As you may be aware, the world of fiat currency is rife with identity verification, Know Your Customer (USA) laws, and various other things that reveal who you are to everyone in the world when so much as a dollar gets involved. Money makes the world go 'round, and so does your identity details. My original plan for taking (and making) donations involved using an LLC as the proxy to prevent having to use my real identity to send a friend or two a buck (and then having that LLC owned by a registered agent), but I believe I've been able to establish two way donations making without breaking the anonymity that I've cherished (partially because it's fun to evade such things but also because people deserve to use the internet without having their identity tied to it - this isn't China).
First and foremost - Lain.la (d/b/a Iwakura Systems) is not a registered company at this time, and I don't expect it to be in the near future. I've had aspirations to try to do so, but my research has led me to the following conclusions:
- One does not simply donate to a company, they donate to individuals. Therefore, donations to my company would likely be taxable as I wouldn't be going for a 501c3 registered charity where they count as tax-deductible gifts for both parties. (I could try though!)
- An LLC comes with significant cost and paperwork that must be renewed at least yearly. I can hire a registered agent, but that will take time and money still.
- Some of Lain.la's infrastructure is non-free (I know, I know...) and relies on personal, NFR, or other special licensing arrangements. These become null and void when I become a company. While I'm sure we all don't mind waving the pirate flag every so often, it becomes more problematic as a business.
- I don't really want business income. Not yet. Not even with the Asian porn influx.
So, with the LLC idea on hold for the moment, I still needed a way to participate in various donation platforms, both inbound and outbound, without giving myself up. For the sake of argument, anonymity is defined as the following:
A donation, either to Lain.la or from Lain.la, should not reveal my identity to the person I am donating to, nor reveal their identity to me.
If you want true two way anonymity, donate in crypto, specifically XMR. This method does NOT secure you against companies stealing your data. Only disgruntled internet denizens.
Inbound Donations to You:
First and foremost, Stripe is a pretty good platform by my first impressions. It is used as the backend for two major donation platforms (and preferred by them): Ko-Fi and Liberapay. Stripe is where your money will sit when you receive an inbound payment, and you only need to set yourself as an Individual to maintain a business account without a registered business. The platform is feature rich (real businesses are supposed to use it) but you really don't need anything except a linked bank account in here (to extract your donations). Your identity will only be shown on Stripe as the Statement Descriptor you set, as well as the Support Phone/Address (You can generally fudge the support stuff to whatever you like, just don't be stupid about it). A user will see these on their receipt from Stripe. Their fees are a tad rough at 2.9% + $0.30 per payment and there's no way around this, but it is what it is.
Stripe will need a lot of your personal information as it is a payments platform. Again, this article is not meant to protect you against companies or data harvesting. Use crypto instead if that's your use case.
On Ko-Fi and Liberapay, you do NOT have to give them your name or anything private to set up an account. The most identifying thing you will give them is a connection to Stripe via their API which is largely a push-button exercise if you're logged into Stripe already. Oh, and an email address too, although I just used unique email addresses on my @iwakura.systems domain for each service.
Outbound Donations from You:
Ironically this is harder to deal with for some reason. When you donate to someone such as myself, Ko-Fi allows you to donate as a guest and Liberapay lets you make an account on the spot with no information required, but you can get caught by an evil little field on Ko-Fi (if the user picked Stripe as the backend):
Ko-Fi:
That "Name on card" field? Bullshit. Total bullshit. It has nothing to do with the processing of the payment, but it DOES make it through to Stripe if the person you are donating to is using them.
Here's evidence of me putting in TEST in the "Name on card" field and it making it through to Stripe:
Regarding PayPal - I didn't test PayPal's backend. They fucked my business account up when I tried. But, I did pay someone via PayPal as a donator and used the CIA's headquarters as the billing address and the RickRoll hotline (778-330-2389) for the phone number specifically with a VISA credit card and it fucking went through.
Now, LiberaPay's "donation over time" model seems to bypass this as I don't see it in Stripe (they have the same "name on card" field and you can fudge it to "TEST" or whatever), but I have to wait like a month for the payment to finish since they do a "partial refund" in Stripe. I will report back if a name shows up there, but it seems they are able to preserve secrecy as it doesn't generate a receipt immediately.
However in Ko-Fi, your real name shows up if you fall for that trick, so you're going to give your full name away to the person you are donating to. Also, it proves it has NO standing on the transaction because it was successful despite the name on my card being TEST. I already screwed this up once and found out the hard way, so let's hope my very generous donation keeps that person's lips sealed, for science of course. It should also be noted that your email address and your ZIP code will make it through to Stripe but I find these only moderately problematic. The full name thing? Awful!
So, with all of that research out of the way, Lain.la now has both a Ko-Fi and a Liberapay set up, in addition to my crypto addresses and my BuyVM referral. It only took tripping my credit card's fraud alarms three times to make happen during my testing. I recommend Ko-Fi for one-time donations and Liberapay if you want to provide ongoing support of things like this research I did here. Remember to fudge the "Name on card" field if you donate, although your personal info will never be revealed by me if you forget. Oh, if you end up finding my personal details anywhere on these two platforms somehow, remember that I pay out for security bugs, and that's a big one, so contact me at 7666@lain.la to tell me I screwed up for cash.
Last part of this article: Now that I have a donations system in place, I of course have used it to spend money instead of receive it, putting me in the red. Typical, right? Here's a list of people I have donated to (Fediverse handle for all donations) to help fund people who work on software or projects I fully support. (I may do more later but these were at the top of the list for now):
- @dwarf@borg.social - €30
- @maia@crimew.gay - $30
- @devk@xch.fairuse.org - £10
- @hj@shigusegubu.club - €100