Alternate payment methods [LWN.net]

Alternate payment methods

Posted Sep 2, 2026 3:06 UTC (Wed) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408)
Parent article: A note on subscription prices from LWN

The only thing stopping me from subscribing, even with the price increase, is that I prefer to pay in cryptocurrency.

If there are issues with the environmental impact of proof-of-work mining, there are many alternatives that use proof-of-stake algorithms that do not have a negative environmental impact (and surely are less economically unethical than, say, Paypal).

to post comments

Alternate payment methods

Posted Sep 2, 2026 9:44 UTC (Wed) by fredi@lwn (subscriber, #65912) [Link] (1 responses)

@lwn: Hope this comment is appropriate, I am just trying to help here.

@cypherpunks2 Solvable, I can pay it for you, and you pay me back in crypto. If this works for you, give me an email address where we can comunicate privately.

Alternate payment methods

Posted Sep 3, 2026 12:01 UTC (Thu) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link]

> @cypherpunks2 Solvable, I can pay it for you, and you pay me back in crypto. If this works for you, give me an email address where we can comunicate privately.

That's very kind of you, but I'd rather pay directly myself to reduce hassle of renewals and the like.

Alternate payment methods

Posted Sep 2, 2026 11:59 UTC (Wed) by teknohog (subscriber, #70891) [Link] (7 responses)

This was also one reason why I kept reading without subscribing here for years. Cryptocurrencies should be the natural payment method for free software projects, though I also admit their image has been tarnished in recent years; besides the environmental issues, there have been political and financial developments that go completely against the original ideals of "freedom currencies".

I also understand that adding new payment methods may be a nontrivial undertaking for a small website/team, regardless of what they personally think of the methods.

Alternate payment methods

Posted Sep 2, 2026 12:40 UTC (Wed) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link]

Yes, the difficulty of implementing it has been the thing holding us back. I looked into what it would take for us to accept Monero after the last time cryptocurrency came up in the comments, and, unfortunately, it would require either setting up a whole new backend service and integrating it into our credit-card-handling hooks or evaluating and choosing one of the many (variously trustworthy) companies that promise to handle it for you.

It definitely can be done, we just haven't gotten to it yet. With several people expressing their desire to subscribe with cryptocurrency in these comments, maybe we should move the priority up the list.

Alternate payment methods

Posted Sep 3, 2026 12:03 UTC (Thu) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link] (5 responses)

> Cryptocurrencies should be the natural payment method for free software projects, though I also admit their image has been tarnished in recent years; besides the environmental issues, there have been political and financial developments that go completely against the original ideals of "freedom currencies".

At the risk of starting an off-topic line of discussion, I do want to point out that that proof-of-stake algorithms have no problematic environmental impacts, unlike the proof-of-work algorithms of e.g. Bitcoin. I like Monero personally (although it's PoW not PoS) because it does not have that problematic political ultra-capitalist usage where people use it heavily for speculation.

Alternate payment methods

Posted Sep 14, 2026 16:49 UTC (Mon) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link] (4 responses)

> I do want to point out that that proof-of-stake algorithms have no problematic environmental impacts, unlike the proof-of-work algorithms

Don't proof-of-stake systems encourage the mass hoarding of storage hardware? While nowhere near as bad proof-of-work, that is not of zero environmental consequence (presuming they became popular). I'm quite out of the loop these days, though, I may be misinformed. If it does require lots of storage, presumably the squeeze caused by the AI industry has caused interesting things to happen there...

Alternate payment methods

Posted Sep 15, 2026 1:17 UTC (Tue) by edgewood (subscriber, #1123) [Link] (3 responses)

I think you are referring to proof of capacity. The stake in proof of stake refers to the holdings of the cryptocurrency, like "table stakes" in poker.

Alternate payment methods

Posted Sep 15, 2026 20:11 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

What's the scenario look like for a "bank run" on proof-of-stake? Do the whales get to cash out and leave everyone else stuck without "stake" to make exiting transactions? Or is it hoisted by its own bootstraps looking for a "bigger sucker" to allow exits?

Alternate payment methods

Posted Sep 16, 2026 0:11 UTC (Wed) by edgewood (subscriber, #1123) [Link]

I don't know much about crypto except what I've read (I turned down a friend who got into mining Bitcoin in early 2011 and wanted me to join, that's the closest I've gotten to it)

That said, I believe that proof of stake uses automated detection of attacks that destroys the attacker's staked coins, called slashing.

Someone actually involved can probably explain it better.

Alternate payment methods

Posted Sep 16, 2026 6:35 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

There is no "exit". In regular Bitcoin you mine a signature for a block of transactions. As a reward, you get some coins (the block will include a transaction from the thin air into your wallet).

Additionally, you can also say: "I will include your transaction in the block I'm mining if you give me 0.0001 BTC". This is called "mining for transaction fees".

Proof-of-stake just removes the mining step. Instead, you essentially say: "I have 10000000 ETH coins, and I will include your transactions in my block if you give me 1 ETH". These staked wallets form a pool, and a random wallet is selected out of it to sign a block. The probability of selection typically is proportional to the amount of coins that you stake.