Oppaiti.me News - Financial Woes

We've had a lot of downtime lately. Most of it was related to hypervisor issues crashing the VPS, but that's seemingly been fixed and the rest of the downtime (including the most recent few days of it) was caused by bills not getting paid.

It's no secret that Azathoth and I have both stopped caring much about this site in recent years, so I think it's time to start transitioning to a model where the site can continue to function without us. This does not mean we will be gone, but it needs to stop being the case that if we're both unavailable for a week, we inevitably come back to the site in shambles. I would like something more robust than that.

So the first thing we're doing is taking ourselves out of the financial story of OT. The way our primary host works is that our server has a bitcoin wallet associated with it, and the server stays up as long as the bitcoin wallet has bitcoin in it to draw from. If it becomes empty, the server goes down until more bitcoin are added to pay for more server time. The hosting cost is $40/month in bitcoin, but amounts less than $40 will keep the server up for a proportionally smaller time (you can, for example, put $2 worth of bitcoin into the empty wallet to bring the site back up for a little over a day).
The bitcoin address is accessible exclusively to our hosting provider and not to any OT staff. We cannot take money out of it. At any time, you can check the balance of the wallet on any public ledger to see how much money is in it and therefore how long the server will stay funded for.
We ask you to not send bitcoins to the address if the server is already paid up for a long time. There is no reason for you to immediately entrust your money to our system if we aren't going to need it for months, and if we ever decide to switch hosts (unlikely), any remaining balance will not transfer over because we can't access it.

The BTC address for our server is: *************************
Presently, a couple of generous donors have paid our hosting for the next several months, so there is no need for further donations right now. I just want the community to be aware that this is how OT is going to work from now on. If you have money to burn on anime tiddies, keep an eye on this balance and maybe toss something in when it's getting low if you're so inclined.
Feel free to send a staff PM before donating to tell us how much you'll be donating so we can keep track of it. We don't currently have any donor rewards, but if we ever add them in the future we'll need a record of your past donation in order to award you. Of course, donating anonymously is also perfectly fine.

In the past, we've been able to be completely untrustworthy because there was never anything we needed to ask for your trust on. Now that there's money involved, this becomes a little more hairy. If you do not trust us that this bitcoin wallet is inaccessible to us and is managed exclusively by our host, please do not donate to it. I would rather have the site go down than have people wondering if they've been scammed.

I'll setup some kind of donation page eventually so when this announcement gets buried people don't become completely unaware of this situation.

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