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Wikipedia Bitcoin

Wikipedia May Be Next To Drop Support For Crypto (techrepublic.com) 56

Posted by BeauHD from the dominoes-are-falling dept.
New submitter Ol Olsoc writes: "When the Mozilla Foundation took to Twitter on New Year's Eve to announce it was going to begin accepting cryptocurrency donations, it likely didn't think about potential blowback from one of its founders, but that's what it got," reports TechRepublic. "In response, Mozilla has said it's pausing cryptocurrency donations." Wikipedia is now discussing whether it should stop accepting Cryptocurrency as well.

Mozilla co-founder Jamie Zawinski has some strong feelings about the matter, [telling TechRepublic]: "Anyone involved in cryptocurrencies in any way is either a grifter or a mark. It is 100% a con. There is no legitimacy." I cannot disagree with him. Zawinksi tweeted scathing criticism of a Mozilla tweet late last month promoting cryptocurrency donations. They first started accepting bitcoin for donations in 2014.

Here's where Wikipedia comes in: "Shortly after Zawinski's tweet and Mozilla's change of heart, Wikipedia editor GorillaWarfare opened a request for comment on Wikimedia's meta-wiki calling for the organization to stop accepting cryptocurrency donations, citing Zawinski's tweet and Mozilla's reaction," reports TechRepublic. "Zawinski has read the Wikipedia talk page about the discussion and says he hopes it indicates the beginning of a trend."

He added: "I'm actually a bit surprised (and pleased) to see that the conversation seemed to be going in an anti-cryptocurrency direction. Good for them."

Further reading: Wikipedia Faces Pressure to Stop Accepting Crypto Donations on Environmental Grounds (CoinDesk)
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Wikipedia May Be Next To Drop Support For Crypto More

Wikipedia May Be Next To Drop Support For Crypto

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  • If your shitty currency is so scared and useless that it cannot compete without running to mama, it does not deserve to exist.

  • If they're running off donations, why should they care the form it takes. All they do is sell the crypto to whatever form they want.
    • It's not really a lot out of what they get TBH:

      The total $ value of donations made in cryptocurrencies

      In the last financial year we received $130,100.94 worth of donations in cryptocurrencies. Crypto was around 0.08% of our revenue last year, and it remains one of our smallest revenue channels.



      The total number of donors who opted to donate cryptocurrency

      In the last financial years we had 347 donors who used the cryptocurrency option.



      Which cryptocurrencies were donated (preferably with information about total value and number of donors using each)

      In the last financial year the most used cryptocurrency was Bitcoin. We have never held cryptocurrency, and spot-convert donations daily into fiat currency (USD), which doesnâ(TM)t have a significant environmental impact.

      More interesting to me is that on these figures they seem to be pulling in way over $130M a year in donations. Which seems to be quite a lot for a website notionally run by volunteers.

      • Wait till you hear about their 'Knowledge Equity Fund' which sprays about 5 million around various organisations that have no connection to wikis but look good on Twitter. First on the list: paying Jordanian journalists to teach other media in the Middle East to be less racist. Not exactly what their "holy shit, we're about to go bust help us keep the servers on or it'll be your fault" fundraising leads you to think. Actually the hosting bill is about the same as their KEF: about 5 million.

    • Re:Donations are donations (Score:5, Insightful)

      by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Monday January 17, 2022 @07:26PM (#62182579)

      Most important when you rely on donation is a good public image. If it is one day someone analyzes the blockchain and figures amounts of those cryptofunds were dirty (e.g. ransomed from a hospital and people died), the bad publicity can kill them as a charity. Crying "How could we know" is not going to save them. It's not worth.

      • When you think about it, they should just have a blanket "No ransomware murder donations" policy. Maybe put a checkbox.

