The Tor Project held out the longest with magic internet money. Congrats to them.

The Tor Project removed their Bitcoin Cash donation address a few months before the 2024 US election. They appear to be the last (or one of the last) major general software organizations to comply in advance on this issue.

These are the relevant captures from the Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240720042540/https://donate.torproject.org/cryptocurrency/

https://web.archive.org/web/20240828021533/https://donate.torproject.org/cryptocurrency/

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The world has learned a lot about the nature and character of some of the people who influenced or supported various cryptocurrencies and various forks since August of 2024.

We know a lot more now about what Jeffery Epstein was doing with Coinbase and Brock Pierce in 2013-15. We've learned a lot more about the characters who supported ETH and pumped DOGE as well.

The meaning of DOGE as a word has been completely transformed. DOGE is now the name of a fascist wrecking ball that irreparably damaged US National Security, the privacy of American citizens and the capacity of the US government for generations (or perhaps permanently).

That 2013 fork of Junkcoin is still listed on the Tor Project's donation page, so there's that.

And the world is seeing the true face of one of the founders of PayPal, and early supporters of ETH, as he builds a total surveillance system (like Lavender or the threat classifier systems used in Afghanistan and Iraq), but for the American people.

The Tor Project states clearly on their site that acceptance of a currency is not an endorsement, but maybe the exclusion of Bitcoin Cash at the last minute could be interpreted as an endorsement of the project.

Regardless, as a signal of who will comply in advance, the fact that they stopped accepting Bitcoin Cash right before the election is both telling and disconcerting given the nature of the software they develop.

The Tor Project is not alone accepting early forms of internet monies.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has also found they can neither bring themselves to list a Bitcoin Cash address nor even a P2PKH style Bitcoin address (although they have in the past).

They initially took down their donation address because they didn't want to be a party to a legal proceeding, but they're certainly a party to whatever is happening now!

The Wikimedia Foundation accepted some proxied crypto payments from 2014-22, but has never held cryptocurrencies, only accepted them through Coinbase, then BitPay. They stopped due to "public" backlash around emissions.

The Internet Archive had an early bitcoin address (1Archive1n2C579dMsAu3iC6tWzuQJz8dN) from prior to the 2017 fork. The address can still readily receive Bitcoin Cash donations. For the operators of the wayback machine, removing their own donation address like the other organizations would be a self-defeating and self effacing problem.

The Mozilla Foundation accepted bitcoin payments (through coinbase) from 2014 to 2022 but stopped due to backlash about greenhouse gas emissions too. They're now integrating AI by default into their browsers.

The open internet that is responsible for so much of the freedom and progress we saw in the last 30 years is increasingly under a broad and persistent DDoS attack from ever expanding AI data centers, as well as from the crumbling democracies that once fostered them.

But what the world is seeing now isn't really shocking for people who used the freedom of the magic internet money from 2009-2018. We watched everyone comply in advance and fold already. We already know where the institutions that have benefited from the free labor and trust of billions of people are gonna land when it comes to compiling with a few dozen people.

We know. Your core principles for a free open internet are missing on your donation page.

Organizations that can't list a plain P2PKH bitcoin address (because it's also a Bitcoin Cash address) were never going to make it. Institutions that refused to accept freedom money on the internet were never going to stand up for the freedom of eight billion people when the chips were down. The fascists never stop coming, they're always advancing an inch at a time. The wicked never rest.

Handling direct payments were the third error code for http. We started with such high hopes for what the internet could have been.

Imagine if content creators and publishers didn't have to sell ads or personal information for revenue. Imagine if small businesses weren't beholden to payment processors. Imagine if all the institutions crumbling now had substantial trusts from prior to 2017. Imagine if anyone could just take 1/10th of a penny to stop millions of AI bot requests from DDoSing their site.

Instead we just got a succession of collectibles, casinos and bucket shop instruments. It seems only taking money for nothing in return is allowed on our "free" internet with our feckless regulators.

We never built the internet as it could have been because individually (and institutionally) everyone was too afraid. Everyone let the cohorts of the Epstein class do as they pleased.

What we believed was a free open internet was in fact just a tool to entrap democracy and empower a conglomerate of autocracies. And the institutions that built and safeguarded it seem now to have always been compromised, they were frauds. They took the hope of giant collective project and watched it burn.

The users of peer-to-peer magic internet currency understand. We're going to keep on the project none of you would accept or use or contribute toward advancing.

We can have our own archive. We can publish what we want without intermediaries or censorship. We can say what you could not. Our processor fees are not going up. We can have a form of internet using the one tool everyone else scoffed at.

We opted into freedom.

We understand that the fascists don't like what we're doing specifically, and that's why we're still here.

In the same way it'd be funny to have an Internet Archive without an archive, you can't really completely take the currency out of all peer to peer digital currency.

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