I recently had a conversation with kyun.host about their project
reiya.io and they seemed more discouraged than scammy.
I have permission from them to copy our conversation to this mailing list (sorry for the formatting but i couldn't copy and had to type it over):
Me: <informing them that i haven't received a payout for the last two months>
Them: i haven't checked that project in some time, let me check the logs and i'll get back to you
Me: Have you checked it?
Them: yeah it's been failing to send txs for some time im going to shut it down and manually send each relay however much they're owed
Me: Do you plan to shutdown reiya?
Them: yes
Me: Why?
Them: just not worth my time. from day 1 the community team lead or whatever from the tor project was calling it a scam. and trying to get my posts deleted in r/tor and r/monero. the tor project just smells fishy and i would advise everyone to move on to i2p instead. even after i told them its open source and they can host it themselves. they just said uhh well we cant do that it would be illegal or something.
Me: I saw your post on r/monero and i recall that gus commented there and "warned" that they don't know if it is a scam. Do you still have the conversation with them where they said it's illegal? Maybe i can ask on the tor-relays mailing list as a relay operator. Reiya is the only way i know about how relay operators could get some donations for their relays and it would be sad to see it disappear only because of a misunderstanding or something.
Them: nvm yeah i was misremembering the guy saying it was illegal. gus just annoyed me thats all. calling it a scam without really calling it a scam and refusing to talk to me no matter how many times i tried. as i said theres a bug that stops it from sending out the transactions so its pretty much useless at this point. whoever wants to maintain it can maintain it and i can provide hosting for free. but im not going to invest my time im this anymore.
Me: Is it okay for you when i use our conversation to bring it up on the tor-relays mailing list to ask the torproject what their stance is?
Them: yeah definitely. ive seen pretty much everyone other than gus in that convo was positive towards the project so maybe someone more trusted can pick it up.
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2023-October/021343.html . this was the thread but i dont know how to reply to it im a zoomer.
So if reiya was a planned scam that didn't worked out then the torproject debunked a scammer.
But if it wasn't then the torproject discouraged a community member who just wanted to support and strenghten the tor network with providing an easy-to-setup way for relay operators to get some donations for their bandwidth and sysadmin time.
There has to be a vetted and official way of donating to relay operators because otherwise scammers will take their advantages and good actors could get burned.
The torproject can not rely on getting informed about every website that claims to take donations for relay operators and the torproject has no way of preventing anyone to make a fake donation website to spread it at places where uninformed or unsuspecting Tor users are around.
I obviously only know reiyas stance about it but it looks like the handling of the situation was not great.