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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

#381

Post by roamerz »

phs318u wrote: post #368
roamerz wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s vague at all. You know as a person when something internally doesn’t sit right. But I do agree that one’s core values are necessarily ’good’ by other’s standards but they are still core values. For example I have stopped eating at my favorite fast food restaurant because they supported(ed) BLM on their front page. I am an ALM guy because I believe that giving one color preference over another is th…

At the risk of going massively off topic and triggering a flame war, I always thought of movements like BLM in this way - “until lives matter too, then all lives clearly don’t matter”. I.e. if you support ALM you must also support LM, by definition. EDIT: added the word “too” to clarify my meaning.

You are correct of course. In fact the whole ALM thing is just a reactionary middle finger to BLM.

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

#382

Post by malba »

roamerz wrote: post #263
indymike wrote: post #249

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.

Yup core values. More often than not sticking to them come with some kind of cost. Kudos Wikepedia. This world would be a better place if more did the same and honored their core values at whatever cost.

I mean, it's literally a fraction of a percent of their revenue stream, according to what the Wikimedia Foundation says in the threads below. It seems like a tiny sacrifice for a small benefit, to me.

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

#384

Post by kingcharles »

lhl wrote: post #24

For those interested in charitable giving with crypto, I set up a decent-sized on-chain Donor Advised Fund with https://endaoment.org/ the end of last year. There are rough corners and it's still early days, but I'm able to give to basically any arbitrary 501c3 in the same way using a dapp interface now, which is pretty sweet. You can setup a DAF via crypto w/ either Schwab or Fidelity as well (and others I'm sure).…

Thanks for these leads. I'm setting up a nonprofit at the moment and I'm definitely interested in receiving crypto donations. The question is whether to keep crypto accounts or always convert immediately to fiat like Wikimedia?

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

#385

Post by tablespoon »

throwawaw741741 wrote: post #363
tablespoon wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Since many years ago. The cryptocurrency movement has always been very ideological. > so has the anti-crypto so we are at an impasse No on both counts. Also, the "cryptocurrency movement" isn't just regular ideological, it's particularly ideological. Cryptocurrency wasn't made to fill any practical need, it was made to fit certain peculiar ideological obsessions.

You're wrong. It was definitely made to fill a practical need: avoiding the middle man. Why do you think it's so popular in corrupt authorarian thirld-word countries? And if you live in the US/Europe, you'll get there eventually.

> You're wrong. It was definitely made to fill a practical need: avoiding the middle man.

No I'm not. Also, with cryptocurrency you still have middlemen. To whom are you paying fees to clear your transactions on your dog-slow, unscalable, extremely inefficient network?

And why do these systems have the negative characteristics I just mentioned? The peculiar ideological obsessions I referred to earlier.

> Why do you think it's so popular in corrupt authorarian thirld-word countries? And if you live in the US/Europe, you'll get there eventually.

I'll believe it when I see it. And frankly, those use cases are nonsensical. How exactly is someone supposed to convert their Syrian Pounds into cryptocurrency, and after they do that, what use is it? It's not like it's an actual currency that you can buy things with. It's mainly speculative investment surrounded by enormous hype.

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

#386

Post by ketzu »

sparkie wrote: post #373
ketzu wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin's monetary policy is fixed. It is in nobody's hand, but everybody who decides to run a validating node. My understanding is that bitcoins monetary policy can be changed through code, something a very small group is allowed to do in practice, even though theoretically it could be forked easily. Previous attempts at democratication of decisions have been prevented by various questionable tactics and by measur…

> My understanding is that bitcoins monetary policy can be changed through code, something a very small group is allowed to do in practice, even though theoretically it could be forked easily. Previous attempts at democratication of decisions have been prevented by various questionable tactics and by measures of share of computer power, something also held by very few people. Maybe this changed since I stopped paying…

We seem to misunderstand each other, I am not talking about a miner making changes to their own mining code. There are, to my out-of-date knowledge, two fairly small groups with a lot of power within bitoin:

* The maintainers of the bitcoin core code

* The miners proving a large portion of the hashing power

These two groups have a large amount of centralised power. Last time I was involved with bitcoin the maintainers were essentially five people for example.

The network majorly runs the core client in various forms [1] by far the largest portion even runs the newest, or at least last two major releases. If those two groups decide to change the monetary policy via the source code of bitcoin core your options are basically to take your losses and fork the official chain or go with it.

But as I mentioned, I am out-of-date on my bitcoin knowledge, so these things might have changed.

> If somebody were to propose adjusting the monetary policy, they need overwhelming consensus of all bitcoin users.

I don't believe that is true, you just need consensus by hashing power and maybe harassing/ddosing power [2], otherwise you risk them sabotaging and damaging your new network too much to recover.

edit: I just read your other response to better understand your point instead of just trying to make mine clearer. It seems you are of the opinion that the consent of most economic participants, especially end users, is required to make that change. Which, obviously, is in contrast to my hypothesis that most people will follow whatever the current core version of bitcoin does as long as the primary hashing power of the system agrees.

I wonder if that's a dispute that could be settled with data/arguments at all, or if that's just something we have to disagree on.

[1] https://bitnodes.io/nodes/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3jj2hf/bitcoin_xt_...

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

#387

Post by ryan_lane »

topranks wrote: post #209
ithinkso wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that but it was not a vote for Wikipedia users nor it was a vote for Wikipedia donors. It was a vote for Wikipedia and what payment do they accept - it has no impact for you as an user, and as a donor - they made their choice how and what they want to be donated to them It's an interesting topic in on itself, about rejecting donations. On one hand they are donations to you so you should be greatful but o…

It’s a “community” vote so it’s very much for users (readers and editors). Anyone could participate.

Readers have essentially never been given a vote. The votes are by editors.

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

#388

Post by namdnay »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #355
namdnay wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the fact that if you cancel they give you USD means it's not "paying with bitcoin". it's "converting bitcoin to USD then paying with USD". it's a pretty fundamental difference - Expedia aren't making any bets on the stability of BTC, as they are when they accept EUR or USD or GBP or whatever

It's not about the bets. If BTC can transparently be converted to USD or GBP then it does actually offer value to the person using BTC to buy services. I'm not sure why you're so adamant about insisting that Expedia isn't buying into "bets" or whatever. Having parts of a transaction happen off-chain doesn't constitute a repudiation of cryptocurrency. Not everyone is a Bitcoin maximalist. Demonstrating it has value fo…

The problem isn’t that there is a fiat step, the problem is that only one side of the transaction is in crypto. Expedia aren’t “accepting crypto” - they’re sending you to someone who will swap your crypto for cash and then taking the cash. The fact that refunds are in dollars means there is no fundamental difference with just swapping the crypto yourself before booking

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

#389

Post by pnt12 »

roamerz wrote: post #381
phs318u wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of going massively off topic and triggering a flame war, I always thought of movements like BLM in this way - “until lives matter too, then all lives clearly don’t matter”. I.e. if you support ALM you must also support LM, by definition. EDIT: added the word “too” to clarify my meaning.

You are correct of course. In fact the whole ALM thing is just a reactionary middle finger to BLM.

ALM sounds like, but is not, a superset of BLM.

BLM opposes violence against black people. ALM doesn't oppose violence against all people - it opposes BLM.

Agree with BLM actions or not, but ALM is an whataboutism distraction, not a legitimate movement.

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

#390

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

davidgerard wrote: post #301
asterix_pano wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have no desire to waste time and brain on "look up Block lattice tech" and I know that you tend to "take one for the team" in this kind of matter.

So. Block lattice tech: real or Malarkey?

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