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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
- 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?".
> - 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 )
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"?
This is great news, it is pretty pointless to use cryptocurrencies at all anyway since for Wikipedia:
> Crypto was around 0.08% of our revenue last year, and it remains one of our smallest revenue channels.
Remember that Wikipedia is one of the top 10 websites on the planet, I'm also assuming that other websites trying to accept crypto have even smaller percentages rendering cryptocurrencies as payment useless, not to mention damaging to the environment.
What is really happening is that nobody is using it for payments at all, rather just holding crypto coins and hoping they'll go up and speculating on the price.
This is the real reason they received so few donations. I've only ever donated to them through Brave's Attention Tokens [1], so I never realized they use BitPay, but it really is intrusive.
Charitable giving with crypto is just getting off the ground
As tax considerations with crypto are just getting off the ground
So you basically have this wide polar extreme of:
A) People using crypto and thinking there are no taxes
B) And entrepreneurs moving their premines to their own non-profits for massive tax breaks and exemption
leaving existing non-profits just waiting
People in A) move slightly towards the center year over year as reality catches up to them and more become loaded with appreciated assets or just have an inventory of crypto at all times
People close to B) are also loaded with assets and more likely to contribute to other non profits
Its better for a non profit to keep the door open and have the payment rails available. Large contributions could happen at any time. At the end of the day, money talks, pretty much all non profits figure it out when a donor wants to donate any large asset, including in crypto
> As tax considerations with crypto are just getting off the ground
This is very not true. Buying and selling anything has very clear tax implications. It's more that enforcement is slow, and people are willingly breaking the law because of it. Here's a good Twitter conversation explaining the situation:
> 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).”
> nobody is using it for payments at all, rather just holding crypto coins and hoping they'll go up
The above statement is false.
I prefer to use cash and crypto to prevent my expenses from being tracked (although I absolutely am not avoiding any taxes). I pay cash, not crypto when I want weed (sadly it's still illegal in most of the places). I rarely hold more than $100 worth so don't care about where is the rate going. I presume I'm not unique.
> What is really happening is that nobody is using it for payments at all
[Citation needed]
Over the past years I've been able to book flights, shop hardware, get hotels and rental cars, renew my domain, pay for my server with cryptocurrencies.
So this is not great news at all, a totally inconsequential and pointless move for signaling virtue (look at the arguments given), which is contrary to wikipedia's aim to be neutral
> So this is not great news at all, a totally inconsequential and pointless move for signaling virtue (look at the arguments given), which is contrary to wikipedia's aim to be neutral
WP:NPOV is about article content, not payment systems.
How does that make a difference? As I understood it, every individual would still have to do a regular on-chain transaction, it's only if you later realize you actually wanted to donate more than you did that this could be useful because then you avoid the full transaction fee. Or if you let it run over years without settling and do a yearly donation, though I'm not clear on the implications there.
Or, if the on-chain parties are just Wikipedia and a few big payment service providers to avoid that everyone has to do the setup individually, you've basically reinvented paypal credits or, less evil-ly, liberapay.
As of March 11, close to $100 million. According to a deputy minister in Ukraine:
> “In a situation like this, where the national bank is not fully operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers, to make it very quick and get results almost immediately.”
This is crypto’s second largest use case, behind as a means for illegal activities. Crypto is easier to send in extreme situations than fiat currencies.
There just isn't the incentive to use cryptocurrency to donate to Wikipedia. For some other kinds of payments, such as gambling payments, cryptocurrency is a popular option.
> There just isn't the incentive to use cryptocurrency to donate to Wikipedia.
Sure there is. A lot of people have lots of value tied up in crypto, a very liquid asset. It’s also easy to send. I know nothing about wiring money to Ukraine, but I know how to donate to Ukraine organizations that accept crypto. If crypto is a small part of your revenue stream, maybe it’s because you haven’t nurtured it as a donation channel.
If the speculation in crypto is being fueled by crypto chasing non-fiat exits (as you imply wrt gambling payments), then isn't it silly to cut off that tap? Value is fungible, it shouldn't matter whether it's a Wikipedia donation or a "gambling payment".
Only where gambling is illegal and to illegal casinos. Legal casinos do not want the hassle with KYC, market volatility and the often slow transactions. And neither does the customers.
