Thank you! We are no PR experts, this took on a life of its own.

Awesome idea. You should consider adopting http://freedomsponsors.org and http://gittip.com as crowdfunding platforms for that - it just makes sense, recursively so. :-)

When they mentioned that they would open source their code, I started looking at payment gateways that did cool things. Here's my research so far: http://www.geekphd.com/lockitron-selfstarter-us-payment-gate...

Thank you for doing the leg work with this. I think that anyone who wants to use this needs to look at payments very carefully so as not to run the risk of rampant chargebacks or getting shut down by your processor.