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Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote

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

#251
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

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

#253
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 scanned a qr code, entered an amount and clicked pay in my banking app. It automatically converted the amount from my local currency to UAH. Negligible or no fee (can't recall and can't check right now).

Seems that crypto is just a technical solution to socio-political issues that plague parts of the world.

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This is an interesting line of thought. Which currency is more democratic: USD, or BTC/ETH?

With ETH for example, I can create a new EIP, and if the majority of users agree with it, the currency can evolve. For example see EIP-1559 adoption despite it going against miners best interests, or even EIP-721 which has led to profound changes in the way the network is now used. This is pretty much "majority rule" but obviously it is being driven primarily by developers and those with the technical knowledge needed to propose and shape these EIPs.

On the other hand, with USD (or any state currency) I have nearly zero chance of influencing its policy, inflation, and so on. The only option I have is to write to politicians and hope they take it further. If the politicians (governing body) in place do not currently agree with this policy despite a large (user) backlash, there is no way for users to "fork" the USD, and so they are forced to adopt whichever decisions are made by their current government and policy makers. This is especially true if you live outside the US (as I do), but are still required to use USD by virtue of working with US clients, US customers, and primarily USD-based payment systems (e.g. as Wikimedia is stepping closer toward with this change).

This is mostly just presented as a thought experiment in response to the idea that USD is far more democratic than an open source + decentralized currency.

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

> 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…

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.

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

#257
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It turns out when you do allow anyone on the internet to sign up to your community to vote on what it does, you get the FCC net neutrality ballot stuffing, so I can't blame them

Why was that an option? What was the voting results otherwise? So many questions

You can count it up yourself without the exclusions, voting on wikimedia is just editing the talk page to include your comment with the word Oppose/Support and a signature.

The raw counts are:

Strongly support: 35 (+1 with no icon, not sure if this got counted)

Support: 192 (+1 with no icon)

Weakly support: 4

Weakly oppose: 5

Oppose: 86

Strongly oppose: 20

So the "raw" figures are 233 to 111 or 68%, still a clear majority and not that different from the 72% "anti-astroturfing" figure.

I'd also point out that voting on wikipedia is also non-binding.

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

I think this is a targeted action against scammers, because use of cryptocurrency alone is a sufficient signal that the sender is a scammer, to the point that it is worth disassociating with the entire platform.

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

#259

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…

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 ce…

> 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:

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).”

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

#260
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Wikimedia hoarding cash? If so, I’d hope that they would have some kind of money management in place (adhering to the same ethical standards as for payments, as otherwise this move would be quite hypocritical); if not, inflation does not matter.

As of June 31st 2021 they had $86.8 million of cash which made up about 36% of their total assets.

What matters isn't the absolute or relative number compared to total assets, but rather their yearly cashflow.

Having a buffer of a few months worth of their monthly operational budget in the currency that most of their spending will be in just seems like common sense and is also very different from the concept of an endowment (where return on an investment is supposed to pay for ongoing expenses).

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