Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote
meta.wikimedia.orgHonestly the reasoning is weird. Don't get me wrong, I think crypto currencies are for the most part a scam, a ponzi scheme or a platform for pump and dumps.
Yet the whole thing just does not make sense imo. It's one thing to be against crypto, but refusing it when you are a charity for the most asinine moral purity tests is absurd. This 100% reminds me of the almost cultist like extremely negative reaction to anything related to crypto on some parts of twitter. Now I have been active in crypto mocking groups for years , but this feels more like some people have incorporated "anticrypto" to their daily culture war routine. So it must be purged from everywhere.
Also, I'm semi active in the wiki community and I have never heard anyone talk about the climate impact of their wiki mania meetups and the hundreds of flights that it requires. Or jimbo going to davos in private planes... etc. Well maybe this is signaling that climate change will actually be taken in consideration by the foundation and the wiki editors for their future policy decisions and RFCs , but I somehow doubt it.
The other reasons are even less relevant to wikimedia's mission.
> Yet the whole thing just does not make sense imo. It's one thing to be against crypto, but refusing it when you are a charity for the most asinine moral purity tests is absurd.
Charities generally have the luxury of having core values superior to delivering a return to investors. To not accept crypto for moral reasons makes much more sense to a not for profit that a for profit business.
Yup core values. More often than not sticking to them come with some kind of cost.
Kudos Wikepedia. This world would be a better place if more did the same and honored their core values at whatever cost.
I mean, it's literally a fraction of a percent of their revenue stream, according to what the Wikimedia Foundation says in the threads below. It seems like a tiny sacrifice for a small benefit, to me.
Core values is just a vague concept. A lot of things considered backwards or even downright evil today used to be core values not too long and vice versa, e.g. racial segregation, LGBT, women's right, etc.
I don’t think it’s vague at all. You know as a person when something internally doesn’t sit right.
But I do agree that one’s core values are necessarily ’good’ by other’s standards but they are still core values. For example I have stopped eating at my favorite fast food restaurant because they supported(ed) BLM on their front page. I am an ALM guy because I believe that giving one color preference over another is the by definition racism. But what sticking by my guns does is it causes me to at some level evaluate that every time I choose not to eat there.
At the risk of going massively off topic and triggering a flame war, I always thought of movements like BLM in this way - “until <minority> lives matter too, then all lives clearly don’t matter”. I.e. if you support ALM you must also support <minority>LM, by definition.
EDIT: added the word “too” to clarify my meaning.
You are correct of course. In fact the whole ALM thing is just a reactionary middle finger to BLM.
ALM sounds like, but is not, a superset of BLM.
BLM opposes violence against black people. ALM doesn't oppose violence against all people - it opposes BLM.
Agree with BLM actions or not, but ALM is an whataboutism distraction, not a legitimate movement.
Incorrect.
ALM is a censure of BLM, which was a convenient nominative signpost for a rally banner that was aggregating a significant amount of violent and destructive riot activity in the name of it's cause.
You can argue that "if it was violent, it wasn't BLM doing it", but when you had the movement being used as a cover the way it was, and look at the bigger picture, it should start to crystalize.
ALM is a reminder. Yes, BLM. No one reasonanable questioned that. What chafed people, is the assertion any one group should be treated differently period. The fighters for civil rights of the last century plus fought hard for equality. There's this new push for equity which comes with extra baggage of "others should have to be subjected to exceptional treatment to compensate for historical treatment*. That is just racism, or segregationist thinking in another wrapper.
That is what ALM is a reaction to. Equal is hard. Equal requires work. Equal requires the unreaonanle among us to refuae to be pushed aside, and that's okay. Just... Be judicious with what gets enabled in the meantime, and don't provide cover/outlets for arson/robbery/vandalism/destruction of infrastructure at the same time.
Obstruct, be heard, yes. Divide, destroy, no.
All lives matter. And if someone feels like they aren't mattering, odds are, the bunch of people trying to make heads or tails of quantitative and qualitative evidence as to the claim, and information propagation is work, and takes time, and has mo guarantee of success.
It’s used to be widely accepted that all light travelled through a luminiferous aether that encompasses the entire universe.
Then we learned about special relativity. Societies learn and adapt.
Strongly disagree. Science is based on fact and whether models fits observations.
Politics and core values is more like fashion and there is no right or wrong.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem : science advance is about "is" statements, and core values are "ought" statements.
More often than not, comments such as this come across as justification for being a jerk, while other people are trying to make the world a better and more inclusive place for others. The world can’t effectively operate well without a shared sense of right and wrong.
I will point out that this comment is factually wrong.
The concept of luminiferous aether was discarded- not because of the discovery of Theory of Relativity, but becauae of the Michelson and Morley Experiment [0].
It is often joked about in High School and college Freshman Physics circles- Michelson received Nobel Prize in Physics [1] for a literally failed experiment.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson–Morley_experiment
[1]: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1907/summary/
Calling the M-M experiment a "failed experiment" is a bit misleading. The experiment was successful; the result was definitively negative (no aether). Previous experiments had failed to reach a conclusive result.
And what moral reasons could those possibly be for Wikipedia?
If you click the link, you'll find out :)
> Honestly the reasoning is weird. Don't get me wrong, I think crypto currencies are for the most part a scam, a ponzi scheme or a a platform for pump and dumps.
and
> Yet the whole thing just does not make sense imo. It's one thing to be against crypto, but refusing it when you are a charity for the most asinine moral purity tests is absurd.
It seems like the first paragraph you said would be enough of a reason to not accept it.
>> I think crypto currencies are for the most part a scam
> enough of a reason to not accept it.
Not if that's simply another instance of Sturgeon's law ("90% of everything is crap"): https://nitter.net/mycoliza/status/1451992293532004355
I mean, they aren’t going to accept a donation of SlapChop’s either…
You'd be surprised. Many orgs have a service provider like https://www.careasy.org/ on hand to accept junk cars or even boats. Not to mention stocks and other financial instruments. If taking Slap Chops brings in nonzero funds - why not.
Here's a counterexample of Sturgeon's law:
I mean otherwise, sure, illegal drugs are 90% crap, but wouldn't it be stupid to not accept nickle bags if people wanted to use them for trade?
I also have an NFT I'm willing to sell you, I just need 1000ETH. Yes the NFT market is shitty, but 1000ETH is a pittance if you believe in Stugeon's law.
Man, there's a baby in that bathwater Wiki RFC are throwing out.
There are projects that are fair, were fairly distributed, that work and are secure, that are feeless and instant, all while being truly decentralized. Everything that Bitcoin promised to be and wasn't.
So, when the scams die out the best projects willl still exist. It doesn't matter how much of their own face Wikipedia cuts off, but it's sad to see them do it.
Nothing in crypto is fairly distributed. Not when the majority of supply is distributed in just a few years, or, much worse yet, all at launch in the hands of the founders plus whoever they decided to handout tokens to by whatever publicly unverifiable way.
> Nothing in crypto is fairly distributed.
Are we speaking relative to fiat here? .... Lol.
Besides, there were many attempts at fair distributions, so you're simply wrong there. My favorite, Nano, distributed small amounts to people who solved captchas between 2015 and 2017.
Yes, relative to fiat, since crypto can at best limit the unfairness to that already present in fiat.
But so far crypto has created wealth inequality which is way worse than that in fiat. Yes, there have been attempts at fair distribution, but to re-iterate my point above, they would need to spread distribution over a long timespan (gold has been distributed over millenia).
Or maybe you don’t want to accept water from providers that are well known to have a very negative impact on environment in the first place. Your baby deserve that you don’t tacitly turn a blind eye to well known side impact, all the more when there no lack of clean water provider.
Yes but Wikipedia only accepted BTC, BCC and ETH anyway. Maybe one day if what you say becomes true they will go back and accept these fancy new currencies.
> There are projects that are fair, were fairly distributed, that work and are secure, that are feeless and instant, all while being truly decentralized
Name two?
Monero and Monero related projects, like Haveno.
Its probably one of the most used cryptocurrencies for normal transactions, as most darkweb marketplaces use it.
The highest transaction fee in the last 100 transactions has been 4c. That's not a lot but very far from "feeless". Monero mines blocks every 2 minutes; hardly "instant". A full confirmation takes ~20 minutes.
Source: https://www.monero.how/how-long-do-monero-transactions-take
As opposed to a normal credit card transaction which takes days.
But not in a practical sense for the user. You don't have to wait 20 minutes for your authorization to clear so you can walk out of Dunkin with your iced coffee
Ironically you're more likely to have such an experience paying with cash these days.
I tried to buy a pizza from Dominos last week. Order online, pick up in person and pay with cash. Should have been simple, but it devolved into 5 minutes of Domino's employees trying to figure out "who's on cash?" (Had the credentials to open the cash drawer.) That person was apparently taking a smoke break, but when they came back it still took them another minute of furious hollywood hacker style keyboard pounding at the POS systems (accidental dual acronym of 'Point of Sale' and 'Piece of Shit'?) to open the cash drawer and give me my $1.20 change. Great job guys.
If you forgive me for being a little conspiratorial, I think point of sale systems must be designed to streamline credit card payments while artificially stalling cash transactions, as part of the financial industry's war against the cash economy.
I think the reason might be much simpler. For businesses, cash involves the risk of robbery, and in any case someone must drop it off at the bank periodically, or a pick-up must be arranged (adding cost). If your customers have a card anyway, why bother?
Fear of robbery might motivate a locked cash drawer, or no cash accepted at all. But only one person in the store being able to operate the cash drawer? The most generous explanation for this I can think of is the business fears their own employees are thieves, and want to reduce risk by only trusting a small number of them to handle cash.
But this doesn't explain why it's so hard for even the employee with the cash drawer credentials to open the drawer in a timely manner. They go full hackerman on the keyboard, scratching their head and cussing at the computer with utterances about the value of technology that would make the unabomber proud. It seems obvious to me the workflow for opening the cash drawer is inexcusably broken.
Sorry, my comment was in reply to the last paragraph of your comment, about POS systems being designed card-first. (Should've quoted it, but my tablet was acting up :) )
"who's on the bitcoin thing?" is also possible. it's still +n minutes under identical conditions
you're somewhat right about the POS thing. a system like clover, for example, takes credit cards on the main unit, but the cash drawer is an add-on
> "who's on the bitcoin thing?" is also possible. it's still +n minutes under identical conditions
That much seems certain. Switching to bitcoin to avoid the [artificial] annoyances of cash is like jumping out of the frying pan, into the fire.
You don't have to wait 20 minutes for a Bitcoin transaction to clear for the price of an iced coffee, either. For low-value transactions with a low risk of double-spending you can just verify that the transaction made it into the mempool and is likely to be included in the next block or two, a process which takes seconds at most. It could technically still be reversed during that window but you could just as easily get a chargeback from a credit card, or a bad check. And with Bitcoin you'll have confirmation within less than 30 minutes that the transaction is fully irreversible, vs. 30 days or more with most other methods. Only physical cash offers a faster clearing time.
Contactless from my phone takes well under a second, perhaps less when I walk through the ticket barrier
Nobody outside of this thread would use “normal transactions” and “darkweb” in the same sentence.
> normal transactions ... darkweb marketplaces
For some abnormal definition of "normal", ok.
Obviously he/she meant normal in terms of exchange for goods and services.
Nano and Hedera.
Block lattice tech is very cool. It's been around for over 6 years now, but even here, people seem not to realize that it exists and is fully functional.
Nano is a very interesting one. The foundation developing it focuses on one thing: developing the best digital currency. They don't implement smart-contracts to make it as efficient as possible for example. The feeless aspect is what makes it great but also maybe vulnerable at the same time: the foundation will have to look for external finance a bit like the Linux foundation of which they are taking inspiration.
and their super-fast blockchain manages 70tps ... compare hundreds of tps on other non-PoW blockchains, e.g. private Ethereum
I believe it has one of the best TPS for a decentralised system, and this can be improved with better hardware when the need for higher TPS comes. Now, as it stands today, you can transact on Nano with a 0.4s confirmation time, so higher TPS is not a necessity.
some interesting data on that point: https://forum.nano.org/t/nano-stress-tests-measuring-bps-cps...
I have no desire to waste time and brain on "look up Block lattice tech" and I know that you tend to "take one for the team" in this kind of matter.
So. Block lattice tech: real or Malarkey?
> I think crypto currencies are for the most part a scam
> Man, there's a baby in that bathwater
It takes a special kind of thinking to insist "yeah, crypto currencies are about 98% scammy, but there must be good in the last 2%!, I've just seen 98 scams in a row, this _increases_ the odds that the next 2 that I see are legit!"
Well,
* no it does not increase the odds, this is desperate wishful thinking clinging to a fixed belief
* what if there is no baby, only bathwater? And where does the burden of proof that there is a baby or not, lie?
