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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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