It's Official: Wikipedia Stops Accepting Donations in Cryptocurrency

Posted by EditorDavid

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  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.

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  • 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.

      • 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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        • 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.

          • 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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    • "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...:-)

      • 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.

    • • 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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

• • And what's more, high energy consumption is not an inherent property of cryptocurrency. For version 1 cryptocurrencies it is, but Ethereum will soon be off that, and there are many other new ones that are not energy intensive. So that is a complete red herring (spurious and vexatious) argument.

    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

    • I have donated quite a bit (I think) to Wikipedia, and I will stop doing so. I donated around $50 every year, which according to their website is far more than the average.

      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.

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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.

  • All cryptocurrency is evil. The most obvious is that it's a currency made out of whole cloth where the technical design lends itself to money laundering and Ponzi schemes. Attempts to fix those flaws lead to complexity which in turn leads to vulnerabilities. I shouldn't have to explain why having a currency that has fundamental technical vulnerabilities on top of all the other problems that are regular currency brings with it and that isn't backed by a government in any way shape or form is a recipe for disaster.
    
    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.
    
    /. Is full of tech nerds and we really want to believe that all the problems in the world can be solved with tech. But there are just some things that need human and social solutions. Technology can't solve all problems in the world. If only because we're still humans were not machines.

    • > 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 the cryptocurrencies don't fall victim to negative market effects that crop up in an unregulated market what ends up happening is you have to regulate them so much that all you've really done is recreate our Federal reserve system and banking systems but with more steps and a lot of wasted electricity.
        
        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

  • 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

    • > banned

      They said the same things about the internet as well, just not here on/.

  • Labelling a viewpoint (parent post) that is opposed, with stated reasons, to the anti-crypto orthodoxy as a troll is just Orwellian censorship of a viewpoint you disagree with. Grow up. Join the real adult world, where people disagree and are allowed to disagree.

• "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.

• 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

  • 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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        • • Yet here you are, posting as an AC

            Why do you care what anyone posts?

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            • • Plenty of people here know exactly who I am. I've never hidden it.

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

• 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

  • > 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.