Wikipedia Faces Pressure To Stop Accepting Crypto Donations on Environmental Grounds (coindesk.com) 98
Wikimedia, the non-profit foundation that runs Wikipedia, is facing internal opposition to its policy of accepting cryptocurrency as a form of donation, primarily for environmental reasons. From a report: A proposal to the foundation from contributor Molly White, who goes by the user name GorillaWarfare, argues that accepting donations in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, bitcoin cash and ether signals endorsement of digital coins, which are "inherently predatory" as investments and don't align with the foundation's commitment to environmental sustainability. The contributor argues that Wikipedia risks damaging its reputation by accepting crypto donations, citing the recent decision by non-profit peer, Mozilla, to pause accepting donations in crypto. Wikimedia currently accepts bitcoin, bitcoin cash, and ether via BitPay. White singled out bitcoin and ether's need for enormous amounts of energy, while noting that there are other "eco-friendlier" cryptocurrencies, although they are less widely-used.
writing is on the wall (Score:1)
Eventually crypto is going to need stronger regulations for both environmental and crime side-effects. Too much riff-raff always ruins good things.
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Most of crypto - especially the exchanges - are already in violation of many existing regulations. They just aren't being enforced.
Re:writing is on the wall (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:writing is on the wall (Score:4, Insightful)
Crypto seeks to end inflation - BULLSHIT.
Crypto is just a currency, like Gold before it. - Again, BULLSHIT. "Crypto" is fake currency. How do you know? Because every fucking participant in the Cryptocurrency scams admits their end goal is to cash out into real money.
Cryptocurrency is just the same old penny stock scams [fool.com] with a couple words replaced so that the scammers could evade securities regulations and laws. Those at the top of the pyramid sell fictitious crap to suckers, and laugh as they run off with the suckers' money; those running the pump-and-dump scam run up the prices, dump what they have while encouraging the suckers to "hodl", and then laugh as it crashes.
Cryptocurrency is to cryptozoology⦠(Score:2)
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Re:writing is on the wall (Score:5, Informative)
Crypto is just a currency
It's actually not. Or, at least, if it is it's a really bad one. BTC transactions are ludicrously expensive and terribly slow. The workaround has been to not use BTC as a currency, but instead to use it as an asset to back credit accounts which transact in US dollars.
The reason we went off the gold standard is so the government could mint it without having to mine it.
No, the reason we went off the gold standard is that it was a bad idea... and frankly we had been gradually going off of it (via fractional reserve lending) for centuries before we finally admitted that we weren't actually using gold and pulled the plug. Also, we realized that it was actually a bad idea. A good currency needs to be able to grow and shrink the money supply as the economy demands it.
Finally, if you think the government prints money, you don't know how fiat currency works. The government doesn't create it, banks do. When you borrow money to buy a house, the bank actually invents 90% of the dollars they lend you. This was also done when we were notionally using gold (and was done long before USD even exists -- at the beginning, goldsmiths did it, not banks).
Fiat currency is a marvelous invention. It creates a currency with actual value behind it, moreso even than gold. If you think this statement doesn't make sense, you need to learn how money is created and destroyed. If you want a summary, here's a comment I wrote a while back: https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
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Pyramid scheme has a technical meaning. What it is simply a speculative investment. People have bought things based on the theory that their value would increase later many times, and many of those things did not enjoy much practical value beyond the idea that they would either increase in value, or at least retain their value.
Pyramid schemes are entirely different and illegal in most jurisdictions for the reason of false advertisement alone. — There are no lies with cryptocurrency
Not a Pyramid Scam, Collective Insanity (Score:2)
Most crypto is the same old pump-and-dump and pyramid scams
It's clearly not a pump-and-dump or pyramid scam because these require some form of central coordination and plan to defraud people. Crypto is far, far too widespread for it to be that. It's more like a collective insanity of greed, driven by a fear of missing out. As many point out it is similar to the dutch tulip bubble which is generally not regarded as a scam just a crazy market, disconnected from reality. What has been surprising though is how long people have managed to maintain this insanity.
