It's nice to propose Bitcoin as an alternative, but there's no "they didn't make it so you get your money back" system like pledges, is there?
Also, I don't see how they qualify for PayPal donation status as a nonprofit, so the outcome of this was predictable by day 1 and entirely their fault.
That's kind of a show-stopper, then. Saying that Bitcoin is an alternative to Paypal for these kind of Kickstarter-like efforts is just disingenuous and exposing your "customers" needlessly.
Well, USD doesn't have that feature either, but we have central agencies we trust (e.g. kickstarter). There's no reason why that model cannot be used with Bitcoin (so nothing disingenuous as you claim). The real power of Bitcoin would be to be able to do this in a trust-less manner. It hasn't been implemented yet, but exists in the Bitcoin Protocol. You're welcome to take a shot at it, by the way, the core developer team is always looking for new developers.
"Well, USD doesn't have that feature either, but we have central agencies we trust (e.g. kickstarter). There's no reason why that model cannot be used with Bitcoin (so nothing disingenuous as you claim)."
Well, in this case, they're using one of those central agencies (PayPal). So using PayPal as the central agency on Bitcoin would be exactly the same, and using a different central agency is a change independent of the use of Bitcoin.
"The real power of Bitcoin would be to be able to do this in a trust-less manner. It hasn't been implemented yet, but exists in the Bitcoin Protocol. You're welcome to take a shot at it, by the way, the core developer team is always looking for new developers."
I don't know that 'Bitcoin has X if you write code to let Bitcoin do X' is quite the same as 'Bitcoin has X.' Lots of things can do X if I put in all the work to do X.
There's no reason that the crowdfunding platform couldn't hold the pledged Bitcoin in escrow, which seems like it would be pretty straightforward and transparent.
Also, I don't see how they qualify for PayPal donation status as a nonprofit, so the outcome of this was predictable by day 1 and entirely their fault.