This felt like the kind of crowd that might be interested in this!
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Brilliant level of detail in that! Yeah, I was looking into it a while ago, being sick of the reliance on PayPal and Stripe.
I did find a few other initiatives though.
- in Brazil only: Pix is a central bank run bank-to-bank thing with no fees. It IS possible if there is political will!
- GNU Taler: in development. Digital wallet (not blockchain) thatās backed by Swiss financial regulators. There will be fees (but at least itās not going to Peter Thiel and the like)
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And seen this?
direct:
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I have some small exposure to KYC from my past career āknow your customerā and it is a nightmare. This is a very interesting read.
This uses Stripe, so it feels like itās not really a Replacement For Stripe 
. It feels more like a replacement for Patreon.
More info here:
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ah I see, good point
I enjoyed the mention of cryptocurrency here as wellā¦
A few days ago I was lamenting that the playing field is so not level wrt payments and there ought to be a way to decentralize and something like cryptocurrā¦ 
uh hang on a moment!
What is needed is something the fulfills on the promise of what cryptocurrency was originally imagined to be and nothing like what it actually is. Although, more likely, the original promise was a lie and it was always truly meant to be the abomination it is.
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TALER Integration Community Hub comes with free software development grants to integrate GNU Taler with your software. Coming up with a federated solution that can be used by all the projects here, or maybe combining options to serve the music community around a common proposal might be an interesting take. Certainly there is a number of music-specific use-cases that can be shared beyond the simple implementation of micro-payments for singles.
Note that GNU Taler has KYC builtin thanks to the use of IBANs and strong cryptography, which drops the cost of operation down to something that enables micropayments: transaction fees are a fraction of those used in classical payment systems such as Visa/Mastercard, Stripe, Paypalā¦ And it preserves your privacy as a buyer: nobody knows youāre a fan of SĢµĶĢĢĶĢuĢµĢĢĢ±pĢ·ĶĢĶĶĢ¢Ģ„ĶĶĢeĢ“ĶĶĢĢĢŖĶĢ£rĢøĢĢĢĶĢ¬Ģ£Ģ³Ģ«sĢ¶ĶĶĢtĢ·ĶĢ¾ĶĢĢĢĢĢaĢ·ĢĶĢĢrĢøĢĢ¾Ģ«Ģ„Ģ®Ģ.
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As the article linked in the OP puts it;
āWe need far more than a different PayFac or a different Itch. We need an entire different way of transferring funds online. But I still hate crypto.ā
Taler is one attempt to do that. The article about CrowdBucks mentions the OpenPayments and Web Monetization protocols. Itās good that people are exploring the problem space.
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This isnāt necessarily relevant to the main topic, but reading this, it popped into my head.
I know people who have used Liberapay, and I have thought about trying it out in the past. But when I go to the platform, it doesnāt feel or look like itās very secure, so I never actually used it.
Has anyone here used Liberapay, and what are your thoughts or experiences with it?
Also anyone remember Flattr? The micro donation platform? I always thought that was an interesting idea.
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Liberapay is a very stripped down version of patreon. It uses Stripe to handle payments.
But when I go to the platform, it doesnāt feel or look like itās very secure, so I never actually used it.
This underscores how important what something looks like is imo!
I think a thing that this is also getting at, and a thing weāve been thinking about at Mirlo, is the potential of trying to take things out of financial transactions (which currently thereās all interest to be state backed and enforced. Taller is funded by the European Union, and you bet theyāll have tickles around what it gets used for eventually. We donāt have a solution yet though 
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Taler, like any payment software, has to work within the existing payment infrastructure, including the laws in each jurisdiction. But otherwise, thereās no way EU funding can control how Taler works.
Itās a GNU package, so to the degree thereās a āproduct ownerā not the EU, but rather the GNU Project (and maybe FSF). Plus itās 100% Free Code software. So even in the unlikely event that the existing stewards went to the dark side, and allowed something dodgy into the code, developers committed to the vision (convenient payments with privacy for customers) could fork it and continue development elsewhere.
This isnāt about āadding something dodgy into the codeā
Weāve touched on this in other threads on here, and maybe weāll just never agree, but thereās a huge difference in level of play when it comes to institutional support for a thing and how power relates to āitās open source so you can just go somewhere elseā. If what people want is a payment processor that plays nice with banks and has buy in from those institutions (eg. like PayPal and Stripe), but isnāt beholden to investment or venture or crypto capital, then theyāre going to, at one point, run into the problem of the state, and how it controls what you can and canāt do with money. Itās nice to be able to plug away at your microcosm and āwalkawayā (to quote Doctorowās book) I guess (in part thatās what working on Mirlo is).
@simon All fair comments. No disagreements here. I just donāt think the (limited and arms-length) EU funding of Taler has much to do with any potential for its enshittification. EU financial regulations, or decisions by banks, definitely could pressure them to enshittify though, as you say. But being a GNU Project, Iām guessing they would limit the packageās usefulness before they would compromise the privacy or other rights of the people using it.