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because these require some form of central coordination and plan to defraud people. Crypto is far, far too widespread for it to be that. - "HEY LOOK, WE SCAMMED A BUNCH OF DUPES, WHO ARE CONTINUING THE SCAM HOPING THEY CAN STILL CASH OUT" isn't a valid defense of a pyramid scam.
Cryptocancer (Score:1)
Crypto money is cancer.
Especially for the environment.
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The electricity use is an implementation detail, not the core idea. It can be, and is being, fixed.
Re: Cryptocancer (Score:1)
It can be fixed with proof of stake, which only enables new attacks. Oh goody.
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it's cancer.
it's not fixed, it's reduced.
Re: Cryptocancer (Score:1)
You must be right, I got modded down for saying it was fixed :)
Crypto wanks can't defend it without lies or fraud. Like abuse of moderation.
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Haha in fact some wank modded me down five times in a row. Little do they know that I ride the kap.
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Reduced by how much? Do you even know?
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Not fixed.
it's still increasing.
https://www.ft.com/__origami/s... [ft.com]
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Not clicking a link that obfuscated, so. Post your numbers or don't.
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What's obfuscated ?
Nothing.
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Do that many people actually give a shit about stuff like this?
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Yes !
We have children, and want them to not go extinct.
Other way (Score:1)
Too much riff-raff always ruins good things.
To the contrary, all good things are built on top of a solid base of riff-raff, then people like to pretend that original criminal base never existed.
Things only get ruined when the criminal elements are throughly expunged.
You need some criminal elements in a system the way an engine needs oil, the nice clean engine of progress needs the unseen dirty slimy elements to let the overly rigid parts of the system slide past each other.
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Collectively, the overhead of crypto in network communications just in response by the industry players to counteract the NSA spy net (for flipping on HTTPS everywhere, for example) I'd dare assume draws more power than cryptocurrency mining itself.
The whole point of crypto is freedom and privacy, and your argument could be summarized as simply wanting less of these things.
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If full freedom means being ripped off, flooded, and shot at often, then I'll back off some. I like civilization; a Mad Max world is not for me. There is a Goldilocks zone of regulation vs. freedom.
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You'd probably be wrong. Especially for a project like Bitcoin that requires incredible amounts of power to carry out mining while requiring precious little bandwidth.
Re: writing is on the wall (Score:3)
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Re: writing is on the wall (Score:1)
I agree your opinion should be ignored. But that does not reflect on the validity of anyone else's opinion.
One-man pressure? (Score:2)
So a single person wrote a proposal and this is called “internal pressure”? This person has the title of “contributor” of which I know not how high ranking it is.
I do wonder, however, what is the environmental impact of say, the same value mined in gold or diamonds? — It almost seems to me that with many modern regulations that the price of a product is very proportional to the environmental impact of creating it. Bitcoins are worth what they are worth because they cost a certa
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You make a good case - for banning gemstone mining and trade along with cryptocurrency.
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The same case can be made to ban the use of, say, gold and diamonds in jewelry outside of industrial use, where it is clearly purely used for it's rarity to show how much one can afford to spend.
And with that, one can ban the wearing of any fine fabric, the eating of expensive food, the owning of large houses, and many other such things.
I am still very much interested in numbers however. — What is the environmental impact of one bitcoin, vis a vis a bitcoin worth of, say jade?
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You make a good case - for banning gemstone mining and trade along with cryptocurrency.
And US Dollars -- whose value was built on the backs of abducted slaves working land taken from people via cannonballs and bullets.
And Chinese Yuan -- whose value was built on 40-50 million dead bodies starved to death or outright murdered for having wrong political beliefs.
And then we start on the historical sources of wealth for France, UK, Germany, the Dutch, literally every nation on the Arabian peninsula, etc.