There were people who called the internet a fad, while the dot com silliness was at it's peak. Many of them, if you recall.
Look up block lattice tech - it's powerful stuff.
> But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
- Carl Sagan
Block lattice tech is not Bozo the clown, but I won't stop you believing whatever you like.
All ponzi schemes start with smart people. The more complicated it is, the more "magical" it becomes for those that have been swayed. It's a religion for some, a cargo cult for others, and a grift machine for the criminals.
But scratch the surface and peer underneath, and you can see what it truly is.
We don't laugh at the people who started the ponzi schemes. We don't laugh at the people that lost their money and learned their lesson.
No, we laugh at the people who despite the clearest of clear headed reasoning still insist on wrapping their logic tighter than a pretzel. We may not all do it publically -- even though there are those that do -- but we do laugh, and are amazed how people got sucked into a tech cult.
What the fuck are you talking about a cult for.. Nano is a real and functioning product, that works. There's no religion or sacrifice or anything like that, you can literally download an app or go to a website and see it work for yourself.
Access to the world's knowledge and people defend their ignorance like this, smh.
Crypto can overall be a scam (or not, pick your poison), but if it's helping wikimedia get funding then that 'baby' is worth saving.
I think we can all agree that wikimedia is a net positive in the world.
Wikimedia Foundation have hundreds of million of dollars. Nothing need saving
See https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
> I think we can all agree that wikimedia is a net positive in the world.
Should Wikimedia take funds from the Kremlin, North Korea and Drug cartels, or should they have limits on ethical sources of funding?
You don't have to answer what you would do, but it is 100% legitimate for them to choose to have clear, written guidelines on what funds they ethically agree to accept.
I don't think that accepting cryptocurrencies is quite equivalent to accepting funds from the Kremlin, North Korea and Drug cartels.
It's more equivalent to accepting donations in roubles, in North Korean won or in the form of legal drug caches.
It's not about the source, but the means of the payment. I can imagine people accepting money from dubious sources, but not via dubious means and vice-versa.
> I don't think that accepting cryptocurrencies is quite equivalent to accepting funds from the Kremlin
I didn't say it was the same, just that they can choose to draw a line somewhere.
> It's more equivalent to accepting donations in roubles
And many are in fact drawing the line at that.
> I can imagine people accepting money from dubious sources, but not via dubious means and vice-versa
Agreed, though I think that once you start looking into ethical funding "why not both" is going to be a common position.
- It’s not significant in terms of the funds it brings in.
- Crypto has been on a 10+ year long quest for “adoption”. So far it’s been fairly pathetic. Organisations who accept it provide a focal point for crypto advocates to point to, legitimising it and luring more retail investors into the Ponzi.
- The environmental impact is massive, which makes accepting it ethically dubious and does not align with the Wikimedia Foundation’s values.
I worked and got paid in crypto in the past, which made me able to move out. Also I used crypto to pay for services, I just bought a GPU (for gaming, current one broke, I do not mine crypto) with crypto that's still shipping.
I won't call the adoption pathetic, it is just that you are not in the circle of adoption/need. Just like I see people mentioning services here that they say they cannot live without and I do not care if they close tomorrow and I have no idea what those services do.
Crypto is a needed option, it can be made to be more environmentally friendly. I personally *often* do not (and cannot) benefit from the global banking system despite all the waste it produce from electricity to wasted manpower to the carbon footprint of material for buildings and offices.
Crypto as many other technologies have use cases, believe in the use case, don't be dogmatic. This is no different from "we only need Java in the world why other languages exist?".
If you use almost any goods or services almost anywhere in the world, you at least indirectly benefit from or use the global banking system, as it is the de facto (and probably quite often de jure) system for payments. There are no alternatives that are as good as it, on pretty much any axis. This includes all crypto.
I'm not trying to unfairly critique your personal choices, but that's just the reality. Just like how you basically can't possibly survive in a city without participating somehow in the global capitalist market economy, you can't claim to personally not partake in the global banking system. It's everywhere, and you might personally take issue with it and of course can critique it, but you can't claim to not partake or even partly benefit.
that’s what crypto is trying to be - the alternative to the global banking system, because the banking system has some issues.
My comment is a response to a specific point that was being made, mostly encapsulated by this quotation:
> Crypto is a needed option, it can be made to be more environmentally friendly. I personally often do not (and cannot) benefit from the global banking system despite all the waste it produce from electricity to wasted manpower to the carbon footprint of material for buildings and offices.
I'm choosing to ignore the parts about buildings because the appropriate comparison is with electronic payments. A transition from in-person banking to Bitcoin is less likely and more costly than a continued transition from in-person banking to purely online electronic banking (not that I think it'll be desirable to anywhere near 100% complete such a transition in my lifetime).
So doing an apples-to-apples comparison, even assuming crypto ever actually becomes meaningfully more environmentally friendly, how does crypto replacing the current global banking system lead to a less wasteful system, measured in environmental terms? I see no way it can.
I also think:
> There are no alternatives that are as good as [the current system], on pretty much any axis. This includes all crypto.
Crypto has far more issues beyond environmental ones, and the very real issues with the current system are not meaningfully helped by crypto. The issues are political problems without much in the way of a technological solution, except at the margins. If crypto wants to stay relevant there, at the margins, that's mostly fine by me.
My main issue with banking is that I cannot use it to its full extent, I am not from a Western country.
Also because how bad banking is, clients find all excuses to not buy you sometimes. I lost one month of income because a European startup was claiming all kind of problems with wiring me my salary (3 different ones), with waiting weeks between every "try" and gaslighting me into asking my bank to do some paper work that will easify the process, something that simply not in my power to do.
With crypto you either have the money and you pay me or you don't.
I'm not actually in your situation so take this with a hefty pinch of salt, but if I was, I wouldn't like to keep that received money in crypto, unless I was speculating. It's not like you can use it as a currency (in terms of purchase goods or services directly in the currency, and even if you can, prices are never set in terms of crypto because it is too volatile, and therefore there are constant arbs... the problems stack up). And I presume there are difficulties in turning crypto into local currency, the same way there are difficulties with international payments. If not, then I would suspect those companies were just bullshitting you or being lazy -- no technological solution for that.
If you've managed to successfully navigate all these difficulties, then congratulations and I'm not telling you you're doing anything wrong, but I don't see a budding alternative in the making, I see uneven economic development.
I do not keep my money as crypto, mainly because there is bills to pay, and things to buy, it was money I used to move out, buy furniture slowly, get a car... etc. It was not hard to convert it to the local currency at all, it was instant.
About the bullshitting, it is just interesting that banking does encourage bullshitting.
Even one of my best employers who pay me in time, was always asking me to confirm if I received the money, and sometimes it take way longer, and he sometimes get concerned about it.
The bigger issue with banking is there is no way to debug it, like the CTO of the European startup used to tell me he talked to the accounting people and they are sending me my money, then 10 days later after me being super careful about it being a local issue, he is coming up with some other excuse.
Is there issues with crypto? yes a lot: inefficiencies, scams, gold rush mentality. Some of those can be solved, other will go away with time. But even if so, my point is that crypto has value and change livelihoods of some people.
> Crypto is a needed option, it can be made to be more environmentally friendly.
This argument has never made sense to me. BTC is fundamentally proof-of-work, and attempts to switch it to some other “green” mechanism will almost certainly fail (see Bitcoin Cash). Ethereum has been promising PoS for nearly as long as ETH has existed. Other “green” coins are either tech-demos, ponzi schemes, or some amalgam of the two.
The ball is rolling, the train has left the station, BTC and ETH have the momentum. Other than rug-pull incentives like airdrops, why would those in the “circle of adoption/need” choose green crypto over what is established?
It's reasonable for Wikimedia to adopt a "wait and see" approach.
If in a few years the whole world adopts crypto for payments, then perhaps they should review that.
Until then I'm not sure it's in Wikimedia's interests to be a pioneering "early adopter/supporter" of crypto payments, given the legitimate ethical concerns.
> it can be made to be more environmentally friendly
You don't get points for what *can be* but *what is*.
> - It’s not significant in terms of the funds it brings in.
> Crypto was around 0.08% of our revenue last year, and it remains one of our smallest revenue channels.
This alone would be a sufficient reason to drop it if it requires extra accounting work, technical maintenance work, staff training, support work, etc.
I don't get the environment friendliness argument. It seems to imply that resources consumed by sustaining cryptocurrency transactions are imploding out of control. I am not familiar with coins except for bitcoin, but at least of bitcoin this is not the case. Market mechanisms regulate bitcoin mining.
Energy consumed by mining is limited by income that miners can get, and this income is limited by mining_rate + fee_rate. mining_rate gradually diminishes and therefore in the end it would be just fee_rate. Thus, bitcoin users would be paying for processing their transactions. Why do we have a right to forbid them spending their money on this? Why is it OK to let somebody spend his/hers money on gas for travelling by car instead of bus or train, but in the same time it is not OK for them to spend their money on doing their value transactions the way they like?
If we as a society assume that we cannot afford to spend so much fossil fuel on energy as today this means we have not set proper high enough price on it.
Just rising the energy ( gas / electricity / etc ) price and stopping obsessing about each particular thing if it is environmental friendly or not seems to me a much more cogent, simple and efficient solution.
> Crypto has been on a 10+ year long quest for “adoption”
2018: Only criminals use it
2020: Only fringe websites use it
2022: Only small countries use it
2024: ????
Must be nice living in a fantasy.
First of all, the things you've listed are not building not "one level above the former". The question should be: Are more criminals using crypto now than in 2018? Are more website using using crypo now than in 2020?
For the former: I definitely can't the buy the shit that I used to be able to with the mainstream coins. So I'm not sure how that is going to play out. The market definitely changed for criminals using crypto.
For the latter: I don't have hard data on this, but I'd bet a good wager that the golden time of "You can also pay in crypto!!" is over. Back then crypto was practically only advertised as a means of exchange, which lead to more services offering it as a means of exchange. Nowadays the vast majority of the mainstream crypto (and where most of the "money" is) is used as a storage of value. You could buy all kinds of crazy shit, even with fairly big companies with mainstream crypto. Nowadays? Not so much.
About your 2022 example. I see you've used the plural. Countries. Is that so? Which country, other than El Salvador, is also using crypto as a legal tender? And while you're googling that, please make sure to also google how much the usage for crypto has changed El Salvador since it became legal tender. And how the adoption of it was. I'll give you a little hint: Quite literally not at all.
Why are you trying to win an argument against something that was quite literally invented to benefit you, me and everyone else.
I'm not trying to win an argument either, I only respond with witty remarks such as grandparent (in the vein of you'll see) to people like you.
I'm not going to argue any of your points.
Just get on with the times man, this is the future.
> It's one thing to be against crypto, but refusing it when you are a charity for the most asinine moral purity tests is absurd.
Charities, unlike for-profit businesses, tend to be moral ventures. Refusing donations, modes of operation, etc., for reasons that seem to be “asinine moral purity tests” for anyone with different moral views than the decision-makers is...pretty par for the course.
There was a vote, the majority (70%+) of those that voted voted to stop. I don't know why other arguments would matter
Because I didn't participate in that vote, along with huge numbers of people who are similarly situated.
I am a user of Wikipedia and a regular donor, but I do not follow whatever list there is of issues to be voted on.
This was not a vote of Wikipedia donors, it was a vote of politically active Wikipedia authors on the subject of which donations should be accepted.
I understand that but it was not a vote for Wikipedia users nor it was a vote for Wikipedia donors. It was a vote for Wikipedia and what payment do they accept - it has no impact for you as an user, and as a donor - they made their choice how and what they want to be donated to them
It's an interesting topic in on itself, about rejecting donations. On one hand they are donations to you so you should be greatful but on the other hand, if they are from the party you're against... well, do you accept even if it helps your cause?
It’s a “community” vote so it’s very much for users (readers and editors). Anyone could participate.
Readers have essentially never been given a vote. The votes are by editors.
It was posted here, on twitter , Reddit etc.
There were significant numbers of pro-crypto people sharing it to get people to vote no.
You also don’t get to vote on how HN, Twitter, or Facebook operate, no matter how many posts you write. None of these belong to you, so you don’t get a say. You are, of course, welcome to build your own and take payment however you please.
What would it mean for it to matter? Does it matter to wikipedia or those voting what we discuss here? Very unlikely.
But internally for an individual trying to understand why someone else would make a choice that they themselves would not, it does matter for improving our own understanding and empathy. If you choose B but I would choose A if I were in your shame shoes, then either I don't understand your shoes well enough to call them the same or I'm missing some understanding of the issue. Even in the case where we could objectively determine that A was the correct choice, if I don't understand why you choose B then I'm still missing something about the situation.
