this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
270 points (99.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43989 readers
622 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.