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So a single person wrote a proposal and this is called “internal pressure”? This person has the title of “contributor” of which I know not how high ranking it is.
I guess you can call her an influencer. She is not Elon Musk but it is the same kind of energy at her scale.
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Crypto money is cancer.
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Last I checked the US military had an energy footprint about the size of Portugal's, even if you consider 100% of that energy to be a complete waste akin to pointlessly reversing hashes, cryptocurrency still likely has a bigger energy footprint:
https://www.nytimes.com/intera... [nytimes.com]
instead of keeping track of all the bad things (Score:1)
I think I'd rather have some regulations on what sorts of businesses are legal and what sorts are illegal. I've grown weary keeping track of which companies are using child labor. Which CEOs are sex criminals. Which companies are cited hundreds of times by environmental agencies but never closed down. Which companies support authoritarian regimes that are at ours with the values of their own customer base.
I'm not naïve. I realize that profit is the ultimate arbitrator of what is "right" for most of the
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I honestly find the term “child labor” to be without merit or definition. I remember asking when I delivered papers when I was thirteen why it wasn't child labor, which is illegal, and I never received a satisfactory answer. I even had friends who were 15 at the time whose parents required them to have jobs during the vacation, the salary of course they could keep, in order to teach them responsibility and the fruits of labor.
In practice, I find that only the type of labor which is “associ
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I remember asking when I delivered papers when I was thirteen why it wasn't child labor, which is illegal, and I never received a satisfactory answer.
Then you should have asked smarter adults. While there is no one universal standard for child labor, they generally have similar elements. Limiting the amount of work, how strenuous the work is, and how hazardous it is. I think most people understand this, and could explain this to a child. Child labor laws don't make child labor illegal any more than driving laws make driving illegal.
The International Labor Organization does publish Minimum Age Conventions [ilo.org] which is a good starting point to understand what
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Then you should have asked smarter adults. While there is no one universal standard for child labor, they generally have similar elements. Limiting the amount of work, how strenuous the work is, and how hazardous it is. I think most people understand this, and could explain this to a child. Child labor laws don't make child labor illegal any more than driving laws make driving illegal.
I was given similar answers, and I pointed out that weaving baskets and various other things said to be child labor on the news are not dangerous at all, and was not given a further satisfactory answer to that.
The International Labor Organization does publish Minimum Age Conventions [ilo.org] which is a good starting point to understand what international organizations consider exploitative child labor, but even the US doesn't follow it completely. US farm child labor has almost no meaningful regulations for children under the age of 12, which the Humans Rights Watch has pointed out [hrw.org].
Well I'm simply not really impressed; it speaks here that no one should be able to under the age of 18 have any vocation that is likely to jeopardize his health; it is legal to join the army at the age of 16 in the Netherlands, which is not considered child labor. One can also become an active fireman
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I was given similar answers, and I pointed out that weaving baskets and various other things said to be child labor on the news are not dangerous at all, and was not given a further satisfactory answer to that.
Hazardous work is only one of the criteria I mentioned. I assume what you saw on the news were examples of excessive hours of work, especially if it impacted education opportunities. The work could also be strenuous, depending on how aggressive management is on work volume. But the primary issue is usually whether the work impacts education, especially if children's primary responsibility is their work as opposed to their education.
it speaks here that no one should be able to under the age of 18 have any vocation that is likely to jeopardize his health; it is legal to join the army at the age of 16 in the Netherlands, which is not considered child labor.
As I said, there is not universal adherence even in developed nations to the
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I honestly find the term “child labor” to be without merit or definition.
Thanks for the candor and attempt at reductio ad absurdum, but I think you have an ignorant position based on a shallow decomposition of the terminology. Rather than collect a definition that merits discussion and debate you choose a literal interpretation that ignores the social ills of child labor and abuse. Why should we define things beyond their constitute words? No one can express a complex topic with two words and zero context.
