It is ultimately up to the QubesOS community managers (or whoever takes care of the crypto-donations management) to decide which coins they find appropriate; but here, let me voice some of my opinions:
on stable coins
Stable coins mostly are fractional banks without a banking license. They promise to have a 1-on-1 (or whatever their ratio) of “cash” holdings corresponding to the crypto tokens that they have available for use. But most of the time, that “peg” doesn’t hold, the stable coin issuer gets caught not having the advertised cash reserves for backing its coin, and the value of the coin craters (reminds me of TERRA/LUNA).
on non-POW
I axiomatically disagree with the insinuation that “energy usage is something undesired.” Energy usage is good because it keeps our technological systems going. The question is how efficiently the energy is used. With Monero (and Bitcoin) the energy expended provides the security of their financial networks, and thus keep allowing us to use those networks in a secure way, 24/7 365 days.
Proof of Stake, on the other hand, is mostly a new and untested technique, which might weaken the permissionless nature of the participation of those cryptocurrency networks, or, which might weaken their networks’ security against disruptive attacks (double-spends, 51 percent attacks, etc.).
Donating with Bitcoin ensures that 100% of your money supports Qubes development because we do not incur any administrative costs. With credit card donations, we lose roughly 14% to administrative costs.
Am I correct in assuming that this also applies to all crypto currencies? If yes, it should be updated:
If you want to invest in a stable coin these are valid doubts. For me and maybe others I just want to make a Qubes OS donation without bank transfer and without credit card. Therefore, I do see a stable coin as a good option to offer.
POS is out there since 2011, so yes not as old as POW but I would not name it untested. It is a big step for any coin which has been started before this time (i.e. ETH …). And without any doubt A. Monero is doing a good job with the recoding of their POW to avoid centralization B. Bitcon is the worst case example of POW. Anyways, again if you are looking for a crypto currency which operates on low-energy POS is ahead of POW.
There are many… many… articles when you searx for “POW vs. POS”. I would like to just post one matrix as a kind of summary. Everyone can make his own research and opinion on this…
Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stake
Proof-of-Work
Proof-of-Stake
PoW or proof of work is a special protocol that aims to deter cyber-attacks such as DDoS (distributed denial-of-service attacks).
Proof of stake (PoS) is a type of consensus mechanism which is used to validate transactions on the blockchain.
Any hacker needs to gain more than 50% of total computational power to perform a 51% attack.
Hackers must own more than 50% of all cryptocurrencies on the same network, which is impossible.
The mining probability depends on the computational work done.
A new block’s validity depends on the size of the stake.
Miners receive rewards for complex solving cryptographic problems.
The validator does not receive a block reward. Instead, they only collect network fees as their reward.
Requires powerful and up-to-date mining hardware.
Requires server-grade unit for efficient processing.
PoW is the original cryptographic consensus mechanism originating long before PoS.
PoS was derived from PoW, but it comes with several improvements.
To achieve more scalability, all nodes within a transaction are involved.
The entire network is not involved in the verification of every transaction.
Maybe a good analogy:
POW is the combustion engine, POS is the electrical drive, both are good power trains. The combustion engine is there since decades it is a highly engineered drive and comes with some advantages on range and thermal capabilities. The electrical drive train is green (depending on where you set the system boundaries and how the electricity is generated) it is simple, less rotating parts. It can also drive you reliably to your destination.
Some guys like the combustion engine, some prefer the electrical drive. Why don’t we offer both ?
How is that even true? Is the project able to pay for things in crypto currency? At some point someone has to exchange it into actual money and will incur fees – right?
That’s a fair point, though some people are willing to be paid in cryptocurrency in exchange for doing work for the project, so it’s possible to avoid exchange fees (though not network fees). So, “100%” is not literally true. I believe the intention here was just to point out that donations via cryptocurrency don’t incur OpenCollective administrative costs, but the way it’s worded inaccurately states more than intended. I’ll edit that.
USG doesn’t have jurisdiction about which software people choose to run. If I was the responsible person from QubesOS, I would get that amount (irrespective of if coming from Tornado Cash) happily, immediately.
Thank you, @rustybird and all, for bringing this to our attention. I notified the rest of the Qubes team about this on Wednesday and strongly suggested that we consider creating and publicizing an Ethereum donation address. The team has been discussing it internally.
Cryptos can be debated until the cows come home, for good reasons…
As for Monero I’d just like to add that I’m actively and constantly working towards doing real business based on the emerging economy & community that it already is, and Qubes is part of that in so many ways.
I pay my Mullvad account using Monero only, I’m now running a VPS with the new websites/projects I’m working on and I have some Njalla domains live paid in Monero only
It really is already a circular economy, and I do wish that there will be some entry level Qubes services around there for getting people who want to spend some real time on their own privacy & security.
That is why I’m kinda interested in first line newbie support, and especially if any transactions for this is done with Monero
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