It's Official: Wikipedia Stops Accepting Donations in Cryptocurrency (mashable.com) 129
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."
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."
Bitcoin trending down = multiple crypto stories (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
As bitcoin ramped up to above 60k, there were tons of stories about cryptocurrencies. They've always been on topic for slashdot, after all.
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As I said before: /. clearly has a vested interest [slashdot.org] in seeing it propped up.
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Ridiculous assertion. /. has one of the highest concentrations of cryptocurrency "ok boomers", skeptics, and Luddites I've seen anywhere, in just about any community.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Dude this was one of the first communities buzzing about bitcoins. How do you not know that?
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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.
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"They"? Lol. Idiot.
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"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."
"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 ... :-)
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I'm referring to the idiotic OP's "because they're trying to get it propped up again" stupidity.
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Me? Not a fan of Bitcoin.
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So "they" posted a story that is critical of crypto to ... bolster it?
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If you're suggesting pro/con doesn't matter because either way, a mention fuels the outrage economy, the best way for you to take a principled stance is not to participate at all.
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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".
It's hard to tell because algorithms put you (Score:2)
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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.
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Follow the money.. (Score:2)
"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.
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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.
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And you know there are DLTs other than Bitcoin?
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Jesus Christ /. is filled with dumbasses now.
Well, there's you that's here too...
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Well, I doubt Bitpay is very happy.
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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.
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The ironic thing doesn't compute for me (Score:1)
"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
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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.
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Not a fan of Bitcoin.
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Yet here you are, posting as an AC
Why do you care what anyone posts?
LOL @ Slashdot Boomer logic! (Score:1)
Yet here you are, posting as an AC
Says the troll posting under a nick that doesn't provide any real identity.
Now, you were saying something about hypocrites?
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Plenty of people here know exactly who I am. I've never hidden it.
People forget (Score:1)
That crypto is still experimental, no one knows if it will take hold.
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The crypto bros got to this comment before a real mod could.
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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
Deserved reputation (Score:1)
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
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> 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.
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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.
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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.
Re: Deserved reputation (Score:2)
You are probably right but I hear p2p and my mind jumps to something like i2p or I guess Bitcoin ironically.
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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.
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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.
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Those would be ethical and environmental reasons, not technical and financial reasons.
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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.
no more donations from me (Score:1)
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.
Pay in Bitcoin? (Score:2)
Only if you think the price will drop.
Well.... (Score:2)
Your moneys no good here (Score:1)
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Actual money is still very much welcome.
Ignorance on parade (Score:2)
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.
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As much as I want to give them credit for being informed-but-disingenuous, it really does seem that those complaining are simply ignorant.
amount (Score:2)
Cryptocurrencies are not worth the trouble (Score:2)
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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And Wikipedia will probably reconsider when that happens. Until then, version 1 cryptocurrencies based on PoW are the only ones with any widespread adoption, and for some reason a charitable/public benefit organizati
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I will continue to be grateful to their services, but I am trying to reduce my dependence on the banking system, and an organization that explicitly is trying to do the opposite is someone I cannot support.
Re: A principled stand? What principle? (Score:2)
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> version 1 cryptocurrencies based on PoW are the only ones with any widespread adoption
And if the WP "community" had any real integrity, they'd consequently go out of their way to encourage uptake of non-PoW cryptocurrencies.
But they've done no such thing, because they detest dissent from the WP cult like groupthink.
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Not true, look at Stellar or Ripple. Or Nano. Or any number of other projects using much less power than Bitcoin or Ethereum.
There's lots of ways you can say (Score:5, Informative)
I've pointed this out before but cryptocurrency just doesn't work. Fundamentally it falls victim to the trend of market consolidation that always happens without heavy regulation. We're seeing that with heavy concentration and around the exchanges and the mining pools. Smaller exchanges in miners but try to operate legitimately quickly get bought out or go out of business. Result is you have large mining pools that can easily do 51% attacks and exchanges that those mining poles are dependent on that can essentially Force the pools to do those attacks. This is before you get into all the nastiness around things like chargebacks or how there have been cases where in exchange traced back currency that was sold on its platform and then seized the currency because it was stolen. That's fine unless you're the person who accidentally bought stolen currency after several layers of money laundering.
We could of course solve all those problems with government regulation but if you start regulating it enough that it has the safety and reliability of a fiat currency all you've really done is create a fiat currency that wastes a ton of electricity.
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> I've pointed this out before but cryptocurrency just doesn't work. Fundamentally it falls victim to the trend of market consolidation that always happens without heavy regulation. We're seeing that with heavy concentration and around the exchanges and the mining pools. S
I agree with this.
> if you start regulating it enough that it has the safety and reliability of a fiat currency all you've really done is create a fiat currency that wastes a ton of electricity.
The premise and conclusion are half non
So if you take measures to regulate (Score:2)
I guess what I'm saying is that centralization and finance and markets is inevitable and rather than try and fight something inevitable we should come up with solutions to mitigate and eliminate the neg
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If you think cryptocurrency is in any way useful for a Ponzi scheme any more than regular cash is, then you don't understand Ponzi schemes. And the only reason money laundering should bother you is if it's being used to conceal activities that you are morally opposed to. Cryptocurrencies don't inherently require a lot of electricity either, that's just proof of work (in fact, Ethereum is going to end proof of work mining very soon.)
Really the only reason you don't like cryptocurrencies is because it represe
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You misunderstand. Capcoins are used as the Ponzi-scheme themselves. Yes, it is atypical, but the "greater fool" base of any crapcoin value gains is pure Ponzi. The only way there ever will be any real value in these things is if there is no speculation potential.
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How is it used as a Ponzi scheme?