This could be just to sate curiosity, but enough instances of similar behavior allows us to better understand and empathize with others. When it comes to an issue we think we understand better than most other issues, to have a disagreement in what we would've done is much more striking and indicative of some flaw in our understanding. If this was a bunch of surgeons picking some post-surgery recovery practice to recommend, I could easily dismiss the difference in me not understanding the topic well enough. If it is instead a kid picking a different answer than I would on a test after I helped tutor them, then it is a much clearer indication that I'm missing something in tutoring. Maybe a bad assumption about prior knowledge, maybe an unknown to me issue with test taking like them having significant test anxiety that doesn't show up in tutoring, ect.
> when you are a charity
They are a non-profit only in the most technical sense these days, but have never been a charity.
Yes you are right! I always mix charity and non profit. But yeah, Wikimedia became a huge organization with an annual budget of 150M$ (of which a lot goes to completely unrelated pet projects), so it is a non profit only in a technical sense as you said.
But it still feels the need to plead (or almost beg) for 3-5$ donations yearly with huge call to action banners on every wiki page. Which is okay, I get that they need funds. But to then throw away 140 000$ worth of donations on a whim completely contradicts the "every dollar counts, please help" message of their fundraising banners.
> But to then throw away 140 000$ worth of donations on a whim completely contradicts the "every dollar counts, please help" message of their fundraising banners.
The former is a community decision, the latter is done by the WMF. Many in the community, probably a majority, are very annoyed by WMF's yearly dishonest begging runs, and WMF's interference in WP operations in general.
I’m not sure how scale affects whether something is “non profit” or not.
This decision has been taken by the community, aka users. This isn’t a decision the WMF has taken, nor have they responded thus far.
Where is the line for what they should accept as payment?
It should be the same line regarding fiat so kinda low i'd say
Should they accept anything that can be exchanged for fiat without too much fuss?
I don't know, do they really check who donated fiat comes from and refuse donations when it comes from, let's say, anyone involved in anything against their values ?
Checking this may be impractical. But for crypto donations, you don't need to check - you _know_ that it was generated in an environmentally-unfriendly way (at least for the currencies currently accepted).
Since cross chain activity is made available that's not true, I could do 100% of my money on avalanche or solana and bridge some only to donate
Aren't you just moving the work to someone else, who had to mine a Bitcoin block for your donation transaction to go through?
eth is moving to proof of stake imminently
If I was waiting on a bus that was supposed to arrive “imminently” for this long I’d be well pissed off.
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/05/11/vitalik-buterin-say...
I got sick of hearing this claim years ago. At this point, it's tantamount to gaslighting.
Yes? As long as "without too much fuss" holds - I don't see why not.
Then why not just accept serious stablecoins ? No speculations over it, just a virtual dollar, energy efficient allowing freedom and privacy to a lot ?
So military surplus? Brown coal? These are things with functioning markets. Should wikipedia be obligated to accept my donation of them?
Even though the arguments in support of the ban are to be taken into account it's right that the arguments in opposition make a lot of sense and it doesn't seem like they've been taken into account. When you're begging for money you don't spit on a way to get some more because you disagree with some stuff it's related, you look for solutions to please everyone.
As you said a lot of what's actually done with cryptocurrencies and blockchain based applications is wrong/pernicious but it doesn't mean that nothing good can come out of it. The all out war from some people you describe can also be seen here and is killing the efforts of serious people trying to build great things.
> When you're begging for money
But that is just it, Wikipedia isn't that desperate for money that it has to do tricks for con artists and scammers. Now if Wikipedia was tethering at the edge of non existence it might be excusable, but it isn't, it is making enough to keep running without pandering to the scum of the earth.
First i'd love it if out of pure courtesy you avoided using stuff like "the scum of the earth" to describe people you disagree with because it doesn't help in any way. Then with banners like "Help us save Wikipedia, Wikipedia is in danger, donate" on the website at least a month per year I have to disagree with your "Wikipedia isn't desperate for money"
> "the scum of the earth" to describe people you disagree with because it doesn't help in any way.
The top comment was classifying crypto coins as mostly " part a scam, a ponzi scheme or a platform for pump and dumps". I was referring to that and if you identify with any of these points, you are most welcome otherwise I apologize for the confusion.
> on the website at least a month per year I have to disagree with your "Wikipedia isn't desperate for money"
They really aren't, they are even several years ahead of their own financial predictions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
> This 100% reminds me of the almost cultist like extremely negative reaction to anything related to crypto on some parts of twitter.
This could as well be orchestrated by fiat enthusiasts.
Regarding flying people out to do things while citing cryptocurrency climate issues: the former is unavoidable given the goal while the latter has more efficient alternatives in the vast majority of relevant circumstances.
That's not to say that I'm thus for or against this ban, or for or against flying people out to edit a website from a central location together (assuming that's what wiki mania meetups are), just that the flaw in the logic is that flying isn't practically avoidable if you want to meet up from across the world, while donations have a thousand other avenues (and for those who aren't able to make a donation now from North Korea or so, it's not to their disadvantage, it's not like Wikipedia was a VPN provider, or like you want to hide a Wikileaks donation from your government). This happens in a lot of the whataboutism around doing one thing for the climate while not being perfect because you still do this other thing.
I'm not surprised, Wikimedia can't use "free as in beer, not as in speech" software licences like the Confluent Community one. I guess that they have an ideological drive in what they work with, all power to them.
> It's one thing to be against crypto, but refusing it when you are a charity for the most asinine moral purity tests is absurd.
How can you write that when you just called crypto a "scam, a ponzi scheme or a platform for pump and dumps?" If your characterization is in earnest then any charity would reflexively avoid such a thing. (Possibly excepting Sci-hub who cannot receive donations any other way-- at least that's the only positive edge case I can think of that warrants the "for the most part" hedge)
Edit: clarification
I would balk at accusing any charity of "asinine moral purity tests."
A charity explicitly prefers altruism over gain from moral conviction. One can hardly expect them to optimize for financial gain, even if there exists a compelling utilitarian argument that this would allow them to perform more altruism.
Indeed, this in my view is preferable - one need only gesture towards the infamy of "the ends justify the means" to make an argument against strict utilitarian behavior.
If someone thinks something is a scam, it makes sense for them to be against making money from the scam
Its because wikipedia has been taken over by the same types that most other big tech companies have been taken over by. Just look at anything political and you'll realize they have for the most part won the war on information and are dutifully silencing and censoring and disagreeing thoughts or facts.
The website is not as neutral as it was in its heyday, and that reflection comes in this headline alone.
Seeing at least one downvote, expecting a lot more.
Gonna have to say, wikipedia is free to do what it wants, I'm all for free markets and freedom to choose what they want, I'm not opposed to their choice.
Having said that, there's a good population that exists that don't want to be lied to and we'll just choose somewhere else to get our information if censorship soft or hard continues to get in the way of truth. All I'm saying is people will recognize (and already have recognized) that wikipedia is no longer the source of truth ( and is in many ways controlled by the same personality type of people who are lvl 99 on world of warcraft whose life purpose is to pwn noobs and assert dominance with every living breath )
>So it must be purged from everywhere.
Yes.
I guess to each his own religion.
You know, it's also quite a cult-ish thing to accuse your critics of being fanatics.
There's a case for considering crypto de facto blood money. I wouldn't accept crypto on the basis that I can't interact with it without contributing to its ecosystem.
What sort of a terrible person would I be if I considered crypto to be a force for evil, but greased its machinery just because there was money in it for me? It's not about signalling moral purity, it's about holding myself to my own standards. How could I look myself in the mirror if I didn't?
I don't care if other people accept crypto. I don't even care if they barter ivory, tiger hides, and congolese blood diamonds with Vladimir Putin himself. That's between them and their conscience to sort out.
By that token, shouldn't wikimedia be engaging in thorough KYC to ensure none of the money they accept is tainted or as you referred to it: "blood money"?
I guess the Wikimedia community is going for the low-hanging fruit. Don't Let “Perfect” Be the Enemy of “Good”.
There are differing concerns.
The first is what you're addressing: is this particular bit of value from a bad place? Both systems have issues there. I still think fiat is better, because the bank the transfer originates from has presumably done KYC. I also don't think it's that big of a deal; there are much worse things to do with drug money.
The second is entirely different: is accepting this currency going to help proliferate problems associated with the currency? I.e. does accepting Bitcoin legitimize it and implicitly encourage others to use Bitcoin, amplifying any environmental or money laundering concerns?
I don't have a hard stance, I'm not a member of any of the relevant groups. I can see where they're coming from, and I don't find it a crazy stance. Really, either side seems fair.
That's up to them. I do accept donations on good faith, but I can't in good faith accept crypto donations as there is no uncertainty about where they come from.
I can't in good conscience ignore what I know because there are other things I don't.
> I do accept donations on good faith, but I can't in good faith accept crypto donations as there is no uncertainty about where they come from.
If I murder a drug dealer, steal his briefcase stuffed with 100-dollar bills, and eventually donate some of that money to you in USD, you will happily accept it "in good faith". But if I work hard as a nurse, exchange some of my hard-earned savings into Ether, and donate it to you, you will refuse because "there is no uncertainty about where they come from"? I'm confused. How are you certain that the USD donations are clean money, and certain that the Ether must be dirty money? I guess just the vague association with "crypto" is enough?
Just admit that this is about ideological purity and nothing else.
Accepting crypto legitimizes crypto.
„Even Wikipedia/Wikipedia, a charity with high ethical standards accepts it, how bad can it be?“ might not be the most well-reasoned conclusion, some people will come to it.
If it doesn‘t disproportionately endanger the „core purpose“ of Wikimedia, why not avoid something like that altogether?
> If I murder a drug dealer, steal his briefcase stuffed with 100-dollar bills, and eventually donate some of that money to you in USD, you will happily accept it "in good faith"
Yes, if you don't tell me you did the murdering I would accept the money. Your actions are on your conscience.
> But if I work hard as a nurse, exchange some of my hard-earned savings into Ether, and donate it to you, you will refuse because "there is no uncertainty about where they come from"?
> I'm confused. How are you certain that the USD donations are clean money, and certain that the Ether must be dirty money? I guess just the vague association with "crypto" is enough?
I have moral responsibility for my actions. Due to the way a blockchain works, I can't accept or withdraw your Ethereum donation without contributing to the blockchain with a transaction fee. I can't fault you for putting it there, that is a matter for your conscience, but I can fault myself for accepting it.
> Just admit that this is about ideological purity and nothing else.
It is not about ideology at all, but about conscience. I believe ideology is almost as harmful to humanity as the blockchain.
> I have moral responsibility for my actions. Due to the way a blockchain works, I can't accept or withdraw your Ethereum donation without contributing to the blockchain with a transaction fee. I can't fault you for putting it there, that is a matter for your conscience, but I can fault myself for accepting it.
Are you hypothesizing that the net amount of transaction fees paid on the Ethereum network will be higher if you accept the donation, compared to if you don't accept the donation? I have a feeling that you might be accidentally comparing to a scenario where the donator does not donate and subsequently never transfers that cryptocurrency anywhere ever. This is not a realistic scenario. The donator is almost certainly going to transfer that crypto somewhere anyway, so it doesn't appear to me like your action of refusing the donation reduces the net amount of transaction fees.
I'm not looking at outcomes, I'm looking at actions, my actions to be specific. What you do is up to you. In the first scenario I'm contributing to a bad thing, in the next I'm not. It really is as simple as that.
There is one thing I have control over in this life, and that is what I choose to do. Consequently, that is also what is what I opt to judge.
> I'm not looking at outcomes, I'm looking at actions, my actions to be specific. What you do is up to you. In the first scenario I'm contributing to a bad thing, in the next I'm not. It really is as simple as that.
Okay, based on this clarification it appears that we agree on the subject matter, you just didn't like the terminology I used to describe it. Your description is exactly what I mean when I say motivated by ideological purity. As you said, you're not looking at outcomes. You just want to avoid associating yourself with what you consider to be a "bad thing" - regardless of whether your choice makes the world better, worse, or has no impact at all.
> You just want to avoid associating yourself with what you consider to be a "bad thing" - regardless of whether your choice makes the world better, worse, or has no impact at all.
No, this is not about association, it's about resolve. I do not want to act against my own values. That would make me a hypocrite.
I can't make the world a good or a bad place, I am not God. The world is what it is and it's largely outside of my control. What I can choose is what I should be like, what manner of person I should be, and then hold myself to that standard, not for others to judge, but for myself.
If the world is terrible, that doesn't mean I must be a terrible person along with it. If it isn't, then that's great!
I think we have a fundamentally different view on morality. (For the record, I don't think your view is particularly uncommon and I don't think it makes you a terrible person.)
You obviously don't like it when I describe your motivation as a "desire for ideological purity". You offer alternative descriptions with nicer words, but my reaction to your alternative descriptions is "exactly! that's what I mean by ideological purity!". So it's not clear to me what the disagreement there is (if any). It seems to me that you oppose this label because it has a negative connotation, even though it's a factually accurate representation of your thought process. So you prefer to describe this exact same thing using different words, which sound nicer, even though the substance is the same. If there truely is a difference of substance, then I would love to know what you perceive to be that difference.