Contrary to what you may have assumed. Children performing some work is no
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A child is not mature enough to decide if they should drop out of middle school to work full time as a paperboy. And in a country with reasonable laws designed to protect children, a child's parents are also not permitted to decide this either. Some nations do this better than others. And cover more instances where children may be exploited. (the US is pretty weak in this regard, if Hollywood isn't enough of an example there are plenty more
Yet it happens all the time, legally, in many developed nations, and it's not called child labor depending on how “socially acceptable” the type of labor is.
It's really quite common in developed nations for parents to essentially compel their children to stop education at ages similar to 15 or 16 to help in a family business, and often this is legal to do, and not called “child labor” by the relevant authorities.
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Yet it happens all the time, legally, in many developed nations, and it's not called child labor depending on how “socially acceptable” the type of labor is.
No, they do not.
It's not a matter of being so-called socially acceptable. Social acceptability is a judgement made according to a people's collective values. There are ways to look at this that are not dependent on the whims of moral relativism. Where you can ask and answer simple questions of: Does this harm society? Does this harm a child?
Developed nations widely make it illegal to physically harm or endanger a child through labor. Furthermore psychological harm can and should be accounted for in laws pro
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Yet it happens all the time, legally, in many developed nations, and it's not called child labor depending on how “socially acceptable” the type of labor is.
No, they do not.
It's not a matter of being so-called socially acceptable. Social acceptability is a judgement made according to a people's collective values. There are ways to look at this that are not dependent on the whims of moral relativism. Where you can ask and answer simple questions of: Does this harm society? Does this harm a child?
Developed nations widely make it illegal to physically harm or endanger a child through labor. Furthermore psychological harm can and should be accounted for in laws protecting children. And measures of if labor interferes with education are typical used when looking at child labor statistics of all nations, not just developing nations.
So you say, but I pointed out in another post that in many developed nations minors can join the army or the firefighting force.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_enlistment_age_by_country, as you can see here, many developed nations put the minimum age at 17, some requiring parental consent
Other examples include circus work, where many of these minors that are exposed to a variety of dangers are quite certainly groomed into it from a young age, and had no real chance to resist, yet, because it is tradit
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Which CEOs are sex criminals.
All equal before the law... On what grounds would you single out CEOs? They are the least likely to interact again with kids.
Courts can prevent sex offenders to work in professions where they enter in contact with children, and some jurisdiction disclose the names of sex offenders to local residents (so that you can "hide your daughters"). That is enough for the purpose of the jusice system, protection of society, prevention of future crime and promotion of reintegration.
The public image of sex offenders is
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All equal before the law... On what grounds would you single out CEOs? They are the least likely to interact again with kids.
If you're not aware of #MeToo, it's a grass roots movement and not associated with any court system or legal code. Organizing boycotts is about as democratic as thing as there is, even if it is an extra-judicial punishment.
Courts can prevent sex offenders to work in professions where they enter in contact with children,
I'm sure you realize that sex offenders aren't all pedophiles. Perhaps an innocent oversight on your part. It does kind of invalidate the majority of your argument so I won't spend time responding beyond this.
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I though you suggested "which CEO are sex criminals" should be disclosed by Wikipedia, while you were just saying you were keeping track (to boycott). My bad.
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Ah, thanks for the clarification. Poor communication on my part. sorry
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Am I on your Foes list?
Re:Something is definitely up here (Score:4, Insightful)
Funding right-wing hate groups is a major issue with cryptocurrency...just like funding jihadists, ransomware groups, allowing sanctions evasion by North Korea and Iran, cryptocurrency has opened the money pipelines for all kinds of bad actors. But focusing on right-wing hate groups is a good idea since they've been the deadliest terrorists by ideology in the US for just about 20 years now.
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[citation needed]
Here is a good timeline, can you find them on here or did 18 of them happen after September?
https://www.theguardian.com/us... [theguardian.com]
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It can potentially fund anyone.
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So can ordinary payment methods, with the exception of those groups, so guess what cryptocurrency gets used for?
