It’s been one year since Daily Anarchist’s last fundraiser and I’d like to give you all a head’s up as to what we’ve accomplished in these past 12 months. For starters, since July 2012 Daily Anarchist has received well over 600,000 unique visitors. Granted, those aren’t DailyKos numbers, but for an overtly anarcho-capitalist website, they’re tremendous. A very large portion of that traffic was directed towards our most viral post to date How and Why to Get to Silk Road.

I’m very proud of that piece because it has exposed hundreds of thousands of individuals to Tor and Bitcoin; two vital ingredients for modern anarchism.

I also take great pride in the right-hand column, under the Supporters Of part of the blog. I consider them to be pro-bono advertisements for safe and freedom-respecting software as well as subversive organizations. Those banners have received countless thousands of clicks from curious passersby. I can only imagine how many signers to the Free State Project have come from their initial discovery through Daily Anarchist or how many current i2p and Linux users there are after first learning about them here. Clearly, Daily Anarchist is spreading more than the message of voluntaryism, we’re also equipping people with self-empowering tools.

Where your donations go

Into the pockets of authors. The hosting costs for Daily Anarchist are currently about as much as we bring in in Google Adsense revenue. But I spend hundreds of Dollars every month paying authors for their content. I do this for a few reasons. First, I believe in trading value for value. I could never expect people to write for Daily Anarchist in a gratis fashion. Some do, and I am very honored that they choose to donate their original content to Daily Anarchist, but most do not. Nor do I want them to. In fact, most of the contributors to Daily Anarchist got their first taste of Bitcoin from us. This is because I only pay authors in Bitcoin. This has resulted in many new advocates of Bitcoin in their own right, from some of the best content producers and voluntaryist activists out there today. Furthermore, the incentive of getting paid in Bitcoin helps fuel the creation of new content. Many aspiring authors will start off by attempting to get published to their favorite site, get rejected, and then either stop writing altogether or choose to self-publish on a random foo.wordpress.com site, with no readership, no community, and no web-design. This often leads to no new content. Daily Anarchist offers contributors the possibility of getting paid for their work and being read by thousands of readers within their own community.

Where I stand financially

I’m currently unemployed. This time last year I was a waiter. That job ended, which was followed by a customer support work-at-home job that lasted five months. That ended recently as well and I’m back to square one. I spend most of my time learning new computer skills and programming. I reside in the North Country of New Hampshire and live a very modest lifestyle, so that these financial hiccups don’t ruin me too quickly.

Daily Anarchist is a labor of love for me. It is not an instrument for money-making and likely never will be. But it allows me a cathartic release for subjects that are important to me, and I suspect that is does the same for other authors as well. We have a very vibrant community here despite being small. Our forum is usually active. Blog posts inspire a lot of comments. And we’ve created a large and growing archive of information for individuals whose interest we have piqued on topics of market-anarchism. Daily Anarchist is making a difference.

I’m asking for your Bitcoin donation today to help keep it all going. No donation is too big or too small. The “too small” part really means something when you’re dealing with Bitcoin, too, since it allows individuals to contribute microdonations without fees making small amounts cost prohibitive. In fact, there is rarely a day that goes by that I do not donate $1 worth of Bitcoin to some new project, or old project that is just now accepting Bitcoin donations. I do this simply because I cannot afford to donate $10 every day, and that I want to at least show a token of my appreciation for whatever it is they do.

Last year our fundraiser only accepted Bitcoin as donations, doing away with Paypal as an option. It was a bold move, but we raised $400 worth of Bitcoin. I’d like to think we can beat that this year. Please help. Thank you!