Wikipedia Community Votes To Stop Accepting Cryptocurrency Donations

waspleg writes: More than 200 long-time Wikipedia editors have requested that the Wikimedia Foundation stop accepting cryptocurrency donations. The foundation received crypto donations worth about $130,000 in the most recent fiscal year -- less than 0.1 percent of the foundation's revenue, which topped $150 million last year. In her proposal for the Wikimedia Foundation, GorillaWarfare added that 'Bitcoin and Ethereum are the two most highly used cryptocurrencies, and are both proof-of-work, using an enormous amount of energy.' According to one widely cited estimate, the bitcoin network consumes around 200 TWh of energy per year. That's about as much energy as is consumed by 70 million people in Thailand. And it works out to around 2,000 kWh per bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin defenders countered that bitcoin's energy usage is driven by its mining process, which consumes about the same amount of energy regardless of the number of transactions. So accepting any given bitcoin donation won't necessarily lead to more carbon emissions. But cryptocurrency critics argued that Wikimedia's de facto endorsement of cryptocurrencies may help to push up their price. And the more expensive bitcoin is, the more energy miners will devote to creating new ones. If the foundation complies with the community's request, it wouldn't be the first organization to stop using cryptocurrencies due to environmental concerns. Earlier this month, the Mozilla Foundation announced it would stop accepting cryptocurrencies that use the energy-intensive proof-of-work consensus process. These include bitcoin and ether -- though the latter is expected to convert to a proof-of-stake model in the future.

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