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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

#391

Post by mandmandam »

bb88 wrote: post #369
mandmandam wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Block lattice tech is not Bozo the clown, but I won't stop you believing whatever you like.

All ponzi schemes start with smart people. The more complicated it is, the more "magical" it becomes for those that have been swayed. It's a religion for some, a cargo cult for others, and a grift machine for the criminals. But scratch the surface and peer underneath, and you can see what it truly is. We don't laugh at the people who started the ponzi schemes. We don't laugh at the people that lost their money and le…

What the fuck are you talking about a cult for.. Nano is a real and functioning product, that works. There's no religion or sacrifice or anything like that, you can literally download an app or go to a website and see it work for yourself.

Access to the world's knowledge and people defend their ignorance like this, smh.

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

#392

Post by salawat »

pnt12 wrote: post #389
roamerz wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Incorrect.

ALM is a censure of BLM, which was a convenient nominative signpost for a rally banner that was aggregating a significant amount of violent and destructive riot activity in the name of it's cause.

You can argue that "if it was violent, it wasn't BLM doing it", but when you had the movement being used as a cover the way it was, and look at the bigger picture, it should start to crystalize.

ALM is a reminder. Yes, BLM. No one reasonanable questioned that. What chafed people, is the assertion any one group should be treated differently period. The fighters for civil rights of the last century plus fought hard for equality. There's this new push for equity which comes with extra baggage of "others should have to be subjected to exceptional treatment to compensate for historical treatment*. That is just racism, or segregationist thinking in another wrapper.

That is what ALM is a reaction to. Equal is hard. Equal requires work. Equal requires the unreaonanle among us to refuae to be pushed aside, and that's okay. Just... Be judicious with what gets enabled in the meantime, and don't provide cover/outlets for arson/robbery/vandalism/destruction of infrastructure at the same time.

Obstruct, be heard, yes. Divide, destroy, no.

All lives matter. And if someone feels like they aren't mattering, odds are, the bunch of people trying to make heads or tails of quantitative and qualitative evidence as to the claim, and information propagation is work, and takes time, and has mo guarantee of success.

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

#393

Post by Self-Perfection »

topranks wrote: post #201
mardifoufs wrote: post #37

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…

- It’s not significant in terms of the funds it brings in. - Crypto has been on a 10+ year long quest for “adoption”. So far it’s been fairly pathetic. Organisations who accept it provide a focal point for crypto advocates to point to, legitimising it and luring more retail investors into the Ponzi. - The environmental impact is massive, which makes accepting it ethically dubious and does not align with the Wikimedia…

I don't get the environment friendliness argument. It seems to imply that resources consumed by sustaining cryptocurrency transactions are imploding out of control. I am not familiar with coins except for bitcoin, but at least of bitcoin this is not the case. Market mechanisms regulate bitcoin mining.

Energy consumed by mining is limited by income that miners can get, and this income is limited by mining_rate + fee_rate. mining_rate gradually diminishes and therefore in the end it would be just fee_rate. Thus, bitcoin users would be paying for processing their transactions. Why do we have a right to forbid them spending their money on this? Why is it OK to let somebody spend his/hers money on gas for travelling by car instead of bus or train, but in the same time it is not OK for them to spend their money on doing their value transactions the way they like?

If we as a society assume that we cannot afford to spend so much fossil fuel on energy as today this means we have not set proper high enough price on it.

Just rising the energy ( gas / electricity / etc ) price and stopping obsessing about each particular thing if it is environmental friendly or not seems to me a much more cogent, simple and efficient solution.

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

#394

Post by aaron695 »

oska wrote: post #121
aaron695 wrote: post #23

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…

I just vouched your comment. In return (not really), wondering if you could give me a little more detail on F-Droid 'flipping'. Because this is news to me.

By their own words they are political - "F-Droid is taking a political stance here."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20466730

They should get points for admitting they are political I guess? Not sure.

Obviously it started something, there have been a few small issues since.

But I'd like to see how much time is wasted on talking compared to coding since.

The lowbrow who can't code will say words like Nazi which holds back the people who contribute to society by construction. Gay marriage was because of coders not activists.

This is what Wiki should fear.

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

#395

Post by teekert »

lxgr wrote: post #267
teekert wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When will technical solutions reduce blockchain energy usage enough for the anti-blockhain people to find it acceptable?

I don‘t think "the anti-blockchain people" is as homogenous a front as you might imagine it. Some object on the grounds of PoW mining and its incentive structure; others due to their tendencies to disproportionately accumulate wealth to early adopters; yet others due to widespread predatory and/or misleading marketing. I‘m probably forgetting several other reasons here. Personally, anything based on proof-of-scarce-r…

What is the alternative to proof-of-scare-resource? I only trust money or gold because you cant pick it from the trees with almost 0 effort.

