Crowdfunding vs Bitcoins: donations are better investment than digital tulip mania
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
19:00 Sat, 07 Feb 2026
Remember the Tulip mania in the year 1637? The price of the tulips, like Bitcoins today, grew to an astronomical level and then crashed back down to Earth.
Tulip mania was a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels. The major acceleration started in 1634 and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637. It is generally considered to have been the first recorded speculative bubble or asset bubble in history.
Instead of holding on to your Bitcoins and hoping they make a comeback, why not simply sell them all and donate the funds to worthy crowdfunding campaigns?
Looking at my own crowdfunding campaign, I'm offering to publish tens of thousands of debian-private messages, the internal messages of the FSFE misfits and the Outreachy diversity program.
Various leaks will be published as each of the milestones is achieved. Milestones aside, what is the real value to you of these leaks? In other words, how can we calculate it?
After decades of accusations and lies in every direction, these leaks help you understand who you can trust. If you depend on your computer, knowing who you can trust online is vital.
On top of that, the funds raised will pay for lawyers to conduct depositions. A deposition is an interview that is conducted at the lawyer's office, video recorded and then published online. Various people involved in spreading gossip will be depositioned, including Matthew Garrett and all members of the Debian "Anti-Harassment" gulagteam.
Here is an example of a deposition. There are millions of these videos online. The lawyer asks Father Kern if anybody told him what he did was harmful or criminal.
After making some depositions, it is not hard to imagine volunteers will start editing the videos to create documentaries or online courses about the origins and infiltration of the free software ecosystem.
If you are using Debian as an operating system then the integrity of every other software application you use depends on the integrity of Debian itself.
If you store your Bitcoins in a Debian-based computer system, the integrity of the private keys is only as good as the integrity of Debian itself. Remember when the integrity of Debian SSH keys was compromised?
The integrity of Debian, the operating system, depends on the weakest link in the chain of developers.
If you want to find those weak links, we need the whole community to have access to the secret debian-private archive. It is simply too much information for me to personally go through all these messages on my own.
Even if I did have time to read 70,000 messages myself, I don't know the context around every person and every dispute. Other people who know about certain situations will be able to look at certain messages and recognise at first glance the hidden scandal in that message.
This will lead to an explosion of truth. The truth is priceless and if the value of Bitcoins keeps falling, they will be priceless in the wrong sense of the word.
Please watch my campaign video and discuss it with your community today. █