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I am running a game giveaway group on Steam. What is the best way to accept donations?

P.S I am completely and utterly new to Bitcoin.

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  • "Best way" by what measurement?
    – Murch ♦
    Commented Jun 3, 2015 at 15:25
  • Best as in easiest/visually appealing
    – MrMoglin
    Commented Jun 4, 2015 at 13:21

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The easiest way would be to create a wallet and to dedicate a single address from it to receiving donations. For the convenience of the donaters you could present it both as a QR-code and a bitcoin URI. As with Jonas' answer you wouldn't want other people to be able to change the information on the page where you provide the donation address, as someone might replace the donation address with their own.

For improved privacy, you could replace the address with a new one every once in a while.

For a more advanced, private setup check out Jonas' answer.

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You can take the independent way and create your own receiving address generation:

Therefore you could place a HD(bip32) public master key (or non hardened child public key like m/44'/0'/0'/100) on your webserver and generate a new address whenever a potential donator presses "donate". Just increment the child index +1 (=m/44'/0'/0'/100/<1..2..3..n>.

Important: this needs a secure server environment because an attacker could replace the master public key and make donations sent to his address!

Spending the received coins would require the master private key (or child private key like m/44'/0'/0'/100). It's recommended to keep this key in a cold wallet.

You could further improve your security by using 2of2 or 2of3 multisig which somehow is recommended for this use case.

Example: wikileaks https://shop.wikileaks.org/donate

You can take the easy, but more centralized way:

Accept donations over a bitcoin payment provider like BitPay or Coinbase. Check https://bitpay.com/docs/donations and https://developers.coinbase.com/docs/wallet/tutorials/donations

Examples: Mozilla uses coinbase: https://sendto.mozilla.org/page/content/give-bitcoin/

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    This seems like incredible overkill for a page that will get like $10-$20 of donations.
    – Nick ODell
    Commented Jun 3, 2015 at 16:55
  • Address reuse should really be avoided. It can harm your and other network participants privacy (en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse). And remind: others will read this question/answer where we might see different donation values.
    – Jonas Schnelli
    Commented Jun 3, 2015 at 21:42
  • Um, who cares? He's collecting donations for a steam group, not Hezbollah. You're probably going to show the network what addresses are related when you spend it anyway, and a VPS is going to cost $4-$10 per month, which will take a massive bite out of donations.
    – Nick ODell
    Commented Jun 3, 2015 at 21:52
  • Hmm... if you don't care, fine. But supporting bip32/HDKey would mean, use github.com/Bit-Wasp/bitcoin-lib-php, upload extended public key, puff, done!
    – Jonas Schnelli
    Commented Jun 3, 2015 at 22:08

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