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

#396

Post by throwawaw741741 »

tablespoon wrote: post #385
throwawaw741741 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>> with cryptocurrency you still have middlemen. To whom are you paying fees to clear your transactions on your dog-slow, unscalable, extremely inefficient network?

True, but that's as close as you'll get to P2P for a currency. Still, there's thousands of btc nodes and anyone could theoretically run one... unlike "just one bank" or "just one Mastercard".

It is slow, and inefficient precisely because there's no central authority (lool up Bizantine Generals problem). It has scaled extremely well for what it actually is.

Some people don't seem to understand this and compare it with, say VISA transactions.

>> It's not like it's an actual currency that you can buy things with.

It is. I can pay someone to build a website using bitcoin. Or, I can buy a car using bitcoin. You just need to agree on a number.

>> How exactly is someone supposed to convert their Syrian Pounds into cryptocurrency

You can always buy bitcoin from an individual in exchange for Syrian pounds. It's like bartering.

You can sell it back to an individual even if exchanges don't work.

>> It's mainly speculative investment surrounded by enormous hype.

That's just a byproduct. For example, I don't "save in bitcoin", I just use it for its intended purposes when I have to make a purchase.

By the way, my govt said exacty the same about the black market of US dollars, because people here use them to protect themselves from a quickly devaluing currency (>60% yearly inflation) and to avoid the corrupt govt control over their money (enormous taxes in exchange for nothing).

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

#397

Post by tablespoon »

throwawaw741741 wrote: post #396
tablespoon wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

>> with cryptocurrency you still have middlemen. To whom are you paying fees to clear your transactions on your dog-slow, unscalable, extremely inefficient network? True, but that's as close as you'll get to P2P for a currency. Still, there's thousands of btc nodes and anyone could theoretically run one... unlike "just one bank" or "just one Mastercard". It is slow, and inefficient precisely because there's no centra…

> It is slow, and inefficient precisely because there's no central authority (lool up Bizantine Generals problem). It has scaled extremely well for what it actually is.

> Some people don't seem to understand this and compare it with, say VISA transactions.

The point is almost all people don't really care about that feature of having "no central authority." Cryptocurrency goes through extraordinary effort to solve "problems" people don't actually have and implement features people don't actually care about.

It's like if someone at Google decided all search absolutely must run on 486 machines for weird reasons, and as a consequence it starts taking two minutes to load a page of results. Maybe the two minute load times are a phenomenal achievement of some brilliant engineers, but none of that matters to me as a user who hasn't joined the cult of the 486.

>> It's not like it's an actual currency that you can buy things with.

> It is. I can pay someone to build a website using bitcoin. Or, I can buy a car using bitcoin. You just need to agree on a number.

Theoretically, but that's not what people actually use Bitcoin for. It's also a superfluous detour in those transactions, merely adding unnecessary exchange and other fees.

>>> 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 can always buy bitcoin from an individual in exchange for Syrian pounds. It's like bartering.

Which ones deal in Syrian pounds? Give me an example.

And even there is one, how is someone in a "corrupt authorarian thirld-word [sic]" country supposed to get their money there? The banking system, perhaps? Or some black market broker? Doesn't that defeat the point?

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

#398

Post by lhl »

dogman144 wrote: post #336
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).…

Cool product, hope you get those smart contracts audited!

I agree it's pretty cool project. I don't have any relation to the team (except as an end-user) but of course the contracts have been audited: https://blog.openzeppelin.com/endaoment-audit/

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

#399

Post by lhl »

kingcharles wrote: post #384
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?

With the amount of volatility that most cryptos have, I think it makes more sense to convert to something stable unless your non-profit has a large treasury/flexible expense structure. If you do keep it in a stablecoin, there are some relatively low risk ways to get some yield on collected accounts, some are even 1-click, like this that gives a 9% APR on USDC: https://lite.instadapp.io/

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

#400

Post by rcMgD2BwE72F »

mattdesl wrote: post #340
gibrown wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that this is an interesting line of discussion. I think you missed a few options of why USD are more democratic. You can also: - run for office - organize people politically The open source point is important, but any individual crypto seems very hard to change once it is in place. Feels like it assumes you can predict how it will be used and what the consequences will be. The law isn’t easy to change but there…

> You can also: - run for office - organize people politically I think parallels to this are also happening in crypto networks, e.g. a user deciding to participate more directly in Eth protocol governance by sitting in on R&D and core dev calls, joining EIP discussions, using merge testnets, and generally just becoming a sort of public figure within the Eth community. (Also, this may go back to citizenship, I cannot…

You seem to discard that in a democracy, one person should get one vote. In crypto, you vote with your wallet – due to network effects – so the richest/most powerful weight the most.
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