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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

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> 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.

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