to effects of batching, but as it stands now, they are usually processed (record added to our donor database and accounting software) on an individual basis.
One thing that takes a significant amount of time is when someone mis-pays a Coinbase invoice (sends a different amount of BTC then they indicated on the Coinbase form on our site). Coinbase treats these payments in a different way that ends up requiring more time to process on our end.
All that being said we like having the BTC donation option, and it always makes me happy to see one come in. So if making contributions via BTC is your preference, I’m all for it :)
They use coinbase, so according to this it’s free up to $1 million.
It should be free, period. Coinbase doesn’t charge fees for registered non-for-profits.
Yup, but those are convenient distribution platforms.