Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote
meta.wikimedia.org
meta.wikimedia.org
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.
They are a non-profit only in the most technical sense these days, but have never been a charity.
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.
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/05/11/vitalik-buterin-say...
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.
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.
Yes.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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 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.
See https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
Look up block lattice tech - it's powerful stuff.
- Carl Sagan
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.
Access to the world's knowledge and people defend their ignorance like this, smh.
Name two?
Its probably one of the most used cryptocurrencies for normal transactions, as most darkweb marketplaces use it.
For some abnormal definition of "normal", ok.
Source: https://www.monero.how/how-long-do-monero-transactions-take
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
So. Block lattice tech: real or Malarkey?
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.
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).
> 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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?
There were significant numbers of pro-crypto people sharing it to get people to vote no.
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.
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.
I can't in good conscience ignore what I know because there are other things I don't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
„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?
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.
- 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.
> 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 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?".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
You don't get points for what *can be* but *what is*.
2018: Only criminals use it
2020: Only fringe websites use it
2022: Only small countries use it
2024: ????
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kudos Wikepedia. This world would be a better place if more did the same and honored their core values at whatever cost.
Then we learned about special relativity. Societies learn and adapt.
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.
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/
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.
EDIT: added the word “too” to clarify my meaning.
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.
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.
This could as well be orchestrated by fiat enthusiasts.
The website is not as neutral as it was in its heyday, and that reflection comes in this headline alone.
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 )
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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’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.
Why would being physically in a bank be needed?
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.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct...
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.
Seems that crypto is just a technical solution to socio-political issues that plague parts of the world.
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!
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.
There are also cases in my own country where cryptocurrency is very useful for gambling, with nothing illegal taking place.
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
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).”
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
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
> 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?
I don't see how energy efficient currencies and allowing safer ways for people in oppressive countries to donate is ideological
WP:NPOV is about article content, not payment systems.
> 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.
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.
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
Neutral hardly exists.
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'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...
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.
Yes, that’s known as KYC laws, which are required if you’re a payment processor of any kind.
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.
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.
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.
> “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#
which are less than 1% of the yearly transaction volume according to Chainalysis lol
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/31/eu-parliament-vot...
[1] https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/kraken-to...
[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.
You could buy fully modifiable/refundable first class tickets and use them as free options to bet on the crypto in question
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
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.
Sorry, I know, off-topic.
This isn't the same as when you boycott a company's products and it causes a loss of sales.
Utility increases utilization, which increases fees, which incentivize mining.
It really is exactly the same thing as boycotting a company.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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/
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Occam's razor would suggest to do nothing, but ideological axes are being wielded. This will turn a lot of people off.
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 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
wow you are such an enlightened individual aren't you? Give me a break.
They earnestly do not need your funny money.
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.
> 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).
“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'
The energy argument against crypto is total BS and just an attack from the legacy banking industry and their cronies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
* 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_...
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.
In return (not really), wondering if you could give me a little more detail on F-Droid 'flipping'. Because this is news to me.
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.
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.
Let's see who wins.
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.
Meh. I’ve donated in the past, but will just look for different charities in the future.
Non news article imo.
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
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.
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.
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
>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.
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).
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.
I notice this wasn't even raised in the RFC.
Just like the cannabis industry! Oh wait...
Can you expand?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/05/bitcoin-a-lifeline-for-sex-w...
Thats… medieval.
What was the voting results otherwise?
So many questions
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.