> No, this is not about association, it's about resolve. I do not want to act against my own values. That would make me a hypocrite.
You think crypto is morally reprehensible, I get that. What I don't get is how accepting crypto donations would be acting against those values. I'm looking at morality in terms of expected outcomes: what will the world be like if I choose A, versus what will the world be like if I choose B. And yes I know you said this:
> I can't make the world a good or a bad place, I am not God. The world is what it is and it's largely outside of my control.
We all have the power to make small impacts on the world. I share the feeling that we can't make large impacts, but we can still make small impacts. If we don't accept that, we might as well argue that a single murder is not morally wrong, because a single murder has a statistically insignificant effect on the number of living people, it's practically a rounding error. The decision to not murder still has a small impact on the world. Similarly, many other decisions might have small impacts on the world. Deciding to become a crypto promoter certainly has a small impact. Founding a crypto business certainly has a small impact. But accepting donations in crypto? You would be taking money away from crypto people for the benefit of a charity or non-profit. You take $100k away from crypto people, pay a $5 transaction fee that somebody was going to pay anyway for moving that $100k somewhere, and the net result of these actions is supposedly bad? How? Because it crosses the ideological line somewhere. It breaks ideological purity. Nothing to do with outcomes whatsoever.
I’m super confused. A person has acknowledged that participating in eth (even to accept eth) uses eth, and they are fundamentally against eth… so they don’t use it. You’re making their position sound more boneheaded than it is by adding arbitrary it’s. because the person doesn’t participate in your arbitrary hypothetical making they are not looking at outcomes?
> because the person doesn’t participate in your arbitrary hypothetical making they are not looking at outcomes?
No, they are making that statement. Direct quote: "I'm not looking at outcomes". I'm taking them at their word when they say that they are not looking at outcomes.
> You just want to avoid associating yourself with what you consider to be a "bad thing" - regardless of whether your choice makes the world better, worse, or has no impact at all.
In some ethical frameworks, associating yourself with a thing you consider bad thing is bad regardless of the size or type of the outcome of that association.
This is great news, it is pretty pointless to use cryptocurrencies at all anyway since for Wikipedia:
> Crypto was around 0.08% of our revenue last year, and it remains one of our smallest revenue channels.
Remember that Wikipedia is one of the top 10 websites on the planet, I'm also assuming that other websites trying to accept crypto have even smaller percentages rendering cryptocurrencies as payment useless, not to mention damaging to the environment.
What is really happening is that nobody is using it for payments at all, rather just holding crypto coins and hoping they'll go up and speculating on the price.
Wikipedia used BitPay, the most widely loathed of all cryptocurrency payment processors - https://debitpay.directory/anti-bitcoin/ - and required prospective donors to provide an obscene amount of personal data: https://bitpay.com/464448/donate
It's a high friction, culture-clashing payment flow. I certainly noped out of that form real fast.
For comparison: https://www.givedirectly.org/crypto/
And another campaign on The Giving Block, an anonymity friendly donation payment processor: https://thegivingblock.com/campaigns/ukraine-emergency-respo...
This is the real reason they received so few donations. I've only ever donated to them through Brave's Attention Tokens [1], so I never realized they use BitPay, but it really is intrusive.
1. I wonder if they'll keep this enabled or not?
> 1. I wonder if they'll keep this enabled or not?
I was wondering the same thing -- hopefully they will, as I'd like to see that model succeed.
> required prospective donors to provide an obscene amount of personal data
Yes, that’s known as KYC laws, which are required if you’re a payment processor of any kind.
Seems more like preemptive overcompliance. Plenty of reputable charities accept anonymous donations just fine, whether it's cryptocurrency or cash by mail.
Given the financial size, global scope and dislike by certain governments of Wikipedia I see preemptive overcompliance as a very sane option.
This is a flaw in a service. Turning down free money isn't wise for a service that needs charity (from whatever sources) to continue existing.
Charitable giving with crypto is just getting off the ground
As tax considerations with crypto are just getting off the ground
So you basically have this wide polar extreme of:
A) People using crypto and thinking there are no taxes
B) And entrepreneurs moving their premines to their own non-profits for massive tax breaks and exemption
leaving existing non-profits just waiting
People in A) move slightly towards the center year over year as reality catches up to them and more become loaded with appreciated assets or just have an inventory of crypto at all times
People close to B) are also loaded with assets and more likely to contribute to other non profits
Its better for a non profit to keep the door open and have the payment rails available. Large contributions could happen at any time. At the end of the day, money talks, pretty much all non profits figure it out when a donor wants to donate any large asset, including in crypto
> As tax considerations with crypto are just getting off the ground
This is very not true. Buying and selling anything has very clear tax implications. It's more that enforcement is slow, and people are willingly breaking the law because of it. Here's a good Twitter conversation explaining the situation:
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1501707876888240131
> I think the issue is mostly that the industry’s core request is “Can we have an outright exemption from securities regulation?”, the regulators say “Absolutely not you must follow the law.”, industry follows with “How high is this on your enforcement priority list?”, “Not very.”
> And so industry complains “My my this all seems so ambiguous and look at all these similar projects which never get enforcement actions. I wish we had Regulatory Clarity (TM).”
> This is very not true. Buying and selling anything has very clear tax implications.
I was saying that crypto users willing to consider tax and more complex tax is just getting off the ground, not that the law itself ever ignored them
I think the rest of my post makes that clear
> People in A) move slightly towards the center year over year as reality catches up to them (the reality that tax always applied)
but I can see how it doesn't, especially if you are expecting a crypto tax / regulation protestor
> nobody is using it for payments at all, rather just holding crypto coins and hoping they'll go up
The above statement is false.
I prefer to use cash and crypto to prevent my expenses from being tracked (although I absolutely am not avoiding any taxes). I pay cash, not crypto when I want weed (sadly it's still illegal in most of the places). I rarely hold more than $100 worth so don't care about where is the rate going. I presume I'm not unique.
> What is really happening is that nobody is using it for payments at all
[Citation needed]
Over the past years I've been able to book flights, shop hardware, get hotels and rental cars, renew my domain, pay for my server with cryptocurrencies.
So, you are 0.08%
No problem. Don't cry later with annoying banners crying for donations in order to keep the site's operations running.
The rights of minorities don't matter?
paying in a currency/asset of your choice is no one's right. I have a bunch of foreign currency in cash lying around which I cannot use where I live without exchanging it, I guess that makes me a minority as well - should I make a fuss about my european country of residence not accepting a central american currency?
Paying with x thing was never a right to begin with
book flights with crypto? which airline or travel agency accepts crypto? I don't see how it could work with so much volatility.
You could buy fully modifiable/refundable first class tickets and use them as free options to bet on the crypto in question
Expedia has accepted Bitcoin for almost a decade: https://www.expedia.com/Checkout/BitcoinTermsAndConditions
That's not "accepting payment with bitcoin" - it's just a link for coinbase to convert your bitcoin to USD before booking. Look at the T&Cs, it's a USD booking underneath
Accepting payment with bitcoin means using bitcoin as the currency in the PNR, just like you can use euros or yen or pounds or whatever
... Why does this matter? GP asked about whether you can use Bitcoin to receive goods and services. Nobody asked what Expedia puts in their balance sheet, you're moving the goalposts.
the fact that if you cancel they give you USD means it's not "paying with bitcoin". it's "converting bitcoin to USD then paying with USD". it's a pretty fundamental difference - Expedia aren't making any bets on the stability of BTC, as they are when they accept EUR or USD or GBP or whatever
It's not about the bets. If BTC can transparently be converted to USD or GBP then it does actually offer value to the person using BTC to buy services. I'm not sure why you're so adamant about insisting that Expedia isn't buying into "bets" or whatever. Having parts of a transaction happen off-chain doesn't constitute a repudiation of cryptocurrency. Not everyone is a Bitcoin maximalist. Demonstrating it has value for people is enough to support the GP's comment, in this case value for people that hold BTC to purchase real goods and services, the same way any other fiat currency is used. It's not like a non-US entity that takes USD as payment is endorsing US political actions, it's just trying to receive payment for goods and services.
I'm tired of these shifting goalposts in crypto conversations. They always go like this:
1. I derive value from crypto
2. There's no value in crypto! Show me a usecase!
3. <Presents usecase where crypto is used to derive value>
4. But that uses Fiat/off-chain/<something not crypto>/<vendor that doesn't know what crypto is>/<workflow that's replacable by fiat> so crypto has no value!
The claim the GP made is that an individual can derive value from crypto, not that this value is untainted by fiat, off-chain movement, or any of the other incidental claims. When you use USD or GBP to buy a good, the good itself has probably traded hands between many currencies before the final product was sold to you using the fiat you paid. Does that mean USD or GBP are "useless" because input costs for your product were paid for in RMB? No, you still derive value from fiat.
The problem isn’t that there is a fiat step, the problem is that only one side of the transaction is in crypto. Expedia aren’t “accepting crypto” - they’re sending you to someone who will swap your crypto for cash and then taking the cash. The fact that refunds are in dollars means there is no fundamental difference with just swapping the crypto yourself before booking
I just want to point out the irony in falling back to good old centralized fintech companies to actually use the supposedly decentralized currency.
Sorry, I know, off-topic.
My theory it's a payment processor that converts to %LOCAL_CURRENCY% (if necessary, with an additional conversion through USD/EUR) at the time of purchase and thus would never refund anything in croins at original rate (am open to be proven wrong).
hmmm yes in which case calling it "paying in crypto" is a massive stretch. I can also "buy a flight ticket with a used car" if there's a dealership next to the travel agency
It's no different than buying things with a credit card and having the payment processor convert your currency to the local currency etc.
I think if the payment processor does that, they will also reimburse you in your currency, not the local one
Can't you just switch currency on your bank card, avoiding conversion?
Some banks allow that, but very likely the card networks‘ conversion rates are going to be much closer to mid-market.
So this is not great news at all, a totally inconsequential and pointless move for signaling virtue (look at the arguments given), which is contrary to wikipedia's aim to be neutral
> So this is not great news at all, a totally inconsequential and pointless move for signaling virtue (look at the arguments given), which is contrary to wikipedia's aim to be neutral
WP:NPOV is about article content, not payment systems.
> NPOV is a fundamental principle of Wikipedia and of other Wikimedia projects.
> Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, nor a web directory.
That applies to article content, not stuff like this RFC.
Maybe an example would be clearer:
OK: The community doesn't like cryptocurrency, so decides not to accept it for donations.
NOT OK: The community doesn't like cryptocurrency, so turns the Bitcoin article into a hit-piece that only covers criticisms.
what about the second statement from wikipedia's principles: it is not a soapbox. It would be interesting to put banks to a vote with the same kind of arguments as well
> what about the second statement from wikipedia's principles: it is not a soapbox. It would be interesting to put banks to a vote with the same kind of arguments as well
Let me just put this this way: you are interpreting the text wrong, and repeatedly circling back to your wrong interpretation won't make it right. Pithy texts usually don't impart a full, correct understanding when read in isolation.
It's
Accepting cryptocurrencies is not neutral neither.
Neutral hardly exists.
accepting bitcoin is as legal and regulated as banks and paypal.
as if banks don't spend billions in pointless air travel and (empty in past 2 years) concrete highrises. When WP goes down the ideological rabbit hole everyone loses.
maybe someone will follow up with an RFC to remove banks
Then paypal
It seems pretty clear that ethics, not legality, was the main consideration here.
Accepting bushels of corn is also legal, but why would Wikipedia want to get into the business of accepting them?
According to Wikipedia's co-founder, it hasn't aimed to be neutral in a long while.
That article itself isn't exactly free of bias nor is it fully accurate, some of the things listed as not being mentioned are.
Removing the payment method simplifies the donations system. And since it’s not generating any value, it’s not worth keeping.
that was not one of the arguments made in the RFC
> Common arguments in support include: issues of environmental sustainability, that accepting cryptocurrencies constitutes implicit endorsement of the issues surrounding cryptocurrencies, and community issues with the risk to the movement’s reputation for accepting cryptocurrencies.
it looks 100% ideological
Accepting cryptocurrencies is equally ideological
The ideology of people not needing a central government's permission to privately interact?
What I would concede is that it does challenge the dominant ideology of the establishment.
As this former Federal Reserve economist describes, the Federal Reserve system is extremely centralized:
https://twitter.com/gordonliao/status/1484605701435523072?s=...
This is just one aspect of centralized economic control cryptocurrency threatens to upend.
Centralization will inevitably engender rent-seeking, so the dominant ideological framework being one that glorifies that centralized gatekeeping, and villifies a free market, is entirely predictable.
