Increasing Donations for Calibre

[stumped]

Originally Posted by samcohen

Bitcoin doesn't need your bank to have success. I'm sorry to hear that one of your investments didn't work out but it's also not a good reason to dislike bitcoin.

We have been asked to drop the fascinating debate and get back on topic so I will..
But my point was not that I made a bad call but that the collective of all bankings digital money experts and projects poured untold millions into digital ideas that got quietly binned a few years later.

For the original question of would i donate this way, my vote is NO, sorry

[ilovejedd]

I pay ~$0.25 per kWh. It's also hot here in SoCal so the air conditioner would be working overtime to offset the heat produced by crypto mining.

This seems like a terribly inefficient way to donate to the project. I think I'll just stick to Patreon (which is a super convenient method to support multiple creators regularly).

[DiapDealer]

Also, I think an important distinction might be: "if you don't already donate to calibre via one of the other provided methods, would this be a method you WOULD consider using to contribute?" I don't think anyone's operating under the assumptions that this would be something traditional donators might want to switch to in large numbers (though it could be a small factor). It's so that users who can't contribute funds directly (through the already provided channels) might be able to help support calibre in some way.

[pazos]

I do like bitcoin (the currency and the software project) but I agree that cryptocurrencies in general almost always means scam.

Personal preferences aside I don't think you can earn much money mining with the CPU nowadays. Is the mining intended to be performed with the GPU? Aren't the binaries to heavy to be CUDA accelerated?.

Please also consider other ways to raise money (not as alternative but paired with opt-in GPU mining).

For example Graeme Gott has paypal links in the download page of his programs: see, for example, https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/

There's also Ardour, which releases GPLv2 software but whose binaries are paid. They provide different options, please take a look at the form in https://community.ardour.org/download. Probably it cannot be applied to calibre as is, but I'm sure it worth look at the options they provide to figure out if there's something to borrow

[samcohen]

Originally Posted by pazos

Personal preferences aside I don't think you can earn much money mining with the CPU nowadays. Is the mining intended to be performed with the GPU? Aren't the binaries to heavy to be CUDA accelerated?.

Please also consider other ways to raise money (not as alternative but paired with opt-in GPU mining).

We are prepared to develop both CPU and GPU mining. Can't comment on CUDA acceleration since I'm not the one actually developing i'll make sure to bring up your concern.

[chaley]

Can someone explain what will happen if this process actually mines a coin? Who will get what? Will Kovid get the entire coin or will it be "shared"?

[AngryD]

Originally Posted by crane3

How about getting rid of Paypal as the only option for donations? I don't have a Paypal account nor do I want one. Tried to donate via a CC but it still goes thru Paypal who wanted all kinds of personal info.

I did do a donation a some time back when Paypal was not involved.

Agreed. I am politically conservative and PayPal lost my business some time ago for their attempts to cancel conservative business owners. I have not been able to donate to Calibre since I closed my PayPal account.

[kovidgoyal]

You can make a credit card payment without needing a paypal account or you can use one of the three different funding services listed here: https://calibre-ebook.com/donate

[AngryD]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

You can make a credit card payment without needing a paypal account or you can use one of the three different funding services listed here: https://calibre-ebook.com/donate

Thanks, Kovid. I appreciate how hard you work on Calibre.

FYI, I left a poor review of the Amazon Kindle 10th Gen after I bought because they broke some basic functionality when it comes to creating collections on your Kindle. (Amazon is run by morons who have never owned or shared a book in their lives, apparently. Every single person I know organizes their books by Author, series, and series order. All of them. Default Kindle organization is by TITLE or AUTHOR.)

I actually got a call from someone in the Amazon offices and we talked for a good 45 minutes. Get this-- she had never heard of Calibre. I sent her to your website and she lost her mind! I told her that Amazon needed to reach out to you to learn how to make their crap work properly. I don't know if they ever did, but I do know that she told me she was installing Calibre on her personal computer as soon as she got home.

[kovidgoyal]

IIRC some amazon employee once wrote to me about a technical question, but that is the extent of contact I have ever had from them.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by samcohen

We are prepared to develop both CPU and GPU mining. Can't comment on CUDA acceleration since I'm not the one actually developing i'll make sure to bring up your concern.

A crypto transaction is equivalent to junking a new iPhone.
Crypto mining is one of the most wasteful, stupid things ever invented. Now using more electricity than Switzerland.

Crypto coins and blockchain need banned.

[AngryD]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

IIRC some amazon employee once wrote to me about a technical question, but that is the extent of contact I have ever had from them.

Sadly, I'm not surprised. Amazon has a history of making really stupid decisions. Just in the last few weeks I discovered that:

I can't use Amazon Smile to donate to my favorite charity with purchases on my phone unless I turn on notifications and allow them to use MY data to send me spam notices for products I neither want nor need.

I can't share ebooks with members of my own family without sharing wallets with them-- because of course when you hand your cousin a copy of Terry Pratchett's Pyramids you also always give him your Mastercard, too, right?

Boil this together with the asinine way their readers organize ebooks by default and you have a company that outgrew its pants far too long ago. (Don't even get me started on how a full 37% of orders I placed from 2019 to the present have shown up late and all but three of those were shipped by the same shipping company.)

To be perfectly frank, Kovid, if you had not done Amazon's job for them by developing the perfect sideloading software for their devices, I probably would have thrown out my kindle in disgust long ago.

This is sort of off-topic, so let me bring it back around by saying that I've chosen instead to use Patreon because I feel you deserve more support for making the Kindle a worthwhile device than the company that literally invented the bloody thing.

[gsquared]

A resounding No from me.