Oh. Hi. I guess I'm named nobody. I've just been nobodying for many years. But nobody pays attention to me because they're all fascinated/horrified with what the finance bros are doing off chain. No one likes to read about some dude quietly using bitcoin to pay for things like VPSes, computer hardware (newegg), etc, the last 7 years. It's not as exciting so I don't exist.
I find many of the replies here fascinating. On one hand whenever there is talk about government regulating some industry or actor a large portion of commenter here reply that if you don't agree with the practice don't use them, no regulation needed. Now an organisation does exactly that, they decide that they don't want to use a "service" that they ethically disagree with, and lots of replies call it pointless virtue signalling. So how should people/organisations act when they disagree with certain practices/actors?
I dont think they really care about the environment. If they did, they would accept PoS or similar environmentally friendly cryptos. That way they would be promoting their use instead of the old inefficient PoW ones.
Maybe they prefer currencies that ought be under democratic control, rather than crypto scheme that are designed to be be controlled politically (which includes democratically).
It is pointless virtue signalling because the primary argument for ending bitcoin donations is about energy usage, but the effect of ending bitcoin donations will have precisely zero impact on the amount of electricity used by the bitcoin network.
This isn't the same as when you boycott a company's products and it causes a loss of sales.
For those interested in charitable giving with crypto, I set up a decent-sized on-chain Donor Advised Fund with https://endaoment.org/ the end of last year. There are rough corners and it's still early days, but I'm able to give to basically any arbitrary 501c3 in the same way using a dapp interface now, which is pretty sweet. You can setup a DAF via crypto w/ either Schwab or Fidelity as well (and others I'm sure).
I also did a bunch of year end donations through https://thegivingblock.com/ which allows non-profits to easily receive donations via hundreds of different crypto assets and is pretty seamless for both parties (you fill in your tax info once, get an automated tax receipt letter, the receiving party gets automatic cash auto-conversion (if they want) and donor info).
Also, generally not tax deductible, but I'm a big fan of what https://gitcoin.co/ is doing with sybil resistant quadratic fund matching. Generally, not tax deductible, so I keep my donations small (using either zkSync or Polygon to save on fees) but for the latest GR13 funding round, top grants were getting up to 10:1 matching (mostly Ukraine crisis response campaigns - UNICEF got a whopping 37X match btw!) https://gitcoin.co/blog/grants-round-13-round-results-recap/
Thanks for these leads. I'm setting up a nonprofit at the moment and I'm definitely interested in receiving crypto donations. The question is whether to keep crypto accounts or always convert immediately to fiat like Wikimedia?
With the amount of volatility that most cryptos have, I think it makes more sense to convert to something stable unless your non-profit has a large treasury/flexible expense structure. If you do keep it in a stablecoin, there are some relatively low risk ways to get some yield on collected accounts, some are even 1-click, like this that gives a 9% APR on USDC: https://lite.instadapp.io/
I agree it's pretty cool project. I don't have any relation to the team (except as an end-user) but of course the contracts have been audited: https://blog.openzeppelin.com/endaoment-audit/
I always find it weird when a charity or non-profit publically announces that they stop accepting certain forms of donations due to ideological reasons. It's a signal that the organization isn't particularly starving for donations. If you were planning to donate to Wikipedia any sum less than $130,100.94, remember that 70% of Wikipedians consider such donations to have no impact at all. So if you were about to donate $100k, for example, nobody at Wikipedia cares about such a tiny donation. So maybe donate that $100k to an organization that actually needs it instead?
I don't think there's anything weird about it. Accepting a form of payment increases demand for that form of payment. Not accepting a payment decreases the demand. In effect, wikipedia is paying the price of decreased donations to buy a decrease in the influence of cryptocurrencies. No different than spending money to advance a non-profit's goal, except that the money being "spent" is in lost potential revenue rather than distributed actual revenue.
The publicity of it is to establish an understanding that cryptocurrencies are entirely populated by scammers and their victims, and that ethical companies don't do business with scammers, do not accept money from scammers.
> In effect, wikipedia is paying the price of decreased donations to buy a decrease in the influence of cryptocurrencies.
Exactly! They have amassed so much money that they can afford to wage ideological crusades against things unrelated to their core mission. That's a clear signal that it's time to reduce donations to Wikipedia.
> No different than spending money to advance a non-profit's goal, except that the money being "spent" is in lost potential revenue rather than distributed actual revenue.
The difference is spending to advance Wikipedia's core mission, versus spending to advance random unrelated ventures.
