TL;DR

To be truly unstoppable funding, Agora could not depend on any one server or middle-man service (including us) that could be shut down by a government, corporation, or hurricane. There are multiple benefits to operating this way for our users:

1. No third-party can take down/censor their fundraiser (unlike with GoFundMe).
2. No one can rug their funds after they've been donated (unlike with custodial Bitcoin layers).
3. No one can subpoena Agora to receive information about the users (or if they do, we won't have anything to give them).
4. Operating Agora requires practically zero infrastructure, which means that if our version of Agora went down anyone in the world could easily spin the code of the website up on a new domain with zero infrastructure or hosting knowledge (unlike with self-hosted solutions like BTCPay servers).
5. With no infrastructure costs, maintaining Agora is extremely cheap, which means we do not need to charge any platform fees so all funds go directly to the intended recipient (unlike other Bitcoin fundraising platforms).

The only servers Agora relies on are Nostr relays, which are distrubuted and redundant by design, and a public indexer for the silent payment wallet, which can be run by anyone and easily switched if needed (similarly for the Nostr relays). Even if these servers did go down, no money is lost: a user can import their seed into any silent-payment-supporting wallet and rescan the chain to recover every payment they've received. Their funds live on Bitcoin, not on our servers. This is the opposite of custodial Layer 2 setups, where if the servers go down the money is essentially gone.