Common arguments in opposition include: the existence of less energy-intensive cryptocurrencies (proof-of-stake), that cryptocurrencies provide safer ways to donate and engage in finance for people in oppressive countries
I don't see how energy efficient currencies and allowing safer ways for people in oppressive countries to donate is ideological
Accepting the war-driven petro-dollar is equally ideological.
since when?
Since many years ago. The cryptocurrency movement has always been very ideological.
so has the anti-crypto so we are at an impasse
>> Since many years ago. The cryptocurrency movement has always been very ideological.
> so has the anti-crypto so we are at an impasse
No on both counts.
Also, the "cryptocurrency movement" isn't just regular ideological, it's particularly ideological. Cryptocurrency wasn't made to fill any practical need, it was made to fit certain peculiar ideological obsessions.
You're wrong. It was definitely made to fill a practical need: avoiding the middle man. Why do you think it's so popular in corrupt authorarian thirld-word countries? And if you live in the US/Europe, you'll get there eventually.
> You're wrong. It was definitely made to fill a practical need: avoiding the middle man.
No I'm not. Also, with cryptocurrency you still have middlemen. To whom are you paying fees to clear your transactions on your dog-slow, unscalable, extremely inefficient network?
And why do these systems have the negative characteristics I just mentioned? The peculiar ideological obsessions I referred to earlier.
> Why do you think it's so popular in corrupt authorarian thirld-word countries? And if you live in the US/Europe, you'll get there eventually.
I'll believe it when I see it. And frankly, those use cases are nonsensical. How exactly is someone supposed to convert their Syrian Pounds into cryptocurrency, and after they do that, what use is it? It's not like it's an actual currency that you can buy things with. It's mainly speculative investment surrounded by enormous hype.
>> with cryptocurrency you still have middlemen. To whom are you paying fees to clear your transactions on your dog-slow, unscalable, extremely inefficient network?
True, but that's as close as you'll get to P2P for a currency. Still, there's thousands of btc nodes and anyone could theoretically run one... unlike "just one bank" or "just one Mastercard".
It is slow, and inefficient precisely because there's no central authority (lool up Bizantine Generals problem). It has scaled extremely well for what it actually is.
Some people don't seem to understand this and compare it with, say VISA transactions.
>> It's not like it's an actual currency that you can buy things with.
It is. I can pay someone to build a website using bitcoin. Or, I can buy a car using bitcoin. You just need to agree on a number.
>> How exactly is someone supposed to convert their Syrian Pounds into cryptocurrency
You can always buy bitcoin from an individual in exchange for Syrian pounds. It's like bartering.
You can sell it back to an individual even if exchanges don't work.
>> It's mainly speculative investment surrounded by enormous hype.
That's just a byproduct. For example, I don't "save in bitcoin", I just use it for its intended purposes when I have to make a purchase.
By the way, my govt said exacty the same about the black market of US dollars, because people here use them to protect themselves from a quickly devaluing currency (>60% yearly inflation) and to avoid the corrupt govt control over their money (enormous taxes in exchange for nothing).
> It is slow, and inefficient precisely because there's no central authority (lool up Bizantine Generals problem). It has scaled extremely well for what it actually is.
> Some people don't seem to understand this and compare it with, say VISA transactions.
The point is almost all people don't really care about that feature of having "no central authority." Cryptocurrency goes through extraordinary effort to solve "problems" people don't actually have and implement features people don't actually care about.
It's like if someone at Google decided all search absolutely must run on 486 machines for weird reasons, and as a consequence it starts taking two minutes to load a page of results. Maybe the two minute load times are a phenomenal achievement of some brilliant engineers, but none of that matters to me as a user who hasn't joined the cult of the 486.
>> It's not like it's an actual currency that you can buy things with.
> It is. I can pay someone to build a website using bitcoin. Or, I can buy a car using bitcoin. You just need to agree on a number.
Theoretically, but that's not what people actually use Bitcoin for. It's also a superfluous detour in those transactions, merely adding unnecessary exchange and other fees.
>>> Why do you think it's so popular in corrupt authorarian thirld-word countries? And if you live in the US/Europe, you'll get there eventually.
> You can always buy bitcoin from an individual in exchange for Syrian pounds. It's like bartering.
Which ones deal in Syrian pounds? Give me an example.
And even there is one, how is someone in a "corrupt authorarian thirld-word [sic]" country supposed to get their money there? The banking system, perhaps? Or some black market broker? Doesn't that defeat the point?
If they run a lightning wallet and open it for donations, they'd see that percentage rise dramatically at virtually no cost.
How does that make a difference? As I understood it, every individual would still have to do a regular on-chain transaction, it's only if you later realize you actually wanted to donate more than you did that this could be useful because then you avoid the full transaction fee. Or if you let it run over years without settling and do a yearly donation, though I'm not clear on the implications there.
Or, if the on-chain parties are just Wikipedia and a few big payment service providers to avoid that everyone has to do the setup individually, you've basically reinvented paypal credits or, less evil-ly, liberapay.
I think you misunderstand the Network part of the Lightning Network. It is not necessary for users to have a direct payment channel to Wikimedia in order to donate to them. They just need to have an active channel to anybody in the network who is capable of routing a payment request to Wikimedia's node.
The assumption is that Lightning users already have active open channels to other nodes in the network, and so making a new donation to Wikimedia would not require any additional channel opening, and no on-chain activity.
Thanks for clarifying that! Now that you mention it, I remember reading that but forgot it again somehow. That does (positively) change how well this can work without compromising the whole idea behind bitcoin.
Ukraine received millions of dollars of donations in cryptocurrency. So your last statement is not really correct.
As of March 11, close to $100 million. According to a deputy minister in Ukraine:
> “In a situation like this, where the national bank is not fully operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers, to make it very quick and get results almost immediately.”
NYTimes: https://archive.ph/3HVqU#
This is crypto’s second largest use case, behind as a means for illegal activities. Crypto is easier to send in extreme situations than fiat currencies.
> behind as a means for illegal activities
which are less than 1% of the yearly transaction volume according to Chainalysis lol
On top of that you can trace all the transactions on the chain and see where everything is going publicly. Useful to catch criminals attempting to liquidate on to an exchange. Good luck cashing out and not getting caught.
Monero fixed that a long time ago already.
That's right. Perhaps that's why proposed regulations are cracking down on banning and delisting Monero (and other privacy coins) on exchanges. [0] [1]
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/31/eu-parliament-vot...
[1] https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/kraken-to...
Would love to see them claim my Monero. Oh wait, I have no Monero, sorry about the confusion.
Right, because criminals are so easy to analyze
Not as easy as googling for a restaurant, but definitely doable with the right tools.
But what if Wikpedia donor pool also is made up mostly of those who do not wish to use cryptos to donate?
There just isn't the incentive to use cryptocurrency to donate to Wikipedia. For some other kinds of payments, such as gambling payments, cryptocurrency is a popular option.
> There just isn't the incentive to use cryptocurrency to donate to Wikipedia.
Sure there is. A lot of people have lots of value tied up in crypto, a very liquid asset. It’s also easy to send. I know nothing about wiring money to Ukraine, but I know how to donate to Ukraine organizations that accept crypto. If crypto is a small part of your revenue stream, maybe it’s because you haven’t nurtured it as a donation channel.
> I know nothing about wiring money to Ukraine
You go to your bank and ask them to start a wire transfer. The recipient’s bank will provide the instructions. You can even do this entirely online.
> You go to your bank and ask them to start a wire transfer.
Haha, or, I can just click a single link from a donation page and send ETH from the wallet in my browser directly to the organization that I want to support, which I did in the case of Ukraine. No need to log in to any third party website, and the transaction was finalized in ~10 seconds with negligible fees.
I scanned a qr code, entered an amount and clicked pay in my banking app. It automatically converted the amount from my local currency to UAH. Negligible or no fee (can't recall and can't check right now).
Seems that crypto is just a technical solution to socio-political issues that plague parts of the world.
Sure. But one thing cryptocurrency is terrible at is requiring that you do your own op-sec. Maybe you're good at that sort of thing, but because of the inherent lack of controls to reverse transactions made by mistake or accidental fat-fingering other details, such as the address, it's pretty bad for the less tech-savvy.
Did you ever bother to check that "single link from a donation page" to make sure it's really the correct one?
I love being able to call a bank if my VISA card gets stolen and charged up to high heaven and get that all reversed.
Meanwhile, good luck with that NFT that mysteriously landed in your wallet that has bad coding in it to wreck your day. But yes, mass adoption imminent!
I also did this for Ukraine with BTC.
Seems like they [0] can't use that method and are using cryptocurrencies instead.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct...
Try to do this in Russian bank now. In Russia.
My physical bank is in a different country. As a crypto enthusiast, I’m obligated to migrate to a remote tax haven full of like minded nut jobs.
My physical banks are in 3 different countries, I have not been in an office in years, and I still can send money to UA based organizations easily.
Why would being physically in a bank be needed?
And as a crypto enthusiast you've chosen a bank stuck in the 1980s which doesn't have an app or website? Is that to validate your crypto enthusiasm?
Interbank transfers work the same way regardless of country ( with the exception of sanctions - you can't wire money to Russia or Iran just like that), over the SWIFT protocol with an IBAN and BIC. Usually you pay a fee for the transfer and currency exchange - some banks abuse that, some are competitive.
So you chose to unbank yourself :)
I have transacted millions in crypto and wire transfers. Banking with crypto is like the 1970s - exorbitant fees. To do anything useful with it I have to offramp to fiat which drum rolls ends with a wire transfer.
I once wanted to lend money to my brother only to discover that my bank imposes monthly caps on money transfers "for your safety". Cryptocurrencies never do such dumb shit.
This seems unlikely, given that people buy houses with money transfers.
You are correct. Banks have many mechanisms for sending money from A to B, on the low end there’s Zelle, then there’s free inter bank transfers, then good old wire transfers (unlimited amounts, usually cost $25).
That's a default limit. I'm sure they will raise if you walk in and tell them you're going to transfer x amount out.
You said "go to your bank". I was thinking "walk into a bank branch" XD
I don't think I've ever wired money in my life. I guess I never needed to. And the few occasions I needed to send some money internationally, I've simply sent crypto, used Western Union, or something like PayPal or Revolut.
I find that mind-boggling. How did/do you pay rent? How do you get paid? Coming from Europe people use wiretransfers for pretty much everything over e.g. credit cards (obviously there are differences between countries but wire transfers are very common everywhere).
I send electronic payments all the time, just not payments big enough to exceed maximum transfer limits. For example, Coinbase might say max transfer for ACH of 5000 USD per day, for larger deposits use a wire transfer. I’ve never done the type of transfer that exceeds the maximum ACH limit.
Wiring isn’t that bad, you need to fill in some fields about the recipient account details and receiving bank. The annoying bit is that banks have inconsistent web portals with mediocre UX. So sometimes it can be frustrating to figure out how to enter the information.
I’ll admit that the crypto UX is faster with just entering a destination wallet address. It would be good if banks could adopt QR codes to provide similar experienfe.
Sometimes you get charged a fee, but many institutions will waive that (e.g. Schwab) if your balance is high enough.
Doesn’t make sense really though.
How do these people buy groceries or pay regular bills? Most places don’t accept crypto for payments.
If and when the whole world has moved to crypto payments I’m sure they’ll review it again. Until then the argument there are lots of people who have crypto and have not heard of / don’t know how to use a Visa card stretches credulity.
If the speculation in crypto is being fueled by crypto chasing non-fiat exits (as you imply wrt gambling payments), then isn't it silly to cut off that tap? Value is fungible, it shouldn't matter whether it's a Wikipedia donation or a "gambling payment".
Only where gambling is illegal and to illegal casinos. Legal casinos do not want the hassle with KYC, market volatility and the often slow transactions. And neither does the customers.
My understanding is that in the USA there are a lot of cases where gambling online is legal, but where it is illegal for banks to process transactions relating to those services. In such cases cryptocurrency is helpful, even though the wagering is not illegal, and the casino itself is not illegal.
There are also cases in my own country where cryptocurrency is very useful for gambling, with nothing illegal taking place.
Oh. Hi. I guess I'm named nobody. I've just been nobodying for many years. But nobody pays attention to me because they're all fascinated/horrified with what the finance bros are doing off chain. No one likes to read about some dude quietly using bitcoin to pay for things like VPSes, computer hardware (newegg), etc, the last 7 years. It's not as exciting so I don't exist.
Newegg does not accept Bitcoin for payment. They will allow you to pay via an intermediary who liquidates your Bitcoin and pays Newegg in dollars
Just for context, that's still 140 00$
> In the last financial year we received $130,100.94 worth of donations in cryptocurrencies.
At that take, I'm not sure if it covers the engineering effort to maintain it, accounting and legal work to handle it, and opportunity cost of whatever else they could be doing.
that was nowhere near the justification given
Doesn’t need to be. At most it’s a reason for Wikimedia to not care enough to say ‘no’ to the RfC.
