On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 7:11 PM, Mark Holmquist
<mtraceur@member.fsf.org> wrote:
Any thoughts on how to make it work would be welcome.
1. User wants to give money to a project
2. If that user wants to give a tiny amount, they can opt to pay the transaction fee themselves, or....
3. A better way might be to offer packages, where the FSF or whoever else will pay the fees (or the fees are waived somehow, I am not a banker), but a minimum buy-in is required. Once the money is in the FSF's custody, however, the user can give tiny amounts if they prefer. Transferring money around internally (i.e., this money goes from one bucket to another bucket) is much easier than acting as merely a momentary transfer point.
This way (your option 3) is essentially how Flattr and TipTheWeb seem to avoid the problem of fees.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, avoids them by avoiding actual costs, but if you want to exchange bitcoins for "real money" there will be fees.
Again, not a banker, so I'm not sure how viable this is. But it could work.
--
Mark Holmquist
Contractor, Wikimedia Foundation
mtraceur@member.fsf.org
http://marktraceur.info