this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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This exactly. But also because of my self interest. When they accepted crypto I was donating crypto, to encourage people to use crypto. Specifically monero, which they never accepted, but I used a transactional exchange to give them money from monero.
Since they got political about how they accept money, I can in relationship be political about not giving them money. I support their mission. I just wish they'd make it easier to give them money
My dudes, the fact that cryptos are fundamentally fucked and unusable by design is nothing to do with politics, it's to do with technology. You don't get to brush it off as "oh they're just being woke", it's a business decision necessitated by the fact that it's really annoying to get paid in crypto.
There's a lot to say about this, but in this case specifically, the value of all major coins fluctuates massively, so if you accept them as payment then you have to look at it as getting paid with a speculative asset. It's like getting paid with a barrel of oil hoping that the price will go up. I guess some businesses would be willing to make that bet, but maybe not a 501c like Wikimedia.
And the reason the prices fluctuate is because miners validators and holders straight up want it to, they want the price to fluctuate because they want to speculate and get rich, not actually use it as a currency. Even if normies were to require payment in stablecoins, enthusiasts don't tend to use those because the price fluctuation is part of the point.
We could have a thread about it
I respect your position. I'm just telling you why I used to donate to Wikipedia and I don't now.
It doesn't need to be held. Once you've received the decentralized currency, the tech has done its job. You exchange it to dollars
Again, price volatility had nothing to with Wikipedia stopping crypto donations.
You can hate all you want, crypto is the only way I have to pay for a lot of things and it has definitely helped me more than reactionary moralists from the West living large in their oppression funded country.
I didn't call them woke. Hell, people would probably call me woke if they asked about my political preferences. Being woke and being a reactionary pawn are two different things.
I don't understand why it's upvoted. It doesn't even make sense. The reason crypto is bad for donations is the enormous transaction fees. They prefer giving up on your very peculiar situation because you are not worth it. Accepting bitcoin for you brings new fees for hundreds of normal people who do have access to the regular banking system but are enthusiastic about crypto so they will use it if available, thus giving less and overall losing money.
What enormous transaction fees?
Stablecoin transfers on an Ethereum L2 like Arbitrum is a few cents and about to get even cheaper in the future. It's 1/10000 of a cent on Solana.
Monero payments are 1-3 cents.
Bitcoin has the highest one I paid, something like 12-15 cents. This can go higher like $10 if the chain is busy but you have plenty of options in the crypto space to choose the appropriate chain for payments.
I mean, it's very clear you just listen to mainstream news and actually believe their agenda.
True, i should have mentioned transaction fees maybe even as the main point, and transaction time too while we're at it. In the moment when i was writing that comment all i was thinking of is trying to not write an essay, which you easily fall into when writing about crypto, so i omitted some pretty crucial points.
Speaking of points, i'm surprised it's upvoted too, that kind of contrarian rant doesn't usually garner sympathy
Your rant is not contrarian for Western imperialists who don't want another financial system competing with their current hegemony.
That's why crypto is hated by Westerners while most others have neutral to positive opinions of it generally.
And the transaction fees argument and time needed for confirmation doesn't even make sense? Wikipedia doesn't need to pay any fees to accept crypto and it's not like they're a business which needs the money a second after the transaction. Even if they did need it that quickly, there are plenty of choices in crypto that settle much faster than Bitcoin, which they used.
I definitely agree with your stance that we should exclude people from things because it's inconvenient. This is why I don't support accessibility measures in any domain.
I don't even understand what your point is? Wikipedia doesn't have to pay fees to accept crypto? They could keep other payment options too, no one said credit cards should not be allowed. They could just provide the address for the centralised exchange and sell it for cash with minimal problems.
What I'm finding out is that people have a bad case of Dunning-Kruger when it comes to crypto and it's usually privileged Westerners who don't care if other people are included or not. Just straight up racists.
Quoting from the article:
The environmental part is arguably mitigated by other cryptos than Bitcoin, but the others are true for pretty much all of crypto. The low volume of donations in particular is notable to me: people buy cryptocurrencies to hold as a speculative asset, and not to use as a currency.
I do see the mention that Mozilla stopped accepting crypto after backlash, but i don't think you're going to be able to pain that backlash as reactionary. And they would have run into the same issues as Wikipedia did regardless of backlash of any kind.
They do make it easy to give them money.
They just don't want unstable scam bullshit where they have to go through the slog of going to an exchange, selling the coin, and cashing out.. hoping all the while it doesnt crash in the mean time. Everyone tried to cash in on it when it was hot, before the vast majority knew or realized that crypto was nothing but a pump and dump scam, and they all dropped it due to instability and the fact that its a scam.
Except it was complaints from reactionaries which made them delete the option to donate through crypto after accepting it for years!
So, they were worried that an asset that has consistently gone up in the long term was too unstable to receive payments in? Your arguments make no sense.
I wanna dig into this point: i find it really weird how you tie rejection of crypto into politics at all, let alone reactionary politics. I always saw it as just the fact that the product doesn't fit most people's needs as a currency.
It's reactionary politics? I'm not sure what else led to the rejection. It doesn't actively hurt them to accept crypto. They just capitulated to reactionaries in their rejection, what else would I call it?
I'm not even claiming that crypto in its current form can handle global transactional needs, but Wikipedia and Mozilla realised that it could just be an additional avenue for payments. It wasn't hurting anyone and allowed people like me to contribute. How would you like it if you couldn't pay for things because it upset other people's views of what the world should be like? Because that's what happened to me.
Wikipedia caved to white Western imperialists' demands which have no basis in reality and excluded large portions of the world, most of which are marginalised communities who don't have access to the same financial systems that Westerners do.
I'm just glad that SciHub isn't headed by a reactionary but an actual person who cares about our rights to free and fair access to all things. And SciHub proves the need for an alternate financial system that isn't dominated, or at least, directly controllable by vested interests of the Western financial system.
Ah, i see, so it's conspiracy theories.
You know, the tech just being fundamentally flawed is a lot simpler an explanation than this, and it has the distinct advantage of actually having any evidence to back it up.
At this point, I'm not sure you understand what reactionary means?
The tech being fundamentally flawed has nothing to do with payments being stopped. Show me one reason where they said it was because they weren't receiving the payments as shown by the blockchain.