I find many of the replies here fascinating. On one hand whenever there is talk about government regulating some industry or actor a large portion of commenter here reply that if you don't agree with the practice don't use them, no regulation needed. Now an organisation does exactly that, they decide that they don't want to use a "service" that they ethically disagree with, and lots of replies call it pointless virtue signalling. So how should people/organisations act when they disagree with certain practices/actors?
I dont think they really care about the environment. If they did, they would accept PoS or similar environmentally friendly cryptos. That way they would be promoting their use instead of the old inefficient PoW ones.
This is wrong. Caring about the environment doesn't require accepting different crypto. And certainly promotion isn't required either.
Maybe they prefer currencies that ought be under democratic control, rather than crypto scheme that are designed to be be controlled politically (which includes democratically).
This is an interesting line of thought. Which currency is more democratic: USD, or BTC/ETH?
With ETH for example, I can create a new EIP, and if the majority of users agree with it, the currency can evolve. For example see EIP-1559 adoption despite it going against miners best interests, or even EIP-721 which has led to profound changes in the way the network is now used. This is pretty much "majority rule" but obviously it is being driven primarily by developers and those with the technical knowledge needed to propose and shape these EIPs.
On the other hand, with USD (or any state currency) I have nearly zero chance of influencing its policy, inflation, and so on. The only option I have is to write to politicians and hope they take it further. If the politicians (governing body) in place do not currently agree with this policy despite a large (user) backlash, there is no way for users to "fork" the USD, and so they are forced to adopt whichever decisions are made by their current government and policy makers. This is especially true if you live outside the US (as I do), but are still required to use USD by virtue of working with US clients, US customers, and primarily USD-based payment systems (e.g. as Wikimedia is stepping closer toward with this change).
This is mostly just presented as a thought experiment in response to the idea that USD is far more democratic than an open source + decentralized currency.
Agree that this is an interesting line of discussion. I think you missed a few options of why USD are more democratic. You can also: - run for office - organize people politically
The open source point is important, but any individual crypto seems very hard to change once it is in place. Feels like it assumes you can predict how it will be used and what the consequences will be. The law isn’t easy to change but there is a clearly defined abs democratic process for doing so (assuming you are in a democracy).
> You can also: - run for office - organize people politically
I think parallels to this are also happening in crypto networks, e.g. a user deciding to participate more directly in Eth protocol governance by sitting in on R&D and core dev calls, joining EIP discussions, using merge testnets, and generally just becoming a sort of public figure within the Eth community.
(Also, this may go back to citizenship, I cannot run for US office if I am living in another country, but crypto currencies aim to be effectively borderless internet networks.)
> The open source point is important, but any individual crypto seems very hard to change once it is in place. Feels like it assumes you can predict how it will be used and what the consequences will be. The law isn’t easy to change but there is a clearly defined abs democratic process for doing so (assuming you are in a democracy).
There is also a pretty clear process for changing ETH, and it does change often[1]. Sometimes these changes are at the protocol level, requiring consensus among core developers (different client teams, protocol engineers) and a fork. Other times the changes are at the application level, like the EIP 721 standard that many wallets and smart contracts are now adding compatibility for due to user interest.
You seem to discard that in a democracy, one person should get one vote. In crypto, you vote with your wallet – due to network effects – so the richest/most powerful weight the most.
Not necessarily - this depends on the chain and protocol.
For example governance of ETH is off-chain, and there is no token voting. Developers come to a consensus and create new spec as a fork, clients and ecosystem may decide to follow that new spec and implement the changes (or they may fragment, as was the case of ETC).
It's disingenuous arguing. Free association for me, no cancelling for you, amounts to a plea for a get-out-of-Coventry-free card.
People like to be contrarian, or at least the replies a thread receives will mostly be from people who disagree with the thread's premise.
I think you made a great argument, if you don't agree with cryptocurrency, stop using wikipedia.
It is pointless virtue signalling because the primary argument for ending bitcoin donations is about energy usage, but the effect of ending bitcoin donations will have precisely zero impact on the amount of electricity used by the bitcoin network.
This isn't the same as when you boycott a company's products and it causes a loss of sales.
Accepting or spending Bitcoin increases its utility quadratically per participant (via the network effect).
Utility increases utilization, which increases fees, which incentivize mining.
It really is exactly the same thing as boycotting a company.
The majority of miner revenue is a subsidy given via inflation. It's effectively paid for by all bitcoin holders, and is decoupled from usage and fees. Fewer people transacting is going to make no difference. Miners aren't going to suddenly think "Oh, perhaps I should mine less now that these clowns at Wikimedia aren't taking donations."
This is the case now, but every halving shifts that proportion towards fees.
Correct, but miners are operating on the assumption of revenue now, and not 8 or 12 years down the line when transaction fees eventually exceed the block subsidy.
By that time, the network effect will be so large that Wikimedia will not be able to just ignore it to pacify a small group of whining overgrown children.
For those interested in charitable giving with crypto, I set up a decent-sized on-chain Donor Advised Fund with https://endaoment.org/ the end of last year. There are rough corners and it's still early days, but I'm able to give to basically any arbitrary 501c3 in the same way using a dapp interface now, which is pretty sweet. You can setup a DAF via crypto w/ either Schwab or Fidelity as well (and others I'm sure).
I also did a bunch of year end donations through https://thegivingblock.com/ which allows non-profits to easily receive donations via hundreds of different crypto assets and is pretty seamless for both parties (you fill in your tax info once, get an automated tax receipt letter, the receiving party gets automatic cash auto-conversion (if they want) and donor info).
Also, generally not tax deductible, but I'm a big fan of what https://gitcoin.co/ is doing with sybil resistant quadratic fund matching. Generally, not tax deductible, so I keep my donations small (using either zkSync or Polygon to save on fees) but for the latest GR13 funding round, top grants were getting up to 10:1 matching (mostly Ukraine crisis response campaigns - UNICEF got a whopping 37X match btw!) https://gitcoin.co/blog/grants-round-13-round-results-recap/
Thanks for these leads. I'm setting up a nonprofit at the moment and I'm definitely interested in receiving crypto donations. The question is whether to keep crypto accounts or always convert immediately to fiat like Wikimedia?
With the amount of volatility that most cryptos have, I think it makes more sense to convert to something stable unless your non-profit has a large treasury/flexible expense structure. If you do keep it in a stablecoin, there are some relatively low risk ways to get some yield on collected accounts, some are even 1-click, like this that gives a 9% APR on USDC: https://lite.instadapp.io/
Cool product, hope you get those smart contracts audited!
I agree it's pretty cool project. I don't have any relation to the team (except as an end-user) but of course the contracts have been audited: https://blog.openzeppelin.com/endaoment-audit/
I always find it weird when a charity or non-profit publically announces that they stop accepting certain forms of donations due to ideological reasons. It's a signal that the organization isn't particularly starving for donations. If you were planning to donate to Wikipedia any sum less than $130,100.94, remember that 70% of Wikipedians consider such donations to have no impact at all. So if you were about to donate $100k, for example, nobody at Wikipedia cares about such a tiny donation. So maybe donate that $100k to an organization that actually needs it instead?
I don't think there's anything weird about it. Accepting a form of payment increases demand for that form of payment. Not accepting a payment decreases the demand. In effect, wikipedia is paying the price of decreased donations to buy a decrease in the influence of cryptocurrencies. No different than spending money to advance a non-profit's goal, except that the money being "spent" is in lost potential revenue rather than distributed actual revenue.
The publicity of it is to establish an understanding that cryptocurrencies are entirely populated by scammers and their victims, and that ethical companies don't do business with scammers, do not accept money from scammers.
> In effect, wikipedia is paying the price of decreased donations to buy a decrease in the influence of cryptocurrencies.
Exactly! They have amassed so much money that they can afford to wage ideological crusades against things unrelated to their core mission. That's a clear signal that it's time to reduce donations to Wikipedia.
> No different than spending money to advance a non-profit's goal, except that the money being "spent" is in lost potential revenue rather than distributed actual revenue.
The difference is spending to advance Wikipedia's core mission, versus spending to advance random unrelated ventures.
> ethical companies don't do business with scammers, do not accept money from scammers.
Nope, that's not it, at all. If that were the case, they would have announced some kind of KYC initiative to identify scammers and refuse their donations. But they aren't targeting scammers specifically - scammers are still welcome to send their donations in USD, and Wikipedia will happily accept their donations. What they won't accept is donations in crypto, regardless of the origin of that donation.
I think this is a targeted action against scammers, because use of cryptocurrency alone is a sufficient signal that the sender is a scammer, to the point that it is worth disassociating with the entire platform.
> publically announces
That’s how RfCs work—they’re public by nature, so that people can comment. It’s hardly feasible not to then promulgate the outcome.
> they stop accepting certain forms of donations
They haven’t. This is a proposal through an RfC. The foundation may or may not accept it.
> organization isn't particularly starving for donations
Well it isn’t, so that’s a good thing. People should stop donating to the foundation for a while. Hopefully the bureaucracy will be slashed.
Thanks for the clarifications. I misread the title and assumed that the RFC had been passed.
The RfC is passed but the effect of that is to make a request. Imagine you and I were to form a committee to discuss, e.g., landscaping in municipal gardens: we might pass a motion to suggest planting different flowers, but that would amount only to a request to the gardeners/the competent authority.
Okay. I'm not familiar with Wikipedia politics so it seems I used incorrect term again.
Your confusing the Wikipedia community of users, which anyone is free to participate in, and have passed this RFC, with the Wikimedia Foundation, which accepts donations and runs the systems and networks that Wikipedia runs on.
https://networkcultures.org/cpov/2010/03/27/mayo-fuster-more...
Such hybrid and “community” driven systems are far from problem-free. But this one has created Wikipedia, which most people think is a good thing. Obviously it’s tricky to walk the line.
> It's a signal that the organization isn't particularly starving for donations.
That's not a conclusion that came to my mind. Despite all the hype, Bitcoin is still a niche payment system and basically everyone can use a more established payment method instead.
> basically everyone can use a more established payment method instead.
Are you hypothesizing that the amount of donations will not be reduced as a result of this decision? Even the person who wrote the proposal admitted that this decision would lead to less donations. Are you suggesting 100% of people who were going to donate with crypto are now going to donate the same amounts using traditional channels?
> I always find it weird when a charity or non-profit publically announces that they stop accepting certain forms of donations due to ideological reasons. It's a signal that the organization isn't particularly starving for donations.
It's as or more likely a signal that the cost of accepting those forms of donations is too high. Cost for non-profits can mean more than just currency, it can be things like ethics, morality, popularity, political stances, etc.
Exactly right. And note that this is done purely and openly for ideological reasons - there is no maintenance cost argument being made.
"cryptocurrencies provide safer ways to donate and engage in finance for people in oppressive countries"
Yet a bigger problem is that too much money is moved out of these countries by those in power and hamstered away in various global tax havens.
I recommend "Moneyland" for anybody wanting to learn more.
I am in the middle of Moneyland now after seeing it recommended here on HN. A fascinating and horrifying read that also provides some context to what is happening in Ukraine.
So Wikipedia doesn't accept crypto anymore. Who cares? They don't need it!
The Knowledge Standards Foundation does. We're making an open network of all the encyclopedias (http://encyclosphere.org). Contact us: info@encyclosphere.org
Disclosure: I was co-founder of Wikipedia, once upon a time, and the KSF is my project.
Ideological payment censorship is a known issue with digital payments, and the core so-what of BTC that has been lost in the cryptocurrency sales pitch somewhat. The first block has an anti-'08 bailout message in it for a reason.
These censorship use cases are slowly moving towards more possible mainstream familiarity and empathy, and in my opinion also moving towards impacting progressive activist groups with axes to grind and payment rails dependent on the targets of those activism.
When that eventually comes to a head, as it seems likely, then the real decision point on cryptocurrencies will occur.
Assange gets payments/donations cut off from all the major providers - ok, he's possibly a Russian asset, not a great personality fit for whistleblower empathy, did some shady/bad things, ok who cares.
OnlyFans almost gets its payment rails cut off by investors due to its core content - ok, I may not know camgirls/boys, but I can empathize with them a bit more and certainly don't like Investment Banks and Visa telling folks how to spend their evenings.
Now, taking a look at climate action groups, and wikis that try to leverage free and fair information for a public good. Also, not much has changed since 2008. The predatory financial behaviors still occur, maybe just called something differently - see Canada banning foreign purchases of homes. Depending on which side of the abortion debate you are on, large chunks of the country are moving in divergent directions on it. Unions in tech-y warehouse jobs have serious OPSEC concerns and are shifting over to Signal for coordination.
