Live data from Hacker News

Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote

meta.wikimedia.org

241–250 of 401 posts

Re: Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote

#241

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 t…

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.

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.

Re: Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

> 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…

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.

Re: Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote

#243

Wikipedia is on a knife edge. It can flip quickly. I'm not sure what they are doing to keep it stable, but this is a bad sign. This should not be up to a vote. Wikipedia is there to be an encyclopedia, not have opinions on currency. People should be prepared for when Wikipedia becomes the enemy. F-Droid, DDG, Cloudflare all flipped at points. The problem is if Wikipedia treats themselves like a democracy with no stro…

Wikipedia flipped a long time ago. My local language's wikipedia is horrifically run by people deleting virtually any new content based on their own interpretation of rules, effectively turning away newcomers, and the English-language Wikipedia has a lot of articles with anything but NPOV content (and edit wars looming the moment you add other, non-popular information of a subject, even if sourced).

Wikipedia still is a good source for general-purpose information on unpolitical topics, but the moment even the slightest amount of controversy exists around a lemma, it's unreliable and unusable.

Re: Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

Re: Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote

#245
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

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.

Re: Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote

#246
post #14

So they excluded all the new accounts and unregistered voters, and only got 70% of the vote for reasons that are all solved with education. Thats… medieval.

> reasons that are all solved with education Reasons like "risk to the movement’s reputation for accepting cryptocurrencies", solvable with education, sure. People who use cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and other related stuff all have a vested interest in it succeeding. That has led to a lot of people who have annoyingly strong opinions about it. Things like "educating others" by cryptobro-splaining all over things is not…

The moment you understand your web project as a "movement" is the moment you need to take a step back and carefully consider which track you are really on. Very few good things ever came from organisations that self-described as a movement, but we got plenty of crime and sometimes genocides out of movements.

Re: Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote

#247
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> NPOV is a fundamental principle of Wikipedia and of other Wikimedia projects. > Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, nor a web directory.

That applies to article content, not stuff like this RFC.

Maybe an example would be clearer:

OK: The community doesn't like cryptocurrency, so decides not to accept it for donations.

NOT OK: The community doesn't like cryptocurrency, so turns the Bitcoin article into a hit-piece that only covers criticisms.

Re: Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote

#249

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 anythi…

> 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.

Re: Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote

#250
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know nothing about wiring money to Ukraine You go to your bank and ask them to start a wire transfer. The recipient’s bank will provide the instructions. You can even do this entirely online.

> You go to your bank and ask them to start a wire transfer. Haha, or, I can just click a single link from a donation page and send ETH from the wallet in my browser directly to the organization that I want to support, which I did in the case of Ukraine. No need to log in to any third party website, and the transaction was finalized in ~10 seconds with negligible fees.

I also did this for Ukraine with BTC.
Post reply on HN