So, never thought i would suggest a form of crypto or token, but it struck me that one of the best ways to help people pay for hosting services would be to create a de-centralized crypto token that when awarded to a user it is send on the back end to their instance.
If we put this token on some of the exchanges then people could pay with either real money by buying tokens and gifting/awarding them, or converting other crypto into Fediverse tokens.
We could even use the same blockchain to allow minting of one off or limited run tokens where users can create their own.
Would also be cool if awards attach to the profile and are federated, but with the ability to make tokens private by the user.
Just a thought, because someone wanted to give me gold for a post, and I linked to our donation page, but man it would be easy if they could have just purchased a token and sent it right then and there without having to go through all the different instance donation methods.
Sadly, I am not a programmer so hopefully this idea is worth a shit and one of you smart people takes it and runs.
I am 100% not interested in crypto, except when I see pro-social uses. I had another idea to use crypto to essentially help remove bias in science. It would be a system similar to F@H or SETI@HOME but it would pay out for the time used to further science.
I see the value of blockchain but so far its only being used by grifters and criminals.
There is some use in unmutable data for ledgers and things. But that’s the only useful thing I’ve seen. AMS offers a blockchain ledger-like application. I almost used it for work but decided on our own solution due to some limitations on AWS and cost.