All of these causes and related groups rely on digital rails for payments, information sharing, and organization (Slack groups, Paypal accounts, GSuite free-ish emails, Signal groups etc). There is already a trend of building OPSEC programs for activist-y groups, and leveraging data science/FOIA for activist research. The McDonald's CEO was nabbed for this via a ~FOIA against the Chicago mayor. All of these causes' desired outcomes fundamentally oppose core tenants of corporate infrastructure, pending some major change. Climate activism especially comes to mind.
When the real conversations and possible anger actually start occurring in these groups, andthe real reactions from their counter-parties start occurring in public, and the fights over what gets into a wikipedia article occur in conjunction more so than already, a censorship-free payment rail comes into play. That means paper cash, cryptocurrency, or maybe some new tech. But I doubt Zelle or Venmo are safe at that point. I think the real so-what debate about crypto starts at that point.
Am I reading correctly that this is all cryptocurrencies, not just PoW? That's slightly surprising, although it probably simplifies things.
Mozilla is rejecting only PoW cryptos https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/reporting-back-on-moz...
They were only accepting PoW cryptocurrencies anyway. In future, if PoS crypto gains wide currency (ha), I assume the matter can be reopened.
Does it simplify things? That's kinda hard to imagine.
I find it annoying that all cryptocurrencies would found guilty-by-association when it is well known that not all cryptocurrencies damage to the environment.
> I find it annoying that all cryptocurrencies would found guilty-by-association when it is well known that not all cryptocurrencies damage to the environment.
If you read the responses in support of the proposal, you can clearly see that the majority of them are citing 'Environmental reasons and concerns' which that even has already been refuted to death.
Mozilla seems to have made the sensible decision to not allow PoW cryptocurrencies and to allow only eco-friendly cryptocurrencies. It is the mining that is doing the damage to the environment which that is the problem.
Guilt-by-association works all the time on people who want a blanket ban on anything they don't like, especially when there are bad eggs spoiling the bunch.
In response to these kind of stories, the comment sections online are always filled with crypto advocates upset about the organization not taking their money. This really makes clear who needs who. Crypto needs wikipedia much more than wikipedia needs crypto.
Wikipedia is not hard up for cash (if you earnestly believe their begging ads, you must be naive. Give me a break.) But crypto is hard up for legitimacy.
> if you earnestly believe their begging ads, you must be naive. Give me a break.
wow you are such an enlightened individual aren't you? Give me a break.
If you don't believe me, go read the financial documents they publish. This topic has been beaten to death innumerable times on this forum and others. They're sitting on a huge pile of cash, far more than they need to operate their already massively bloated organization for many years to come.
They earnestly do not need your funny money.
> They're sitting on a huge pile of cash, far more than they need to operate their already massively bloated organization for many years to come.
This is the most ignorant comment I've ever read on an org that relies on donations. Cash runs out my friend (shit happens, operations change and scale, bad decisions occur). It's not like they are a for profit business that can rely on other methods.
its not just the crypto-buffs. This is a purely ideological decision that actually goes against the original libertarian ideas behind wikipedia. Keeping BTC payments costs nothing to wikipedia, and it actually meshes with the original idea of BTC as "native internet money" which has not yet been refuted. Wikipedia and BTC are a good match because of their nonaligned, distributed web 1.0 nature . Wiki&banks are not, wiki&paypal is not. The reasoning behind this decision is purely ideological, and rightfully people should be worried. This will open the floodgates that will eventually lead to the destruction of npov. We have seen this happening so many times with social media and payment platforms that it is laughable to suggest it won't happen this time.
Occam's razor would suggest to do nothing, but ideological axes are being wielded. This will turn a lot of people off.
The 'original founding ideas' of wikipedia, whatever they may be, aren't relevant if they aren't actually encoded in the organizations rules. And since nobody can come up with a persuasive argument that wikipedia must accept crypto by wikipedia's own rules, this clearly isn't the case.
Without that, the 'founding ideas' are just ideas wikipedians used to have, and are far less relevant than the ideas wikipedians presently have. Their present views are evidenced by this vote, which crypto advocates are clearly upset about.
> Wikipedia has no firm rules
> Wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but they are not carved in stone; their content and interpretation can evolve over time. The principles and spirit matter more than literal wording, and sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making exceptions. Be bold, but not reckless, in updating articles. And do not agonize over making mistakes: (almost) every past version of a page is saved, so mistakes can be easily corrected
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
people who are looking for rules to manipulate perhaps should build their own projects
Absent rules to manipulate to force wikipedia to accept crypto, crypto advocates who want to get their way must rely on their powers of persuasion to influence opinions in the present. The opinions of founders years ago, whatever they might have been, aren't relevant.
They also oppose having ads on Wikipedia. Personally I don't see much difference between banners asking for donations and ads. I understand there are "bad" ads (privacy violating or ones causing conflict of interest), but not all of them are like this. Same with cryptocurrencies - some of them are "scam", but not all of them. It's strange that Wikipedia sees world as black and white.
If you make ads a meaningful revenue stream, you will sooner or later optimize your content so that people spend more time viewing ads. Money will find a way.
In this case you mean Wikipedia editors will start making their content more attractive to advertisers?
That or making articles purposefully structured so that the user has to jump around a few links and earn more ad views.
I'd much rather them having an old-style Google Adsense-type ad somewhere than their annual, 50%-of-the-screen guilt-tripping donations ad.
I couldn't disagree more. Those guilt-tripping donation ads are obnoxious, but I would much rather Wikipedia be an obnoxious beggar than sink so low as to be make themselves into corporate propagandists for hire. That would be much worse.
This is consistent with their negative attitude towards crypto-related Wikipedia content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_sanctions/Bl...
> A community discussion at the administrators' noticeboard has placed all pages with content related to blockchain and cryptocurrencies, broadly construed, under indefinite general sanctions, effective 14:43, 22 May 2018 (UTC).
Their existing model of soliciting donations via
“DEAR WIKIPEDIA READERS,”
got them over 150MM without crypto.
Their stance on banning crypto changes nothing on this front, and only serves to make themselves seem 'green'
haha, from the headline I thought this meant they would stop accepting new wiki pages about cryptocurrencies, and thought "huh, I guess it makes sense" :'D
"the tally is 232 to 94, or 71.17% in support of the proposal" So this decision is the result of a mere 326 Wikipedia users (contributors?)taking a vote.
I've been ignoring crypto for the most post but this is just dumb, they are turning away free money. It's not up to wikipedia to fix the problems of the world (take a hint mozilla). This is a pretty big red flag about flaws in Wikipedia's governance.
Even if it is 0.8% of their donations, it is still a lot. They are pretty direct with how drastic is for them to receive donations in order to survive. This decision is just dumb.
In the context of their yearly guilt tripping banners asking for money in a manner that sounds like Wikipedia is on the brink of death, this virtue signaling is disappointing.
Two very different things. The banner is set by the Wikimedia Foundation, while this is a vote by the community.
I'm surprised how many pro-cryptocurrency comments I see here on HN. I would expect people here to see through the hype and technobabble.
? Perform a really quick binomial test on pro-cryptocurrency comments and anti-cryptocurrency comments and you'll find that sentiment here is overwhelmingly anti. If you can't see that, then you just aren't looking. So what percentage of pro-cryptocurrency comments would make _you_ happy?
If you’re a charity in 1999 and people want to donate their Beanie Babies to you, accept them and sell them asap.
were they intimidated to accept crypto donations in the first place? have seen stories where companies are intimidated and threatened into accepting crypto as a payment option by groups
Beggars can't be choosers. Lame virtue signalling from a worn out platform with its best days long behind it.
The energy argument against crypto is total BS and just an attack from the legacy banking industry and their cronies.
I'm not a cryptobro, but this annoying ass attitude is gonna turn me into one
I wonder what would happen if crypto somehow managed to replace central banks and how the world would change
> I wonder what would happen if crypto somehow managed to replace central banks and how the world would change
My personal guess is that we would recreate most of the infrastructure on top, but with monetary policy now in the hand of a select few individuals instead of governments. The consequences for the world at large would be interesting to explore.
> but with monetary policy now in the hand of a select few individuals instead of governments
Bitcoin's monetary policy is fixed. It is in nobody's hand, but everybody who decides to run a validating node.
Monetary policy is controlled by central banks, which are privately owned. On paper, they're regulated by government, but in practice, politicians are easily bought, bribed or have their hands tied. The monetary policy is not decided by the people you elect into government.
> It is in nobody's hand, but everybody who decides to run a validating node.
Those nodes are literally owned by people. The wealthier the person, the more nodes they can run. Which is exactly how crypto took off; drug cartels mined it, dealt with it, making money both on selling the coins to buyers for cash and on selling the product to the buyers.
Large organizations and wealthy people, criminal or not, can and do control all proof of work (by controlling more workers) and proof of stake (by mining, purchasing, and holding more crypto). And because of the secrecy, we don't know who in many cases (ok... the various intelligence agencies might), and they aren't effectively regulated in any way.
All crypto has done is make it so the only requirement to gain wealth is to already be wealthy. This is far more direct of a relationship with crypto than with real currency, where you at least have to do actual work of some sort to make money.
Miners are not able to adjust the monetary policy of bitcoin, because attempting to do so causes a hard-fork, which would have them mining a chain which has no economic use in the real world.
The chain which everybody is using in the real world is the only one that matters. Miners are forced to mine blocks which adhere to the consensus of economic users. If some people run a million "Sybil" nodes, it makes no difference, because those sybils do not have any economic use, they're effectively ignored.
Bitcoin is not a democracy. There is a network effect which is now far too large and diverse for any small group to sway, and with time, the protocol will become further ossified to the point where it will literally be impossible to enforce changes, because there is no way to coordinate them globally to so many users.
The only control a majority of miners can have is that they can withhold transactions from the chain by orphaning any block they don't want to include. That is, they can cause denial-of-service for as long as they hold the majority of hash-power, but in doing so, they withhold revenue from themselves by failing to include paying transactions into blocks.
> Bitcoin's monetary policy is fixed. It is in nobody's hand, but everybody who decides to run a validating node.
My understanding is that bitcoins monetary policy can be changed through code, something a very small group is allowed to do in practice, even though theoretically it could be forked easily. Previous attempts at democratication of decisions have been prevented by various questionable tactics and by measures of share of computer power, something also held by very few people. Maybe this changed since I stopped paying attention to it, though.
> which are privately owned
Again, my understanding is that the reserve banks are some form of private entities but essentially owned by their governments (e.g., profits are transfered to them). Sites like the faq of the fed (https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm) and information about the german central bank seem to confirm that view so far.
> My understanding is that bitcoins monetary policy can be changed through code, something a very small group is allowed to do in practice, even though theoretically it could be forked easily. Previous attempts at democratication of decisions have been prevented by various questionable tactics and by measures of share of computer power, something also held by very few people. Maybe this changed since I stopped paying attention to it, though.
The monetary policy cannot be changed by modifying the code. If you modify the code of your own node, you simply create a different set of rules to the network, which might lead you to eventually end up on a forked chain which has no economic use.
The monetary policy is not only in the code, but it is in the network. Every user who validates blocks enforces the monetary policy. No miners are able to dive into another user's machine and update the code which their nodes are running. Bitcoin is not a democracy. It isn't most-votes-wins. If somebody were to propose adjusting the monetary policy, they need overwhelming consensus of all bitcoin users. Something which will get increasingly more difficult with passing time and adoption growth.
Changing the code to adjust the bitcoin issuance rate is effectively creating a shitcoin which integrates bitcoin's historical ledger into it. That's simple to do. Now you have the insurmountable task of convincing all bitcoin users to switch away from using the bitcoin they know and love to using your new shitcoin. This has been attempted and failed (Bitcoin Cash).
We seem to misunderstand each other, I am not talking about a miner making changes to their own mining code. There are, to my out-of-date knowledge, two fairly small groups with a lot of power within bitoin:
* The maintainers of the bitcoin core code
* The miners proving a large portion of the hashing power
These two groups have a large amount of centralised power. Last time I was involved with bitcoin the maintainers were essentially five people for example.
The network majorly runs the core client in various forms [1] by far the largest portion even runs the newest, or at least last two major releases. If those two groups decide to change the monetary policy via the source code of bitcoin core your options are basically to take your losses and fork the official chain or go with it.
But as I mentioned, I am out-of-date on my bitcoin knowledge, so these things might have changed.
> If somebody were to propose adjusting the monetary policy, they need overwhelming consensus of all bitcoin users.
I don't believe that is true, you just need consensus by hashing power and maybe harassing/ddosing power [2], otherwise you risk them sabotaging and damaging your new network too much to recover.
edit: I just read your other response to better understand your point instead of just trying to make mine clearer. It seems you are of the opinion that the consent of most economic participants, especially end users, is required to make that change. Which, obviously, is in contrast to my hypothesis that most people will follow whatever the current core version of bitcoin does as long as the primary hashing power of the system agrees.
