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Wikipedia Bitcoin The Almighty Buck

It's Official: Wikipedia Stops Accepting Donations in Cryptocurrency (mashable.com) 129

Posted by EditorDavid from the your-money's-no-good-here dept.
The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (which operates Wikipedia) "announced that it would no longer accept cryptocurrency donations," reports Mashable, saying the decision came after a three-month discussion period: Wikimedia said it would close its account with Bitpay, the crypto payment service provider which Wikimedia used to collect cryptocurrency donations....

The Wikimedia Foundation did say it would continue to monitor the situation, possibly keeping the door open to a future where it did accept crypto donations once again. For now, though, the critics of cryptocurrency and the broader Wiki community are victorious.
Mashable notes Wikipedia own figures showing that for all of 2021, donations in cryptocurrency to Wikipedia barely totalled $130,000 — or just 0.08% of its revenue. And a long-time Wikipedia editor notes on Twitter that in a three-month request for comments "excluding new accounts and unregistered users," the final tally supporting the ban was 232 to 94 opposing it. (That is, 71.17% supported the ban.)

"I'm really happy that the Wikimedia Foundation listened to the community's wishes on this issue," they tell Mashable, "and I'm really proud of my community for taking a principled stand."
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It's Official: Wikipedia Stops Accepting Donations in Cryptocurrency More

It's Official: Wikipedia Stops Accepting Donations in Cryptocurrency

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  • Bitcoin trending down = multiple crypto stories (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NoMoreDupes ( 8410441 ) on Sunday May 01, 2022 @03:37PM (#62494698)

    It never fails: anytime you see a slew of crypto stories on /., it's because they're trying to get it propped up again, after losing value recently.

    • Re:Bitcoin trending down = multiple crypto stories (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Sunday May 01, 2022 @03:42PM (#62494710)

      As bitcoin ramped up to above 60k, there were tons of stories about cryptocurrencies. They've always been on topic for slashdot, after all.

      • As I said before: /. clearly has a vested interest [slashdot.org] in seeing it propped up.

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by nyet ( 19118 )

          Ridiculous assertion. /. has one of the highest concentrations of cryptocurrency "ok boomers", skeptics, and Luddites I've seen anywhere, in just about any community.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Clearly you haven't seen Pyrite Pete's [urbandictionary.com] frequent [slashdot.org] shitposts [slashdot.org] on here.

            • Not really fair, since that guy hates all cyptocurrency except Bitcoin. If you promote anything OTHER than Bitcoin here, he goes (or used to go) apeshit. Premines! Centralization! OH NOES

          • Ridiculous assertion. /. has one of the highest concentrations of cryptocurrency "ok boomers", skeptics,

            If that were true, then /. should have no problem giving us a 'cryptocurrency story' filter... yet they've refused to do so.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by nyet ( 19118 )

              You know *you* have the option of skipping these posts, right? How on earth is a lack of a filter any sort of indicator of "support"? What you want isn't the ability to "not see" these posts. What irks you is that others see these posts; though bizarrely, this story is actually biased towards said "ok boomers", and clueless Luddites.

              There isn't a single thing about your narrative that makes a whit of sense.

          • Dude this was one of the first communities buzzing about bitcoins. How do you not know that?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by N1AK ( 864906 )
              Dude, that can be true and irrelevant to what they said. The overwhelming vibe on /. is anti-crypto and has been for a number of years.

              • Oh yeah I’m sure it’s followed closely with my own sentiments. At first I was excited about a simple way to exchange money over the internet. Then I gave up on it. Maybe one day I’ll find those bitcoins I got at less than $100 as a few of my friends did but the whole concept is wasted potential thanks to speculators.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nyet ( 19118 )

      "They"? Lol. Idiot.

      • "They"? Lol. Idiot.

        If you're referring to the last line of TFS ...

        "I'm really happy that the Wikimedia Foundation listened to the community's wishes on this issue," they tell Mashable, "and I'm really proud of my community for taking a principled stand."

        ... it looks like the editor/submitter botched it. TFA directly attributes this line to Molly White, and more clearly writes:

        "I'm really happy that the Wikimedia Foundation listened to the community's wishes on this issue, and I'm really proud of my community for taking a principled stand," said longtime Wikipedia editor and crypto skeptic Molly White in a message to Mashable.

        Her pronouns on Twitter are "she/her", so don't know why someone thought to use something more generic/non-binary. Maybe they had trouble making heads or tails out of a coin story ... :-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      I'm not sure how a story like this helps to "pump up" crypto. If anything, it just helps to confirm the bias that cryptocurrency fans are all a bunch of "Planet incinerating Ponzi grifters".

    • And a bit of a bubble but so far the news for crypto has been pretty terrible as far as I can tell. The only really good news is that a bunch of Texas politicians are going to let them set up their data centers there and have cheap electricity. But beyond that there's a ton of new regulation be drafted and Warren Buffett himself just came out and said Bitcoin and crypto are garbage and basically called them Ponzi schemes.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nyet ( 19118 )

        Then again, he (and others) also made the claim that agreeing with the Chinese government on the topic of regulation means you're in the right.

    • Bitcoin trending down is probably why they decided to stop collecting donations in Bitcoin. After all, their donations are losing value! Watch if Bitcoin rallies and makes a new all time high. They might reverse their decision and start accepting Bitcoin again.

  • "For now, though, the critics of cryptocurrency and the broader Wiki community are victorious.

    And so is each and every payment processor who happily accepts a minimum of 3% for the order flow.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by splutty ( 43475 )

      You mean as opposed to the money that goes down the drain doing Bitcoin transfers? It's not free, you know. And it's not even a percentage of the actual amount.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      And so is each and every payment processor who happily accepts a minimum of 3% for the order flow.

