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tpa rfc 25 btcpay replacement

Last edited by Antoine Beaupré 
title: TPA-RFC-25: BTCpay replacement
costs: TODO
approval: accounting, finance, TPA, hiro
affected users: Fundraising, comms team, donors
deadline: TODO
status: rejected
discussion: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/donate-static/-/issues/75

Summary: BTCpay has major maintenance issues that are incompatible with TPA's policy. TODO: find a replacement

Background

BTCpay has a somewhat obscure and complicated history at Tor, and is in itself a rather complicated project. A more in-depth discussion of the problems with the project are available in the discussion section of the internal documentation.

But a summary of the problems found during deployment are the following:

  • PII retention and GDPR-compliance concerns (nginx logs, invoices in PostgreSQL)
  • upgrades require manual, periodic intervention
  • complicated design, with multiple containers and sidecars, with configuration generators and lots of shell scripts
  • C#/.net codebase
  • no integration with CiviCRM/donate site

Proposal

TODO: make a proposal after evaluating different alternatives

Requirements

TODO: clearly define the requirements, this is just a draft

Must have

  • must accept Bitcoin payments, with confirmation
  • must not accumulate indefinitely PII
  • GDPR compliance
  • must not divulge a single cryptocurrency address to all visitors (on-the-fly generation)
  • automated upgrades
  • backup/restore procedures
  • monitoring system

Nice to have

  • integration with CiviCRM so that payments are recorded there
  • reasonable deployment strategy
  • Prometheus integration

Non-Goals

  • we're not making a new cryptocurrency
  • we're not offering our own "payment gateway" service (which BTCpay can actually provide)

Scope

This proposal affects the processing of cryptocurrency donations from the Tor project.

It does not address the fundamental problems with cryptocurrencies regarding environmental damage, ponzis schemes, fraud, and the various security problems with cryptocurrencies, which are considered out of scope of this proposal.

Personas

TODO: personas

Examples:

  • ...

Counter examples:

  • ...

Alternatives considered

Status quo: BTCpay

TODO: expand on pros and cons of btcpay

Simple BTC address rotation

This approach has been used by Riseup for a while. They generate a bunch of bitcoin addresses periodically and store them on the website. There is a button that allows visitors to request a new one. When the list is depleted, it stops working.

TODO: expand on pros and cons of the riseup system

Other payment software?

TODO: are there software alternatives to BTCpay?

Commercial payment gateways

TODO: evaluate bitpay, coinbase, nowpayments.io, etc

References

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