I wonder if that's a dispute that could be settled with data/arguments at all, or if that's just something we have to disagree on.
[1] https://bitnodes.io/nodes/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3jj2hf/bitcoin_xt_...
wikipedia doesn't need the money anyways (any more money)
Wikipedia is on a knife edge. It can flip quickly. I'm not sure what they are doing to keep it stable, but this is a bad sign.
This should not be up to a vote. Wikipedia is there to be an encyclopedia, not have opinions on currency.
People should be prepared for when Wikipedia becomes the enemy.
F-Droid, DDG, Cloudflare all flipped at points.
The problem is if Wikipedia treats themselves like a democracy with no strong constitution and legal system once these decisions on morals start, we all know where they end up, the same as Twitter.
Wikipedia flipped a long time ago. My local language's wikipedia is horrifically run by people deleting virtually any new content based on their own interpretation of rules, effectively turning away newcomers, and the English-language Wikipedia has a lot of articles with anything but NPOV content (and edit wars looming the moment you add other, non-popular information of a subject, even if sourced).
Wikipedia still is a good source for general-purpose information on unpolitical topics, but the moment even the slightest amount of controversy exists around a lemma, it's unreliable and unusable.
I just vouched your comment.
In return (not really), wondering if you could give me a little more detail on F-Droid 'flipping'. Because this is news to me.
F-Droid rejected Gab. A lot of nazi sympathizers and free speech absolutists disagreed with that move. That’s all there is to it.
By their own words they are political - "F-Droid is taking a political stance here."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20466730
They should get points for admitting they are political I guess? Not sure.
Obviously it started something, there have been a few small issues since.
But I'd like to see how much time is wasted on talking compared to coding since.
The lowbrow who can't code will say words like Nazi which holds back the people who contribute to society by construction. Gay marriage was because of coders not activists.
This is what Wiki should fear.
I'm very happy to see we are now in the "then they fight you" stage :).
Let's see who wins.
Sometimes an idea opposed by many is really just a bad idea.
It's definitely an idea that caught some traction, else you're in the "first they ignore you" stage.
The "fight you" stage is when people perceive it as a threat. And it already needs to be big enough to be considered a threat. Can still be a bad idea of course. We'll see.
It sounds like Wikipedia isn’t really wanting for money.
Meh. I’ve donated in the past, but will just look for different charities in the future.
Non news article imo.
It's Wikipedia's loss. If they had actually took bitcoin donations since they added it in 2014 they would have appreciated quite a bit.
Like, if they continued to hold those bitcoins, speculating in the market, rather than feed those funds into running Wikipedia? You don't usually donate to charities so they can speculate with that money.
From the linked page only 0.08% of revenue came from cryptocurrency. It's likely that without that 0.08% margin Wikipedia could still be kept running (which is part of the reason why taking cryptocurrency donations was removed).
>You don't usually donate to charities so they can speculate with that money.
Similarly one wouldn't want your donation to just sit somewhere reducing in value due to inflation. If you donated $100 and then later when Wikipedia actually needed the money they were able to sell your donation for $1000, your donation was able to do more for them than if they had just immediately sold it.
Is Wikimedia hoarding cash? If so, I’d hope that they would have some kind of money management in place (adhering to the same ethical standards as for payments, as otherwise this move would be quite hypocritical); if not, inflation does not matter.
As of June 31st 2021 they had $86.8 million of cash which made up about 36% of their total assets.
What matters isn't the absolute or relative number compared to total assets, but rather their yearly cashflow.
Having a buffer of a few months worth of their monthly operational budget in the currency that most of their spending will be in just seems like common sense and is also very different from the concept of an endowment (where return on an investment is supposed to pay for ongoing expenses).
I don’t know about Wikipedia, but many none for profit organization have strict guidelines about investment.they usually can either spend the money on operation, capex, or if they have to keep some reserve they need to use very safe investment like government bonds.
Saying that most likely Wikipedia has to convert the bitcoin to cash before the end of the year. They cannot keep crypto as reserve or investment
The law is alot more flexible.
I’m in the non profit space. There isnt a single thing they would have had to do with crypto donated to them. So yeah they could have ridden it up.
Even investing rules and guidelines from the state and fed exempt donated assets from them completely.
Non profits just lack an incentive to learn how to do anything well, and are often staffed by people that have never had to consider market forces.
> Non profits just lack an incentive to learn how to do anything well
Being involved in a project that would benefit from being a formalized German no-profit entity, there is another issue: the laws around non-profit entities are vague and at the same time there are almost no lawyers specializing in non-profit laws and regulations. The major ones (think of Greenpeace and the likes) all have their in-house counsel, and the countless smaller ones just wing it and hope the tax man never comes for an audit.
in the US there are plenty of non-profit lawyers for US formalized non-profits
I am speaking from a US perspective
The tricky issue arises when there are interdisciplinary issues that require other kinds of legal counsel involved as well just to get the signoff on how to conduct a transaction
appreciation would've be meaningless if they'd been spending it for operations (as is their wont).
A nonprofit doesn't need to liquidate and spend all of its assets by the end of the year. Since bitcoin was only a small percentage of donations it's likely they wouldn't have needed to liquidate any. They may have wanted to liquidate some of it to realize some gains as cryptocurrencies' value can be volatile.
Would a non-profit in the US be legally able to accept donations and then hodl them in case they appreciate in value? I think a Corp doing that in the UK would lose it's non-profit status.
The environment? Then run a lightning node, or use Cardano, problem solved. Why are we trowing the baby out with the bathwater?
Can Lightning exist without the Bitcoin blockchain?
When will technical solutions reduce blockchain energy usage enough for the anti-blockhain people to find it acceptable?
I don‘t think "the anti-blockchain people" is as homogenous a front as you might imagine it.
Some object on the grounds of PoW mining and its incentive structure; others due to their tendencies to disproportionately accumulate wealth to early adopters; yet others due to widespread predatory and/or misleading marketing. I‘m probably forgetting several other reasons here.
Personally, anything based on proof-of-scarce-resource is pretty much a no-go (unless it would suddenly provide benefits more than outweighing the damage it does), but definitely not only that.
What is the alternative to proof-of-scare-resource? I only trust money or gold because you cant pick it from the trees with almost 0 effort.
Wikipedia will no longer receive any donations from me. Works for me. It has become pretty left leaning anyways.
If environmental sustainability is an issue why don’t they shut down their servers? Think of all the electricity they could save. An online encyclopaedia is not essential for human survival.
Wikipedia has gone down the toilet. Too much political correctness, leftists, and sensitive snowflakes.
Ah, another Wikipedia policy designed to exclude sex workers from financial services.
I notice this wasn't even raised in the RFC.
The way to include them is to make it legal and forbid the banks to not accept money from them, not to create alternative lawless universe.
> make it legal and forbid the banks to not accept money from them
Just like the cannabis industry! Oh wait...
Yeah, the same is for cannabis industry.
Lacking petulant restrictions isn't equivalent to lawlessness.
How would a sex worker cash out their crypto if all major cryptocurrency exchanges do KYC?
I don’t see how this would do that. Nor how it is Wikimedia’s gift to give, it isn’t a financial corporation last I checked.
What? Cryptocurrencies are somehow the saviour of sex workers?
Can you expand?
This expands a bit. Banks don't like to bank sex workers.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/05/bitcoin-a-lifeline-for-sex-w...
So they excluded all the new accounts and unregistered voters, and only got 70% of the vote for reasons that are all solved with education.
Thats… medieval.
> reasons that are all solved with education
Reasons like "risk to the movement’s reputation for accepting cryptocurrencies", solvable with education, sure.
People who use cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and other related stuff all have a vested interest in it succeeding. That has led to a lot of people who have annoyingly strong opinions about it.
Things like "educating others" by cryptobro-splaining all over things is not going to solve the reputation of the movement.
What's happening here is that you're seeing a peek into a different bubble. In your bubble, only a lack of education would be a valid reason to avoid bitcoin.
In the bubble of wikipedia users who care enough to touch this poll, it is far less one-sided. I assure you all of those users who voted for or against have more than an average amount of education on the issues too, it's not like you can be the sort of person who votes on a wikipedia RFC without _also_ being a very online person.
Yes, exactly like that reason.
Linked to the other reason about their environmental impact which is not relevant to most crypto currencies.
And the problem of supposed implicit endorsement of the perceived environmental impact, which changes when people understand which crypto currencies to use or how to use them or what specific problems to solve or advocate against.
All solved with education.
If people that know this cant be a source then who can be a source, in your opinion?
> their environmental impact which is not relevant to most crypto currencies.
It's very relevant to "most" cryptocurrencies by value, though - Bitcoin and Ethereum are still PoW, and these two make up most of the market anyway, especially when including other coins based on their chains, like Tether and USDC.
> ...vested interest in it succeeding. That has led to a lot of people who have annoyingly strong opinions about it.
Cryptobro-splainer here. Having been involved from the beginning, I can tell you that detractors (especially vocal ones) are far more invested than proponents. Imagine declaring bitcoin dead in 2014, and then again the next year, and then the next... and while this is going on you can't help but calculate how much potential profit your mistake has cost you. You are also going to be struggling with envy, and your offended sense of justice. What would such an experience do to a person? Well, it makes them very upset - and desperate for something that would shield their ego. The whole environmental impact cover is a perfect example: the papers people point to are always poorly executed, using outdated data and poorly justified guestimation... always without acknowledging the most important part - "relative to what?" But that isn't really the point, the point is to provide a moral justification for the costly shortsighted position.
I don't see any detractors claiming that cryptocurrencies will be dead in any timeframe. They are arguing that they are useless and ponzi schemes, but it's very well known that market and people can stay irrational way longer than any bet.
You must not be paying attention then, because many detractors have made the claim repeatedly. It would be funny if it wasn't clearly the result of a predictable feedback loop. I'm really not interested in skylining one particular individual, but if you are genuinely interested in understanding what is happening: pick any one of the many tech writers appearing in the multitude of obituary compilations, then pull up their twitter timeline and observe their increasingly venomous attacks on cryptocurrency over the years.
With regard to them being useless: that argument falls apart very quickly when challenged. Unless you actually believe that software agents won't cause a massive economic shift, and that a weaponized financial system is really a good thing that brings stability. As far as it being a "ponzi scheme", a pump and dump, a tulip mania, a beanie-baby fad, etc... Just look at the time scale for a big clue as to why such an argument is laughable.
> As far as it being a "ponzi scheme", a pump and dump, a tulip mania, a beanie-baby fad, etc... Just look at the time scale for a big clue as to why such an argument is laughable.
To look at why this counter argument is laughable you simply have to do a bit of research into actual ponzi schemes:
* Bernie Madoff ran a ponzi scheme for ~18-28 years
* Reed Slatkin, 15 years
* Dona Branca, 14 years
* Tenka Ikka no Kai, 14 years
It's difficult to actually classify crypto, but it certainly falls into greater fool theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory).
I know enough about the Madoff point to know that it can't be argued in good faith. Not unless you are willing to describe everyone who ever got looked into by the SEC, and then not prosecuted, as a scammer engaged in a scheme. Because that time scale requires the inclusion of investigations that found no fraud. Now if you are willing to expand your definition of fraud to include the whole of Wall St activity - then I definitely won't argue otherwise, sure - bitcoin is just like that except less concentrated and more transparent.
The larger point being that any plausible definition for fraud applied to crypto actually undermines the legitimacy of the modern financial system to a much greater degree.
None of those have any claims about short-term BTC value.
lol, yeah - Newsweek's claims about the Internet in the 90s had nothing to do with the short-term value... they'll likely be proven right in a thousand years! Take that, peanut-gallery - it was a fad after all.
Yawn. A ton of those do not claim any predictions related to value, just state some facts and opinions about it. For example: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-is-just-a-crappy-tech-stock/
Google "crypto bubble".
The moment you understand your web project as a "movement" is the moment you need to take a step back and carefully consider which track you are really on. Very few good things ever came from organisations that self-described as a movement, but we got plenty of crime and sometimes genocides out of movements.
It turns out when you do allow anyone on the internet to sign up to your community to vote on what it does, you get the FCC net neutrality ballot stuffing, so I can't blame them
Why was that an option?
What was the voting results otherwise?
So many questions
You can count it up yourself without the exclusions, voting on wikimedia is just editing the talk page to include your comment with the word Oppose/Support and a signature.
The raw counts are:
Strongly support: 35 (+1 with no icon, not sure if this got counted)
Support: 192 (+1 with no icon)
Weakly support: 4
Weakly oppose: 5
Oppose: 86
Strongly oppose: 20
So the "raw" figures are 233 to 111 or 68%, still a clear majority and not that different from the 72% "anti-astroturfing" figure.
I'd also point out that voting on wikipedia is also non-binding.
Thanks! That makes me more comfortable with how they normalized the data. It wasnt like a “FCC Net Neutrality” result at all