RFC: Stop Accepting Cryptocurrency Donations | Hacker News Reader

RFC: Stop Accepting Cryptocurrency Donations

meta.wikimedia.org

18 pointsabbe9811 comments

From the article

> In the last financial year the most used cryptocurrency was Bitcoin. We have never held cryptocurrency, and spot-convert donations daily into fiat currency (USD), which doesn’t have a significant environmental impact.

Every Proof-of-Work system consumes energy, whether you make transactions on them or not (a graveyard of barely used POW blockchain systems that are all still being mined prove this).

So really, this is just symbolism politics...

Yeah, the spot-conversion itself guarantees at least one transaction that needs to be mined into a block, which implies all of the energy consumption that it takes to mine a single block, paid up front immediately. (On top of the energy consumption of the transaction that resulted in the donation as well.)

They'd almost have a stronger case if they explicitly were holding on to the cryptocurrencies without transacting them as a rainy day fund, and their plans to minimize energy usage were to sell the wallet (private key) all or nothing in an off-chain exchange with no on-chain transactions to complete the sale.

That still doesn't solve the massive energy usage of the transactions that "donated" those funds into the wallets in the first place. It sequesters some amount amount of transactions in theory, briefly while things aren't moving in that specific wallet, but doesn't solve for the massive future energy needs of whatever the next person expected to transact with that wallet either.

> Yeah, the spot-conversion itself guarantees at least one transaction that needs to be mined into a block, which implies all of the energy consumption that it takes to mine a single block, paid up front immediately. (On top of the energy consumption of the transaction that resulted in the donation as well.)

Transactions per se do not have any notable "energy cost". The block would have been mined whether there are transactions to include in it or not, and adding a transaction does not measurably increase the energy cost of mining the block. If a fee is included then this slightly increases the amount of energy miners are willing to spend to obtain that fee, but transactions fees at this point are trivial compared to the fixed block rewards, and more than offset by the fact that they are selling the bitcoins immediately upon receipt and thus putting downward pressure on the price.

Stop donating to Wikipedia altogether. Its future is not in any way in jeopardy and donations don't seem to be doing much.

Why are they not doing some epic awesome global mesh or new web browser or hiring 100 paid researchers for the highest voted topics?

Shouldn't they have their own educational TV show? A bird call and plant identifying app that takes you to the article?

If they're as secure as people think they are, why are they not doing all kinds of random stuff like that?

If Wikipedia is doing fine, there's a lot of other places where a "Bring free information to the world" would benefit everyone.

Good question. Would be great if money was spent on stuff like that. From what I can see donations are paying for nothing but the comfortable administrative jobs at their foundation.

> The Wikimedia Foundation currently accepts cryptocurrency donations in currencies including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum, as explained on the "Other ways to give" page. I propose that we stop accepting cryptocurrency donations.

Here we go again with Bitcoin, PoW === All cryptocurrencies.

So all cryptocurrencies are Proof-of-Work and non-Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies don't exist today? Perhaps XRP, Nano, Stellar, Solana, Algorand, and Hedera are all destroying the environment and are slow for payments?

I mean I don't even like the hype around cryptocurrencies, but the main reasons presented by this RFC for not using them are quite weak and completely outdated. Yawn.

They aren't saying those are all the currencies that exist, they are saying those are the ones they currently accept.

The question they are asking is specifically "should we continue to accept these" and not "should we accept a bunch of new ones instead" which seems to be the conversation you're trying to have.

Anyway though you've only addressed one of the three points. Even if the second one can be dismissed through proof of work magic or whatever the first and third points are still relevant and strong.

> Even if the second one can be dismissed through proof of work magic or whatever the first and third points are still relevant and strong.

Nope. Paragraphs 1 and 3 have absolutely nothing to do with the current limitations and reasons as to why cryptocurrency donations are bad and should not be accepted. After all that is the point of the whole argument. Reasons like 'it will make us look bad' is not only terribly weak but it is a guilt by association and irrelevant to the cryptocurrency and the technology itself.

Given that they agree with Mozilla's reasons for dropping them whilst also repeating the same environment cases in the paragraph 2, it is heavily motivated by the second point.

BitPay accepts regulated stablecoins such as USDC, USDP, etc. What is so predatory or such and 'extremely risky investment' about them? I don't see how you can use that as a ponzi or even solely as an investment. Not only the environmental concerns argument (point 2) has been refuted to death too many times, using that as a reason to dismiss cryptocurrency donations on the basis of three PoW coins is again fallacious.

USDC is not regulated in any meaningful sense. There is no actual regulation for stablecoins, it doesn't exist yet. All they have are attestations (pinky promise) and a distinct lack of audits

Attestations are not "pinky promises". They are third party verifications of the data:

https://www.ispartnersllc.com/blog/defining-attestation-assu...

Moreover, there's no need for private organizations to adopt the toxic neuroticism that deems anything not under the supervision of a single government authority (e.g. the Federal Reserve system) to be like a contagion to be avoided.

This kind of strategy seems to be based on a zero-risk cognitive bias, rather than a rational cost-benefit analysis. Over-reacting to risk can be just as destructive as under-reacting.

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