Why not teach them to accept bitcoin? (feedtheprotest org. that is)
I'm a little confused too
since matt aka carbonpenguin has told me he has connections to the people behind it, if it's the technical that's bothering you I'm sure Yifu Guo and his crew will love to help you if you go to the meetup on this Wednesday, he is a bright young man. Also Yifu has made a reddit post on this matter
http://redd.it/ktai9I just convinced the guy doing the tech work on FeedTheProtest to start accepting BTC - I'm writing the text of the post to introduce the concept as well as announce the address. Below is what I've written so far; any suggestions for revisions would be appreciated:
As our [recent experience with PayPal] has all too painfully demonstrated, relying exclusively on corporate payment processing to fund a movement that seeks to undermine corporate power is a risky proposition. As such, we at Feed the Protest have decided to begin accepting donations in Bitcoin, the anonymous open source peer-to-peer currency that was used to help fund Wikileaks when they [faced similar issues]. To learn more about how Bitcoin works, visit [We Use Coins], and, to get your hands on some, the major exchange can be found at
https://mtgox.com. It is our hope that the PayPal situation will be resolved soon, but we can be certain that all Bitcoin payments will, in fact, go through. Send your Bitcoins to: [XXXXXXX]
This could be an issue. Im getting back from lots of people, "is that feedtheprotest trustworthy? i.e., how do we know it isn't feedthescammer?" Is there some way they could verify what they are doing?
I will actually be heading back down to NYC from tuesday-thursday for the express purpose of (a) organizing some people on the ground to do regular updates and (b... and most exciting to me) getting the Officer Accountability Project database fleshed out. The announcement of the latter project can be found here:
http://feedtheprotest.com/node/224 and we have a few sample profiles. What I will be doing is trying to get a relatively complete catalog of the "white shirts," with the ultimate goal of creating a time-line of the behavior of each of the officers that is easily searchable (so new instances of police violence can be rapidly contextualized and compared with previous behaviors). This is the project that has been taking up most of Kevin's (the tech lead) time over the past few days, but now that we've got the back end in place it should be ready for rapid expansion when I get down there. If you want your bitcoins supporting other elements of the movement, by all means send them to where you feel most comfortable, but I believe we're doing pretty important work.
Also, as I'll be down on Wednesday, I will try to make the BTC meet-up, so long as there is not anything urgent going down in Liberty Plaza at that time. If anyone wants to get together and compare notes at any other point while I'm down there, drop a pm, and I'll send you my cell phone #...