I really don't understand the hate and anger that seems to be being directed at the developer, in particular the constant stream of assertions that the project is a scam, fraudulent, and created with the intent of cashing out with everyone's donations after pretending to be 'hacked'. It seems like this sort of accusation is more likely to be a cause for legal action _by_ @arsenische rather than the flimsy pretexts for legal action _against_ them. The developer seems to have created this during a hackathon as a fun little project demonstrating what can be achieved using the GitHub APIs and Bitcoin; I'm quite impressed at the end result, to be honest. I don't have any real need for the service, since my employer pays for me to work on open source projects anyway, but if I was wanting to raise beer money from a side-project I don't see any reason not to consider it. As for the opt-in mechanism, it looks like they have resolved most of the issues, and many of the complainants have never interacted with the project until reading about it here - the number of complaints about SPAM and assertions of illegality are amazing, all from people who have never received an email from tip4commit. These days it seems laughable to complain about unsolicited email - perhaps it was a problem in the days of USENET when messages cost real money to deliver over expensive leased lines and dial-up connections, but today with filtering and cheap bandwidth it makes no sense...
The outright refusal to de-list projects makes this seem very suspicious.
It makes it seem like they want to capitalize on well-known oss projects, and more or less trick people into giving money, when there's no clear entity behind the service and no clear rules about what happens with "unclaimed" money.
The two obvious explanations here are "scam" and "thoughtless developers". In either case, I wouldn't want any project I was associated with, listed on their page.
