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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

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and their super-fast blockchain manages 70tps ... compare hundreds of tps on other non-PoW blockchains, e.g. private Ethereum

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

#302
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Core values is just a vague concept. A lot of things considered backwards or even downright evil today used to be core values not too long and vice versa, e.g. racial segregation, LGBT, women's right, etc.

It’s used to be widely accepted that all light travelled through a luminiferous aether that encompasses the entire universe. Then we learned about special relativity. Societies learn and adapt.

Strongly disagree. Science is based on fact and whether models fits observations.

Politics and core values is more like fashion and there is no right or wrong.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem : science advance is about "is" statements, and core values are "ought" statements.

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

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And what moral reasons could those possibly be for Wikipedia?

If you click the link, you'll find out :)

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

#305
post #43
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accepting cryptocurrencies is not neutral neither. Neutral hardly exists.

accepting bitcoin is as legal and regulated as banks and paypal. as if banks don't spend billions in pointless air travel and (empty in past 2 years) concrete highrises. When WP goes down the ideological rabbit hole everyone loses. maybe someone will follow up with an RFC to remove banks Then paypal

Accepting bushels of corn is also legal, but why would Wikipedia want to get into the business of accepting them?

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

#307
I've been ignoring crypto for the most post but this is just dumb, they are turning away free money. It's not up to wikipedia to fix the problems of the world (take a hint mozilla). This is a pretty big red flag about flaws in Wikipedia's governance.

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

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s used to be widely accepted that all light travelled through a luminiferous aether that encompasses the entire universe. Then we learned about special relativity. Societies learn and adapt.

Strongly disagree. Science is based on fact and whether models fits observations. Politics and core values is more like fashion and there is no right or wrong. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem : science advance is about "is" statements, and core values are "ought" statements.

More often than not, comments such as this come across as justification for being a jerk, while other people are trying to make the world a better and more inclusive place for others. The world can’t effectively operate well without a shared sense of right and wrong.

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

#309
post #48

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…

Wikipedia used BitPay, the most widely loathed of all cryptocurrency payment processors - https://debitpay.directory/anti-bitcoin/ - and required prospective donors to provide an obscene amount of personal data: https://bitpay.com/464448/donate 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…

This is a flaw in a service. Turning down free money isn't wise for a service that needs charity (from whatever sources) to continue existing.

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

#310

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…

There was a vote, the majority (70%+) of those that voted voted to stop. I don't know why other arguments would matter

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.

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