      Well, I doubt Bitpay is very happy.

    • They could have just picked something cheap like Litecoin as their official blockchain. It's an old project, it's easy to use, and the txn fees are currently very low. It's one of the tokens favored for exchange-to-exchange transfers because it's so cheap and so widely-accepted. Nano is better where it's supported. Stellar Lumens are also a good option.

  • From the article:

    "It's ironic that so much of the crypto ethos involves ostensible self-governance and individual agency, but then members of the crypto community who are not otherwise a part of the Wikimedia community try to force crypto on us," she explained. "I hope they take this as a reminder that self-governance means listening to community members even when the outcome is not profitable or good PR for them."

    So if "crypto people" want to force it on "them" and they want to decide what to deal with, it seems to indicate that they don't want my donations, because I am on of the "crypto people". This us vs them must mean that it is the Wikipedia community (which excludes "crypto people") who are supposed to fund Wikipedia.

    And she certainly don't want people who are not part of the Wikimedia community to sponsor the organization apparently. But why are they then asking for donations? This

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nyet ( 19118 )

      Nothing about any of this makes a whit of sense. Just more evidence that WP editors (and the entire laughably stupid WP "governance" community) live in a group think bubble just as insular as the laughably stupid bitcoinbro bubble.

      Sanctimonious, insufferable hypocrites. Even worse, demonstrably clueless.

  • That crypto is still experimental, no one knows if it will take hold.

    • The crypto bros got to this comment before a real mod could.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      All tools for financial transactions have gotten heavily abused until they got regulated rather tightly. There is zero reason to believe any crapcoin will be different. But as soon as a crapcoin is tightly regulated, it looses al special properties.

      At this time, it would be beneficial to outlaw all crapcoins just to stop the ransomware epidemic. Apparently, for example in Germany, about 65% of all companies had a ransomware incident in 2021. That is in no way sustainable and must stop. It is possible only b

  • There is in fact not a good technical or even financial decision for Wikipedia to do this but I absolutely understand the optics of this. Wikipedia wants to remain somewhat neutral and they do have their audience of readers and contributers they have to consider. You can call it an echo chamber but that's their reality and they need those people.

    Being associated with crypto-currency, even tangenitally is becoming brand-toxic. I don't consider it unfair, every story about another scam, another bubble, ano

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nyet ( 19118 )

      > All the talk about proof of stake won't fix jack until it actually exists and works (and it probably won't, it just puts the system in the hands of it's strongest players)

      And this is exactly what happened to the internet, which was supposed to be fully p2p and make all participants equal.

      Inevitably, all socio-political systems trend this way - towards control by an increasingly more powerful (and more centralized) elite; the only question is if there is a way to delay or mitigate it.

      • Was the internet ever "intended" to be p2p? Seems like the protocols as built were always intended to have a server/client relationship. That's also an economic and logistical issue, not even today is it feasible to give everyone even close to the same size data links that data centers have. It was always intended to be centralized, we just a pretty decent job of making it fair.

        Crypto going proof of stake though only alleviates one of its issues (power consumption) and exacerbates all of its other ones.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Well, sort of. The internet was supposed to be "peer-to-peer" where the "peers" were networks. It is still that.

          Taking the whole shebang as the internet, it absolutely has a client-server architecture, but there was an idea that anybody could set up a server. Which you can do, much more easily than at any time in the past.

          • You are probably right but I hear p2p and my mind jumps to something like i2p or I guess Bitcoin ironically.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              I don't think of Bitcoin being the least bit peer to peer. If you want to make a transaction you have to bribe a server to do it for you. Servers are reasonably easy to set up, just like web servers, but they're still servers.

    • Nonsense, there are good technical and financial reasons to have nothing to do with a hype driven gambling token that fails all the tests of money and has absurd energy requirements.

      • Those would be ethical and environmental reasons, not technical and financial reasons.

        • Eh, a volatile illiquid gambling token with no utility is bad financially.

          A system that wastes massive amounts of energy for even tiny transactions is technically bad, besides the technical badness of the ill-designed inefficient distributed database it employs.

  • I used to donate some crypto each year, just a few hundred but now that they don't support it, I won't be donating anything in coming years.

  • Only if you think the price will drop.

  • I understand the page has now been edited to say "they do" accept crypto, but now I looked and it has been edited again to say "no". Madness.
  • I guess green isnâ(TM)t the only color that matters

  • All they had to do was endorse a blockchain with low fees and low energy usage for donations. Nano would have been perfect. Or Stellar Lumens. Or even Litecoin, though Litecoin is mined (just not by a lot of people).

    Anyway:

    https://nano.org/ [nano.org]

    This was a huge missed opportunity for Wikimedia to endorse Nano if they wanted to virtue-signal or even substantively undercut PoW chains.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by N1AK ( 864906 )
      I would have loved to see them do that but I think for a lot of people the PoW reason, although probably also a real concern for them, is just a more legitimate sounding reason to oppose Crypto than just saying they don't approve of Crypto idealogically or it's ignorance and they just think all Crypto involves throwing the rainforest into a supersized wood burner.

      • As much as I want to give them credit for being informed-but-disingenuous, it really does seem that those complaining are simply ignorant.

  • With " $130,000 — or just 0.08% of its revenue", what is Wikipedia doing with the rest of the 99.8% of the money collected? A good forensic accounting might be warranted.

  • If the intent is to raise funds for Wikipedia, cryptocurrency is probably more trouble than it is worth. Wikipedia might possibly attract some funds from cryptocurrency evangelists, but I suspect that the increased funds are minuscule. There is then the overhead of converting the funds into a usable form, at whatever rate the speculative market currently dictates. Presumably, Wikipedia has some salaried employees, and there is no guarantee that they will accept payment in some cryptocurrency. There would al

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