      • > Most important when you rely on donation is a good public image. If it is one day someone analyzes the blockchain and figures amounts of those cryptofunds were dirty (e.g. ransomed from a hospital and people died), the bad publicity can kill them as a charity. Crying "How could we know" is not going to save them. It's not worth.

        this isnt true. every dollar that flows around the world flows through corruption, theres no such thing as innocent money, whether its overt crime like cartels to covert crime l

    • Tales from the crypt. Something's are older but seems dam popup screens aren't as I type this. Crypto was just for idea or basic help for those with business ideas that didn't want stock market or formal public known business. Privacy is useful some go crazy if they find you they try to steal things, have you killed, mess with other things it's weird and crazy so safer with no stock market or not with Bitcoin but verified services and limited or safe screened networks that keep in mind struggles on affor

  • E = MONEY? (Score:3)

    by The New Guy 2.0 ( 3497907 ) on Monday January 17, 2022 @06:36PM (#62182457)

    All cryptocurrecy requires energy in order to make, and in many places the energy bill exactly cancels the cryptocurrency gains, plus or minus a walk of randomness.

    What a waste...

    • Re:E = MONEY? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Monday January 17, 2022 @07:29PM (#62182591)

      Only some do. Saner ones use proof of capacity (mining wastes disk space), proof of stake (mining earns interest), and my favourite: proof of coverage (you mine by providing network connections).

      The last one is used eg. for LoRaWAN: these are ridiculously low-bandwidth (300b-5kbps) ridiculously low-power very long range (several to tens of kilometers) that are useful for eg. soil sensors, meteo stations, etc.

      For all of these, energy costs are minimal.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nyet ( 19118 )

        > proof of stake (mining earns interest), and my favourite: proof of coverage (you mine by providing network connections).

        Neither of those are even remotely related to "mining".

      • I can't say that I understand these types of mining. From what I could gather, they are even more dodgy than bitcoin and amount to a pump and dump operation by their founders. Would like to hear more though.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        They all waste resources. Proof of disk space made hard drive prices spike, until people realized it wasn't going to make them rich. A few people got cheap NAS boxes out of it.

        Proof of stake is in theory low energy, but in practice people waste energy by spooling up more machines than they need for actual productive work. People don't like the concept either, because it makes it too easy to earn crypto coins and they don't want the masses getting in on their business.

        Proof of coverage just wastes network re

        • Proof of coverage just wastes network resources and energy. Not as much, but still waste.

          Except for the side effect of providing network coverage to actual users.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by nyet ( 19118 )

      > All cryptocurrecy requires energy in order to make

      Seriously, man, just stop posting.

    • Still, the irony of Mozilla co-founder Jamie Zawinski complaining about wasted electricity makes me want to fucking gag.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Moryath ( 553296 )
        By the same token, Molly White is a transphobic bitch, but in this case it's a "blind pig finds acorn" situation and she made a good proposal...
        • It's just virtue signaling. They could propose planting a tree for every x bitcoin donations (and actually run carbon negative) but that wouldn't hit the right notes.
    • A lot of anti-cryptocurrency sentiment nowadays seems to be of the religious variety. I can understand hesitancy approaching crypto years ago when it was just establishing itself. But nowadays it's institutional. It's well-established and solving real problems. And, frankly, it's not going anywhere.

      To be not only hesitant but actively anti-crypto today, in 2022, can't be much more than just a mark of faith. Mindlessly repeating long-debunked FUD about environmental impact and black market use is the litu

      • Cryptomining today does have a negative environmental impact and to claim otherwise is a lie. Cryptocurrency itself is not inherently environmentally harmful, but current cryptocurrencies rely on power intensive operations to function, and those rely on buring fossil fuels. Sure, ethereum could shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, miners could use only excess renewable energy and stop operating when there is no excess, miners could relocate to oil well-heads that flare unwanted methane and use that f

        • I would argue that it is inherently environmentally harmful. The only reason you can't do a 51% attack on the Bitcoin blockchain is because it is impossible to get a medium-sized country's worth of electricity at your disposal to conduct the attack.

      • Religious, yeah, sure.
        The whole 24GW of constant electricity use is fake ?
        No. It's not.
        It just wastes this huge amount of power. For no value.

    • Cryptomoney is exactly like cancer.
      A good thing turned to exponential growth.
      It just spreads uncontrollably until it takes up all of the resources just for growing more.

  • I don't know why any institution takes these "angry" online protest votes seriously. If I was Wikipedia, I would just hire some PR firm to post positive and non commital replies on the platforms and keep cryptos as an option. Unless all of theses lazy couch potatoes actually got off their ass to protest in person or stop using Wikipedia, they don't really commit to the cause.

  • Ol Olsoc isn't new (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    He's an ol fart.

