The Wikimedia Foundation's acceptance of cryptocurrency donations • Hacker News Board

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation's acceptance of cryptocurrency donations

#31

Post by ashwagary » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #21

rosndo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin revolutionized the drug trade, there’s huge value there. People living in repressive societies like Russia are now able to safely buy weed thanks to cryptocurrencies enabling Hydra. Before these people would risk prison to get a little stoned, but now they can just buy GPS coordinates on the internet and pick up their drugs without ever interacting with anyone. It’s not a coincidence that most of the users co…

Yes the broad enablement of crime and criminality is regressive.

Bitcoin kept Wikileaks going for years after Visa, Matercard, and Paypal cut off service for no reason.

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation's acceptance of cryptocurrency donations

#32

Post by arcticbull » Tue, Feb 01, 2022, 1:59 AM UTC

ashwagary wrote: post #31

arcticbull wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes the broad enablement of crime and criminality is regressive.

Bitcoin kept Wikileaks going for years after Visa, Matercard, and Paypal cut off service for no reason.

Crypto in general has an edge case use as a payment mechanism of last resort in certain very limited circumstances - however Bitcoin isn't the one anyone should be using because it's public and transparent making anything you write up there prosecution futures. Not to mention the insane volatility, long transaction times, climate impact and high fees.

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation's acceptance of cryptocurrency donations

#33

Post by ashwagary » Tue, Feb 01, 2022, 11:22 AM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #32

ashwagary wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin kept Wikileaks going for years after Visa, Matercard, and Paypal cut off service for no reason.

Crypto in general has an edge case use as a payment mechanism of last resort in certain very limited circumstances - however Bitcoin isn't the one anyone should be using because it's public and transparent making anything you write up there prosecution futures. Not to mention the insane volatility, long transaction times, climate impact and high fees.

>Not to mention the insane volatility, long transaction times, climate impact and high fees.

Not correct, transactions on bitcoin's lightning network take 1-2 seconds to complete and cost a fraction of a penny.

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation's acceptance of cryptocurrency donations

#34

Post by arcticbull » Tue, Feb 01, 2022, 7:43 PM UTC

ashwagary wrote: post #33

arcticbull wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto in general has an edge case use as a payment mechanism of last resort in certain very limited circumstances - however Bitcoin isn't the one anyone should be using because it's public and transparent making anything you write up there prosecution futures. Not to mention the insane volatility, long transaction times, climate impact and high fees.

>Not to mention the insane volatility, long transaction times, climate impact and high fees. Not correct, transactions on bitcoin's lightning network take 1-2 seconds to complete and cost a fraction of a penny.

Not quite. Because you still need to open a channel and probably eventually close a channel on the L1. Doing so for everyone on earth would cost 75 years, the entire block reward and about a half a trillion dollars. Double if you plan to close. So yeah it's fast so long as nobody's using it, but if they ever (god help us) start, you'll be putting in your payment requests like a Soviet phone line. Then, you have to deal with the quadratic routing complexity which would likely make it completely untenable past a certain number of users. This is why even the Chivo and Strike wallets don't actually use LN - they have a couple of their own nodes, that they don't allow external peering with, and only in certain circumstances. Mostly they just use MySQL.

Either way, it's not relevant because everyone uses centralized exchanges.