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You seem to be overstating things enough to meaningfully destroy whatever argument you were trying to push for whatever reason you were trying to push it (certainly not for its veracity).
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I cant hand those groups a check made out to cash?
Well, it might be difficult, being an international payment, but theoretically you could. But then they would have a lot of trouble cashing it. And whether or not they succeeded in cashing it, you would quickly be arrested for funding a terror group and/or sanctions violations since the cheque would be trivially traced back to you.
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Surprised I have to keep pasting links like this one:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/h... [forbes.com]
Surprise! Most blockchain activity isn't related to criminal activity!
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Ah, the old "count wash trading as legitimate activity" trick:
https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
It washes in more ways than one!
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Wash trading isn't blockchain activity. It's completely internal to exchanges, e.g. there are no transactions that go out to the blockchain in need of verification to directly facilitate wash trading.
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Not so on NFT markets. or many DeFi platforms:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtm... [acm.org]
If you looked into the study more carefully you'd see that they excluded wash trading on the blockchain of NFT platforms.
But we're getting way ahead of ourselves here, did you know that you're hawking a study performed by a cryptocurrency company boosted by a cryptocurrency entrepreneur? It's like citing a global warming study performed by Chevron through a writeup on an oilman's blog. Both of them have a vested interest in downp
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They're going to impound the assets setup as collateral and no federal regulator can be bribed to undo that.
Good luck with that. Why do you assume that a derivative based on BTC or ETH would have to use 'smart contracts'? They could be contracts traded on an open outcry exchange by a bunch of people wearing funny colored jackets. And since crypto is fungible, contracts could be satisfied by the delivery of any instance of the currency. Not just a particular set of coins set aside for the purpose.
Re: Something is definitely up here (Score:2)
We should kill it in its infancy before it leads to worse things.
Wikipedia doesn't even need money. They have assloads. Yet they keep demanding donations as if they were broke. And for what? To.fund edit wars?
An interesting application of the "Environmental" (Score:2)
Until now, the "environment" was brought up to target the more obvious aspects of Capitalism — creating and using wealth...
That it is now used to target, what people increasingly view as government's overreach into our money and our privacy [slashdot.org], is new. And revealing...
Re:An interesting application of the "Environmenta (Score:4, Interesting)
The environmental problem at hand is the anti-efficiency and staggering energy wasteage of proof-of-work blockchains, the fact that this is a payment system that can be used to fairly easily send money to ISIS anonymously is a problem but not an environmental one.
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If wasting a shit-ton of mostly fossil-based energy isn't an environmental problem, we may just have to agree to disagree about the laws of physics we're working with (I'm sticking to mainstream science, is that the blue pill?)
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"Wasting" is a loaded term conveying a POV. You should use a neutral verb like "using".
For example, Greta Thunberg famously traveled to UN in New York by a yacht — to avoid using fossil fuels involved in air-travel. The yacht's crew of two, who all returned back to Europe by air, used twice as much fuel as the lone Greta would've. The replacement crew, who flew to New York [apnews.com] to drive the yacht back, used two airplane seats
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Ours is not a scientific disagreement. We agree, that humanity uses various energy sources, including fossil fuels. We disagree only on whether this is a problem.
Would you agree that there are inherent problems with the use of fossil power due to the addition of greenhouse gases to the biosphere?
Would you agree that we could compare the relative efficiency or wastefulness of different processes which perform similar operations by comparing their energy consumption in completing a given operation?
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Nope. I'm yet to see a convincing argument, that this is a problem. All I saw so far were politics-motivated arguments, all of them intended to increase the power governments have over citizens.
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Nope. I'm yet to see a convincing argument, that this is a problem. All I saw so far were politics-motivated arguments, all of them intended to increase the power governments have over citizens.
Ah, so you're a science-denying tinfoil-hatter, just say that next time instead of wasting people's time.
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Wow... Someone got triggered...
No, I don't deny science at all — you just haven't presented any scientific argument (yet?)...