  • abusing the word crypto (Score:5, Funny)

    by at10u8 ( 179705 ) on Monday January 17, 2022 @08:06PM (#62182693)
    Can we go back to the days when "crypto" meant a means of preserving value in communications channels instead of a non-governmental fiat currency?

  • It's 13 years (Score:4, Insightful)

    by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Monday January 17, 2022 @08:46PM (#62182793)
    The first cryptocurrency appeared in 2009. It was quickly revealed to be good fo speculating, for money laundering, for extortion, for scamming, and for consuming vast amounts of electric power. Thirteen years and many cryptocurrencies later, cryptocurrencies remain good for those five activities and - anything else? They are certainly not much good for what they were ostensibly created: as replacements for government-endorsed fiat currencies. Should we wait longer to fiat other uses for them, or has the time arrived to denounce them as what they are?

    • Some people get burned because they did not do their research and remember people money launder and scam with paper currency as well.

      Many are not mined and work wonderfully for cross border payments. If you are cross border buying services, products or sending money to loved ones it makes life a bit easier with fast transfers and low fees. For collecting donations internationally and transferring to USD is a pretty ideal use case.

      • Ah well, generally paper currency is "that which is laundered" or "that which is obtained via a scam."

        Crypto, on the other hand, is used as an instrument of laundering, and also as the hook to scam people out of actual money.

        This difference does seem significant.

    • Thirteen years and many cryptocurrencies later, cryptocurrencies remain good for those five activities and - anything else?

      Yeah. It's good at storing value long-term. That volatility makes it not good for short-term storage of value is perhaps obvious. But if you bought Bitcoin during any one of its first 12 years of existence and held onto it, your value would not only still be there but would have increased.

      Fiat currencies generally lost value, some more than others. That's called inflation. Actually the central banks that manage fiat currencies typically target a certain amount of loss of value every year. It's intentiona

    • Thirteen years and many cryptocurrencies later, cryptocurrencies remain good for those five activities and - anything else?

      If you aren't aware of other uses for crypto then you haven't been paying attention.

      Here are some interesting ones with actual use cases:

      District0x - decentralized marketplaces
      BAT - replace ads that pay google with ads that pay you
      Orchid - decentralized VPN
      Filecoin - decentralized file storage
      Mana - Decentraland - decentralized metaverse
      Theta - decentralized video streaming
      Vechain - supply chain traceablilty
      Civic - identity verification
      IOTA - Internet of things - micro transactions - fast and free

      Not all cr

  • Now I understand even more why Mozilla keeps destroying Firefox little by little. These people are morons.

    I just finished reading https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik... [wikimedia.org] and more ignorance. It is like what century are these people living in.

    There are enough stable coins out there that could easily be converted to USD on payment. No issue there. If you are accepting USD payments online, you are using energy. Many popular cryptocurrencies are not mined so there is no difference in energy usage. They should jus

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • If you assume that Wikipedia/Mozilla will immediately convert their cryptocurrency donations to USD, the effect will be to put downward pressure on the price. Which will lower the incentive to mine the currency, thus reducing energy wastage.

  • "The more you think about it, the more “it’s early days!” begins to sound like the desperate protestations of people with too much money sunk into a pyramid scheme, hoping they can bag a few more suckers and get out with their cash before the whole thing comes crashing down."

    I posted this quote to twitter without context from https://blog.mollywhite.net/its-not-still-the-early-days/
    Everyone knew it's crypto. If I just say it's a ponzi scheme without mentioning crypto everyone knows what I'

  • ... if the money-desperate Wikipedia is backing off of it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      Meh, they've got plenty of cash. Donate to the Internet Archive instead. You'll get a better return on your investment.

  • Privacy (Score:3)

    by quenda ( 644621 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2022 @03:32AM (#62183453)

    No way am I going back to HTTP. How much money can they really need to keep the HTTPS service running?

  • Using the term "cryptocurrency" is misleading, as bitcoin has been deemed property in the US and Canada. The energy use thing has been debunked a thousand times over when compared to other forms of property exchange.
    • Are they even assets? I bought the mrs a tiny amount of bitcoin just to show her how much of a scam it is. Within 3 days it has lost 10%. Something that unstable doesn't make for good 'currency'

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