While the Amazon rainforest is burning and organizations worldwide are trying to find solutions to the alarming and irreversible situation, there is an increasing awareness of what’s happening in the Brazilian region and donations have started to flood to charities that are strictly linked to deforestation issues and the support of indigenous people.
Amazon Watch is one of them and this morning they tweeted that they had spotted a BTC donation equivalent to $100,000 within their BitPay account but the transaction had been rejected by the payment system. Hence, they were asking the donor to get in touch to resolve the issue.
@BitPay @BitPaySupport a donor, no doubt upset about horrific #AmazonFires tried to donate $100,000 to our account today and it was rejected as too high. We want to reach out to this person to resolve this issue, but have no way to do so. We need your help, ASAP. Thank you.
— AMAZON WATCH (@AmazonWatch) August 23, 2019
Apparently, they had already contacted the payment company but got no answer and decided to resolve via Twitter instead.
Without a doubt, Amazon Watch payment is capped to exactly $100,000 at BitPay, the reason why the donation could not be accepted. The organization tried to raise the maximum amount permitted by changing the settings in their account, as suggested by BitPay staff on Twitter, but that did not work as a full compliance procedure would be required instead.
The tweet sparked interest and controversy in the crypto space as Bitcoiners suggested the non-profit organization to stop using a centralized system and start adopting a hard wallet instead to get straight payment from donors and avoid third parties having to block any amount that can be donated.
The community promptly offered to provide any necessary help to set up an open-source or hard wallet solution to avoid a centralized service and facilitate one that would instead provide total freedom of amounts being paid into the cause.
BitPay is a Bitcoin payment system provider that facilitates settlements between retailers and consumers and was founded in 2011 in Atlanta, USA.
It’s not the first time that the company has been criticized for its strict and useless bureaucratic procedures along with fake transaction fees issue, apparently instigated in order to favor altcoin Bitcoin Cash (BCH) payments instead.
Also, the company is under fire for refusing to apply Segwit to their blockchain which would cut down Bitcoin fees drastically.
As Bitcoiners believe BitPay is acting dishonestly with regards to support one payment over the other, they suggested to either adopt a Bitcoin wallet with private keys, which might be difficult to justify for a charity and would incur security and trust issues, or resort to BTCPay as a better option for being a self-hosted, open-source cryptocurrency payment processor. It’s secure, private, censorship-resistant and free.
As rain last night seemed to have given a bit of relief to the Brazilian tropical forest, a lot is yet to be done to reduce damage and control the spread of both natural and malicious fires. Hopefully, Bitcoin (BTC) donations will be encouraged and permitted, as they normally translate into substantial amount as well.