Re: An interesting application of the "Environment (Score:1)
Maybe you should stop taking the ones you find on the subway.
5 out of 15 frontpage /. posts = cryptocurrency (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but this is just getting ridiculous now.
At the time of typing this, 1/3rd of the front page stories are cryptocurrency related.
I want "news for nerds, stuff that matters", not a continuous barrage of cryptocurrency shit.
Perhaps it's time to join the many who have decided that /. is all but dead - its heyday having passed many years ago...
... and /. is also way late with stories (Score:2)
About 90% of the stories I actually want to read, I've already found and read, before I get my daily fix of /.
That fix is therefore no longer worth getting - especially when served with a third of cryptocurrency related crap.
Hell, the occasional post is fine - it's nerd worthy, but needs to be "stuff that matters".
Posts about NFT's do NOT matter, posts about speculation on cryptocurrency shitcoins do NOT matter.
I've been a reader of this site for a considerable amount of time, I don't know exactly how long,
There's an obvious reason why (Score:1)
The folks running /. clearly have a vested interest [slashdot.org] in posting all these crypto stories, while offering no filter for it for us all to be able to have them hidden.
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As long as these stories collect many views and comments, they will be posted.
I'm here because it talks about WIkimedia, which matters to me. The other stories I did not even clicked.
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Wait until /. goes crypto! /. needs a crypto filter so registered users can filter those stories out!
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I'm sorry, but this is just getting ridiculous now.
At the time of typing this, 1/3rd of the front page stories are cryptocurrency related.
I want "news for nerds, stuff that matters", not a continuous barrage of cryptocurrency shit.
Well considering cryptocurrency is a global hot topic in the IT world is very much tech related. Considering how discussions revolve around economics, monetary control of governments, and technology behind it is appeals to a very diverse definition of "nerds". The stories all are quite current too so it certainly fits the definition of "news".
And given the current environmental problems we are facing and the insane energy consumption you'd have to be a special kind of moron to try and justify that this isn'
Okay Slashdotters, let's start a list... (Score:2)
Everyone reply to this comment listing the human currencies whose value was built via behavior that was:
carbon-negative,
tree-planting,
water-purifying,
fossil-sequestering,
non-conquering,
non-colonizing,
non-enslaving,
non-exploitative
That way socially-conscious corporations and non-profits can know which types of money are clean, and we can all convert our existing assets into that currency to save the humans from themselves. We'll be doing a service to the entire Internet, nay, the world!
Social Media has given the fringe attention! (Score:2)
Remember, if you use social media to comment on fringe BS you are directly contributing to that fringe BS trending higher! Stop feeding the trolls! Not the old way, now your engagement is empowering them like never before!
You'd do far more good that way than wasting time on crypto scams. If you must talk about it, AVOID doing so in a way that feeds the nightmare of automated curation that is destroying societies around the world in similar ways to the USA. Democracies are
especially prone to harm.
Accepting
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This is like justifying filling up someone's house with human shit because everybody goes to the toilet.
The structure of that analogy doesn't connect to this situation at all.
This is like you choosing to pile up your own house with human feces rather than allowing a plumber to install a toilet entirely for free, because the plumber pulled up to your house with all the supplies in a 2008 Chevy Silverado instead of riding a bicycle and you're don't want to appear to "normalize" internal combustion engines.
Weird, I wrote them a letter 4 days ago (Score:2)
"less widely used"? (Score:2)
You mean, "doesn't get the same hysterical clickbait coverage in the media".
MOST of the world's blockchain transactions take place on the Stellar blockchain. You never hear about this, of course.
Hopefully, wiki is not this stupid (Score:2)
THis is another example. In this case, they should instead push for the crypto coins to be from CLEAN sources, not just stopped.
Cancel! (Score:2)
Wikipedia must stop accepting donations from anyone who owns or rides in fossil-fueled vehicles, or heats their home with fossil fuels, or has even been anywhere heated by fossil fuels.