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07:23 am

On growth limits, finances, and why OSINTers focus on seemingly random, yet interconnected people:

The "startup" logic seems straightforward: if you have users, buy more servers, grow, invest. Add a paywall or a donation button with sad eyes to cover costs.

So, what's stopping you?

The lack of reliable financial infrastructure.

This isn't about post-2022 Russian sanctions or allegations of facilitating illicit activity via PayPal. It's about the impossibility of reliably exchanging or transferring significant sums within a predictable timeframe without falling victim to a scam (on lower-level services) or triggering an AML check (which often feels like a scam in itself). If there is a delay, the service dies. If you accumulate too many donations on PayPal, you get flagged, and your account is frozen for six months. If you transfer funds to or from a crypto exchange, your bank account may be locked, forcing you to travel thousands of kilometers to resolve it (it was fun during COVID, trying to navigate vaccine mandates). Going 100% Monero (or even Bitcoin) is impossible: donation volumes are significantly lower in crypto, and there are many expenses in fiat. All kinds of intermediaries and small underground fintech companies come to the rescue, but there is a limit to relying on them: how much can you really trust them? Over time, it only gets worse: exchange fees and the risk of losing the entire transaction amount keep growing.

The names and pseudonyms that catch the attention of OSINTers (and probably the FBI, given their interest in "who paid and where") are not fully random. They often belong to these fintechs: the names used on their credit cards, for example. These are the names of both managers and "drops", sometimes used unwittingly. Among them are those who worked honestly but are now resentful that OSINTers exposed their names in the context of archives and "piracy," effectively preventing them from creating new ventures. Then there are those who ran away with the money (including some of ours) and are now actually on the run from police and creditors, obsessively scrubbing their data from the web.

Managing the finances of even a small project like ours would require a full-time specialist. Hiring one, in turn, requires a reliable monthly income. Just one fuck-up by this person could kill the project. And while bracing for that fuck-up, we would have to aggressively solicit donations just to pay their salary.