> ethical companies don't do business with scammers, do not accept money from scammers.
Nope, that's not it, at all. If that were the case, they would have announced some kind of KYC initiative to identify scammers and refuse their donations. But they aren't targeting scammers specifically - scammers are still welcome to send their donations in USD, and Wikipedia will happily accept their donations. What they won't accept is donations in crypto, regardless of the origin of that donation.
> It's a signal that the organization isn't particularly starving for donations.
That's not a conclusion that came to my mind. Despite all the hype, Bitcoin is still a niche payment system and basically everyone can use a more established payment method instead.
> basically everyone can use a more established payment method instead.
Are you hypothesizing that the amount of donations will not be reduced as a result of this decision? Even the person who wrote the proposal admitted that this decision would lead to less donations. Are you suggesting 100% of people who were going to donate with crypto are now going to donate the same amounts using traditional channels?
> I always find it weird when a charity or non-profit publically announces that they stop accepting certain forms of donations due to ideological reasons. It's a signal that the organization isn't particularly starving for donations.
It's as or more likely a signal that the cost of accepting those forms of donations is too high. Cost for non-profits can mean more than just currency, it can be things like ethics, morality, popularity, political stances, etc.
I am in the middle of Moneyland now after seeing it recommended here on HN. A fascinating and horrifying read that also provides some context to what is happening in Ukraine.
So Wikipedia doesn't accept crypto anymore. Who cares? They don't need it!
The Knowledge Standards Foundation does. We're making an open network of all the encyclopedias (http://encyclosphere.org). Contact us: info@encyclosphere.org
Disclosure: I was co-founder of Wikipedia, once upon a time, and the KSF is my project.
Ideological payment censorship is a known issue with digital payments, and the core so-what of BTC that has been lost in the cryptocurrency sales pitch somewhat. The first block has an anti-'08 bailout message in it for a reason.
These censorship use cases are slowly moving towards more possible mainstream familiarity and empathy, and in my opinion also moving towards impacting progressive activist groups with axes to grind and payment rails dependent on the targets of those activism.
When that eventually comes to a head, as it seems likely, then the real decision point on cryptocurrencies will occur.
Assange gets payments/donations cut off from all the major providers - ok, he's possibly a Russian asset, not a great personality fit for whistleblower empathy, did some shady/bad things, ok who cares.
OnlyFans almost gets its payment rails cut off by investors due to its core content - ok, I may not know camgirls/boys, but I can empathize with them a bit more and certainly don't like Investment Banks and Visa telling folks how to spend their evenings.
Now, taking a look at climate action groups, and wikis that try to leverage free and fair information for a public good. Also, not much has changed since 2008. The predatory financial behaviors still occur, maybe just called something differently - see Canada banning foreign purchases of homes. Depending on which side of the abortion debate you are on, large chunks of the country are moving in divergent directions on it. Unions in tech-y warehouse jobs have serious OPSEC concerns and are shifting over to Signal for coordination.
All of these causes and related groups rely on digital rails for payments, information sharing, and organization (Slack groups, Paypal accounts, GSuite free-ish emails, Signal groups etc). There is already a trend of building OPSEC programs for activist-y groups, and leveraging data science/FOIA for activist research. The McDonald's CEO was nabbed for this via a ~FOIA against the Chicago mayor. All of these causes' desired outcomes fundamentally oppose core tenants of corporate infrastructure, pending some major change. Climate activism especially comes to mind.
When the real conversations and possible anger actually start occurring in these groups, andthe real reactions from their counter-parties start occurring in public, and the fights over what gets into a wikipedia article occur in conjunction more so than already, a censorship-free payment rail comes into play. That means paper cash, cryptocurrency, or maybe some new tech. But I doubt Zelle or Venmo are safe at that point. I think the real so-what debate about crypto starts at that point.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Deleted Comment
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.
- 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 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?".
> 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.
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.
2018: Only criminals use it
2020: Only fringe websites use it
2022: Only small countries use it
2024: ????
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This could as well be orchestrated by fiat enthusiasts.
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.
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.
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 )
Yes.
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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.
> 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.
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?
Yes, that’s known as KYC laws, which are required if you’re a payment processor of any kind.
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).”
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.
[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
WP:NPOV is about article content, not payment systems.
Neutral hardly exists.
https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/
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.
> “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#
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.
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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.
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/
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.
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.
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?
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.