Wikipedia Community Votes to Stop Accepting Cryptocurrency Donations

upstart writes:

Wikipedia community votes to stop accepting cryptocurrency donations:

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.

Debate on the proposal has raged over the last three months.

"Cryptocurrencies are extremely risky investments that have only been gaining popularity among retail investors," wrote Wikipedia user GorillaWarfare, the original author of the proposal, back in January. "I do not think we should be endorsing their use in this way."

GorillaWarfare is Molly White, a Wikipedian who has become something of an anti-cryptocurrency activist. She also runs the Twitter account "web3 is going just great," which highlights "some of the many disasters happening in crypto, defi, NFTs, and other web3 projects," the account profile says.

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."

[...] 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.

[...] Ultimately, 232 long-time editors of Wikipedia voiced support for ending cryptocurrency donations, while 94 opposed the move.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.