What is the best way for a #church wanting to get started accepting #Bitcoin donations to do so?
(Emphasis on the getting started part. Remember it’s new for a lot of people.)
1) Use a KYC wallet like @River where one individual opens the account?
2) A non-KYC wallet?
3) Multi Sig?
Self-custody is likely to be important for a church due to the risk of illicit government action (unfortunately). There is a minimum threshold of technical knowledge to do this though, so it may or may not work in every situation. It's going to be very hard to do this if you don't have any trustees able to operate a Tezor for example.
A multi-share backup would be the best way to safeguard the seed phrase if you've got a number of trustees who can be trusted not to lose the shares or hand them over to the first goon who shows up at the door with an FBI badge. You can choose an appropriate threshold to reduce the risk of too many shares being lost while still distributing trust over a sufficient number of hopefully trustworthy people.
You could "get started" with small amounts by appointing a trustee to set up and custody a software wallet for the church, but there's a risk of the trustee being compromised or making a mistake, so a multisig wallet would be best. Blue Wallet is compatible with both iOS and Android and supports multisig, but I haven't used it myself and can't vouch for its security practices.
Absolutely non-KYC, self-custodial, 24 BIP39 seed words guarded/managed by whatever your leadership structure may be.
I'd suggest multi-sig, with a plan for succesion should any of the signers become unavailable or no longer trusted.
Use Sparrow wallet for airgapped signing, and keep keys offline in separated locations in the private custody of members of leadership.
My general view is that church members should have lots of bitcoin and the church organization should have just enough revenue and reserves to meet a few months expenses. Therefore, I have no problem with a church using someone like nostr:npub1xkere5pd94672h8w8r77uf4ustcazhfujkqgqzcykrdzakm4zl4qeud0en since most of the donations will be turned into US dollars for now to meet expenses. Anything extra bitcoin can accrue value with private keys managed by a reputable custodian. Custody set ups get hard especially for a church operating under 501c3 of the tax code and for churches that routinely rotate members through leadership. This would allow members to learn to use bitcoin and if the time comes, where the state becomes the enemy of the church, members will be ready to use bitcoin P2P to support staff directly and cover ministry expenses.
