Many times

• Multiple shirts from lightning.store, highly recommend as they're great quality
• Shirt from a podcaster in-person at a conference
• 3D NFC badge from this young fella via his web store: robotechy.com
• Gift cards from friends and family from: bitrefill.com

Why? Mostly as an excuse just to use Bitcoin. I think the most real use case for me was the gift cards though. I have some family members overseas. I was literally unable to purchase certain gift cards for them via my credit card due to a billing address in a different country. Bitrefill and Lightning network allowed me to bypass that madness!

Great read, I've never actually read anything from that forum before, so that was a first 👍

Safari user here 🙈. I should check out Mullvad though!

Shakepay user also, but it seems Shakepay has quietly been reducing their overall rewards features as well.

First, the earn feature was shutdown, now it seems they have some requirements for maintaining the ability to shake for rewards https://blog.shakepay.com/shakingsats-shakeup-introducing-active-stacker-status/

At the end of the day, all these companies are at the mercy of the fiat system.

Also, I'd hope that this would *not * be an unpopular opinion. We all need to keep reminding ourselves why we're here at the end of the day 💪

Yep, great point. Also mentioned in the BTCPayServer docs too.

I don't know if this is totally correct, but doesn't BOLT 12 and its "offers" function potentially fix all of this reliance middle-men? (in the context of NIP-57 / tipping)

Thanks for posting this, I've been thinking about doing this myself. Started playing with BTCPayServer but didn't get much further.

Tor slowness sounds like a dealbreaker for tips. Did you try the Cloudflare method mentioned in the BTCPayServer docs?: https://docs.btcpayserver.org/Docker/cloudflare-tunnel/