Feeding street cats is a strange kind of budget. It isn't large, but it is relentless: food twice a day, every day, plus the vet bill that arrives without warning when one of them turns up limping. Anyone who does this eventually reaches the same thought — people have offered to help; how do I let them?

Bitcoin is unusually good at this. It is also unusually good at quietly turning a small kindness into a spreadsheet problem, a privacy leak, or an awkward conversation about where the money went.

So: how to pass the hat properly.

1. Lightning Is the Right Rail for This

Donations are small, frequent, and often international. That is the exact shape Lightning was built for.

An on-chain donation of two euros can cost a meaningful fraction of itself in fees during a busy hour, which means the donor pays to give and you receive less than they sent. Over Lightning the fee is usually a rounding error, it arrives instantly, and it works from a phone in another country without anyone touching a bank.

The piece that makes it practical for a public project is the Lightning Address — an identifier shaped like an email, [email protected], which anyone can pay without you generating an invoice each time. One string. Put it in your bio, your video description, the footer of your site.

2. Choose Your Trade-Off Deliberately

There are three tiers, and the right one depends on how much you're receiving, not on ideology.

• Custodial wallet with a Lightning Address. The simplest thing that works: install, get an address, publish it. Someone else runs the node. Perfect for starting out and for amounts you'd be annoyed but not devastated to lose. Do not let a large balance accumulate there.
• Self-custodial mobile wallet (Phoenix, Breez and similar). You hold the keys, channels are managed for you, you pay small fees to open capacity. This is where most donation-funded projects should end up.
• Your own infrastructure — BTCPay Server, or LNbits on a node you run. Full control, donation pages, multiple addresses, no third party. Realistic only if you already run a node and enjoy that kind of evening. If you built the Raspberry Pi, this is the natural next step.

Start at tier one. Move up when the balance justifies the effort, not before. A donation setup nobody maintains is worse than a simple one that works.

3. Keep It Separate From Everything Else

This is the part people get wrong, and it costs privacy rather than money.

A published donation address is public by definition. Anyone can look up what it received and where it went afterwards. That's fine — arguably good, for a project asking strangers for money — but only if it stays isolated.

• A dedicated wallet for donations. Nothing else. Never the wallet holding your savings, and never receiving into an address linked to coins you bought with your identity documents.
• Move funds out deliberately, not reflexively. When you sweep donations into savings, you connect the public wallet to the private one. Do it knowingly, in batches, understanding what it publishes.
• Fresh addresses where you can. A Lightning Address handles this invisibly for you, which is another reason to prefer it over posting a static on-chain address.

The donation wallet and the savings wallet should never meet casually. That's the whole rule.

4. Transparency Is the Product

Here's the thing nobody warns small projects about: the moment you accept money for a cause, you have taken on an obligation to account for it. Not legally, necessarily. Socially, and it matters more.

The good news is that bitcoin makes this easier than any other rail, if you use it that way:

• Say what it's for, specifically. "Food and vet bills for the colony" beats "support the channel". People give to outcomes.
• Report back, with pictures. A monthly post — what came in, roughly what it bought, which cat needed the vet. Photos of the actual animals. This is not marketing, it's the receipt.
• Keep your own records from day one. Date, amount, what it was spent on. Your wallet has the incoming side; only you have the outgoing side. Doing this from the start is ten minutes a month. Reconstructing it after a year is a weekend you will resent.
• Check your local rules. Donations, gifts and income are treated differently in different countries, and receiving in a volatile asset adds a wrinkle. Ask someone qualified where you actually live — one conversation, once, early.

5. The Small Practical Things

• Test it yourself. Send one sat to your own published address from a different wallet before you promote it anywhere. Publishing a broken address for a week is a rite of passage nobody enjoys.
• Make it one click. A QR code and a copyable string. Every extra step loses donors who genuinely wanted to give.
• Say thank you publicly, and don't name people who didn't ask. Some donors want the acknowledgement. Others chose this rail specifically because it doesn't require them to be identified.
• Never ask for anything but the donation. No wallet connections, no signatures, no "verify to donate". Your donors have been trained to be suspicious. Give them nothing to be suspicious about.

The Point

The cats do not know anyone is helping. They know the bowl is full at seven, which is the only part of the arrangement that concerns them, and there is something clarifying about a beneficiary who cannot be impressed by your fundraising.

That's the right frame for the whole thing. The donation setup is plumbing, not identity. Make it easy, keep it separate, account for it honestly, and let the actual work be the point.

Publish one address. Keep it isolated. Show people what it bought. 🐾⚡

Not financial, legal or tax advice — I feed cats and write about Bitcoin, which qualifies me for none of those professions. Rules on donations and crypto differ by country; check yours.