Re: pools and 51% attacks (Score:2)
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Pools aren't necessarily a bad thing. Pools that direct the signaling of their miners are a bad thing. Way back when I used to mine, nanopool let their miners signal independently. That was back during the first DAO hard fork that inadvertently created Ethereum Classic.
You still have to be someone (Score:2)
If you don't incentivize it then you don't get enough people willing to devote processor power to make it happen. You can try di
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Keep shouting at the clouds, grandpa.
Cryptocurrency DOES work, it's just in its nascent stages of development. And it's being developed by non-governmental parties which is why you see a lot of "move fast, break things" mentality, along with a wide variety of scams (as opposed to the usual government scams which nobody can stop).
Fact is this morons are expecting Wikimedia to accept fewer payments because a few of the bigger projects burn too much power (read: Bitcoin and Ethereum). They're too stupid to l
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Well, true. But if you regulate any crapcoin the way banks are regulated (and that is what it would take), you just end up with electronic banking and electronic interbank-transfers. These are really, really cheap in a modern banking system, like 1 cent per transfer, regardless of volume. No crapcoin can beat that.
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Goodness here is another rsilvergun comment about cryptocurrency that compels me to respond again.
Normally I hate using "whataboutism"s to respond to an argument, but with logical fallacies and blind spots in your argument I felt it only proper to point out the irony in several of your points where you are comparing crypto to the superiority of fiat currency while neglecting to acknowledge how fiat actually solves these problems.
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It might be theoretically possible to create a cryptocurrency that on balance isn't evil. I don't know of any existing one, and creating one is nontrivial. Existing cryptocurrency is massively inefficient(in terms of resources used per transaction and transactions per unit time), highly volatile, and is almost exclusively used for speculation or illegal activity. Its no stretch to say that something with these properties is on balance evil and should be banned in every civilized nation.
Bitcoin uses more
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> banned
They said the same things about the internet as well, just not here on /.
When my bank stops taking 3 to 5 business days (Score:2)
When contracts are exactly what they algorithmically logically say they are, indisputably, transparently,non-repudiably, or with a universally agreed mostly algorithmic dispute mechanism, I'll agree that we don't need a lot of the economy to move to smart-contract infrastructure.
When national governments start getting together to make universal global rules for transac
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It depends on how you define "cryptocurrency" and whether you consider banks evil or not.
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Banks themselves are neutral. They will do anything for money, whether good or evil. But banks are also heavily regulated, as in if they do certain things or look away on certain things, somebody will go to prison. That regulation aspect is completely missing in crapcoins and that makes them tend strongly towards evil.
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Sure. So a proof of stake cryptocurrency is pretty much a credit union. If you don't think credit unions are evil, and you think that proof of stake cryptocurrencies are cryptocurrencies, then it's possible to create one that's not evil. Starting up a credit union doesn't sound as crypto punk badass though.
Hey Geniuses there is no -1 disagree (Score:2)
Keep digging. (Score:2)
You got 20% Troll and 40% Overrated. If we're being honest, "overrated" is "-1 disagree" while "troll" is effectively, "no reasonable person could believe this". Frankly, I would not have any immediate objections to cryptocurrency if it weren't promoting pollution for profit. However, until climate change is no longer looming then every watt wasted is a watt driving pollution as it could otherwise be used to displace polluting sources.
So yeah, fusion reactors powering cryptocurrency could be a cool thing
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There are several fairly large scale cryptocurrency/smart-contract platforms that are Ethereum competitors and have already been running for a year or so on non-energy-intensive protocols.
In fairness, you should be more educated in the subject you are critiquing.
The unreasonable persons are those who post inflammato
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Non-energy-intensive Ethereum (the #2 cryptocurrency) is considerably less than a year away.
I believe that when I see it. And see it working for a while, because their whole "smart contract" things is excessively hard to get right.
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And btw I am a climate and eco-activist,
Talk is cheap. Your actions promote just the opposite. I mean, have you even bothered to switch to driving an EV?
Re:EVs (Score:2)
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So that would be a no. Using an ICE for 40% of your commutes is more pollution than if you drove an EV 100% of the time.
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I'm a semi-hypocritical environmental advocate. I still partake in some of the environmentally bad stuff our society routinely does,
while advocating for that environmentally bad stuff to be severe-carbon-priced out of economic viability on a really steep ramp.
Charge me significantly more for fuel, asap, please.
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So what's your objection to blockchains that don't "promote pollution for profit"? They do exist. Including some pretty big projects.
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It would probably be the money laundering part of it but I'm not clear on the implied resources utilized by other forms of cryptocurrency.
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Very software developer. "Okay, version 1 is pretty bad, but version 2 will fix all the problems! Any day now! Promise! What, you don't want to use version 1? Luddite!"
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It shows that those pressuring Wikimedia to deny crypto donations are ignorant of blockchain projects utilizing very small amounts of energy to facilitate transactions. Even some older non-crypto blockchains like Ripple can facilitate transactions at low energy cost compared to typical fiat transactions.
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Sorry you're getting downvoted. Unfortunately there is some deep phobia and hate for crypto on Slashdot.
But stories like this are the worst. Sounds like Wikimedia was bullied into not accepting crypto, and now douchebags get to feel super righteous that they did something so overwhelmingly good (in their minds). It's the same rush that a religious zealot gets when the throw a stone at a sinner. That rush of moral superiority.
You're right that it's very conservative to not accept new forms of payment. But
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It's not easy to do it and not break it. If you think it is, feel free to do it yourself. It's all open source code, and I'm sure your immediate proven solution would be welcomed.
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Bitcoin is not exactly a stellar example of developer performance. It takes ages for them to agree on anything.