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Accept GNU Taler for donations
Open, Stalled, LowPublic

Description

GNU Taler is a secure and anonymous system of online payments. It would ideally be very front-facing on https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php but at the very least on https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give

Note that as of 2017-02-08, it isn't possible to start accepting Taler yet. The software exists but a business system has not been set up.

Event Timeline

Hi @Koavf, we depend on an external servicer to accept cryptocoins and immediately cash them out, so this will depend on someone like Coinbase supporting GNU Taler.

Ejegg changed the task status from Open to Stalled.Feb 10 2017, 4:21 PM
Ejegg triaged this task as Low priority.
Ejegg edited projects, added: Fundraising-Backlog; removed: Fundraising-Analysis.
Ejegg moved this task from Triage to Old Unscheduled (prior to 2019) on the Fundraising-Backlog board.

I've just talked with Grothoff at Chaos Communication Camp about it. Apparently payments will start being possible in Switzerland within 12 months (with regulatory approval etc.) and then be extended to the rest of the eurozone. The donation target has set up an account with a Taler processor to receive payments and regularly withdraw the cash to a bank account IBAN. https://taler.net/en/faq.html

The donation page would only have to offer e.g. a QR code with the coordinates, then the user would be able to anonymously transfer funds from their wallet. The main benefit is that it would require no proprietary software at all for the donor.

For someone interested in implementing support so that Wikimedia can later decide whether to enable such payments, what would be the best way?

  • The DonationInterface extension, against which this is filed, would be useful for donations to Wikimedia Foundation. However I'm not sure WMF is adding new payment methods specific to the euro area at this time.
  • https://spenden.wikimedia.de/ (to which donate.wikimedia.org redirects in Germany) uses https://github.com/wmde/fundraising-application . It would be trivial to add an option for Taler under Sofort, skip the page which asks for personal details and just present the user with the required QR code.
  • https://donate.wikimedia.ch just embeds a https://www.raisenow.com/ payment form. I'm not sure how to add payment methods there. Probably the Taler coordinates would simply be added to the FAQ page after the IBAN coordinates. There's not much coding to do here, it's best to just talk with WMCH.
  • For other chapters it may be useful to add CiviCRM payment processor support directly.