More than 200 old Wikipedia editors have asked the Wikimedia Foundation to stop accepting cryptocurrency donations. The foundation received crypto donations worth about $130,000 in its most recent fiscal year — less than 0.1 percent of the foundation’s revenue, which was more than $150 million last year.
Debate over the proposal has raged for the past three months.
“Cryptocurrencies are extremely risky investments that are only gaining popularity among private investors,” Wikipedia user GorillaWarfare, the original author of the proposal, wrote in January. “I don’t think we should condone its use in this way.”
GorillaWarfare is Molly White, a Wikipedian turned anti-cryptocurrency activist of sorts. She also manages the Twitter account”Web3 is just going greatwhich “highlights some of the many disasters happening in crypto, defi, NFTs and other web3 projects,” the account profile says.
In its proposal to the Wikimedia Foundation, GorillaWarfare added that “Bitcoin and Ethereum are the two most widely used cryptocurrencies, and both proof-of-work, with a huge amount of energy.”
According to a widely quoted estimate, the Bitcoin network consumes about 200 terrawatt hours of energy per year. That is about as much energy as is consumed by 70 million people in Thailand. And it works out to about 2,000 kilowatt hours per Bitcoin transaction.
Bitcoin defenders objected that the currency’s energy consumption is driven by the mining process, which consumes roughly the same amount of energy regardless of the number of transactions. So accepting a particular donation in bitcoin will not necessarily increase carbon emissions.
But critics argued that Wikimedia’s de facto endorsement of cryptocurrencies could help drive their price up. And the higher the value, the more energy miners will spend creating new coins.
Crypto skeptics pointed out that people can easily convert their bitcoins to dollars before donating. But US tax law gives benefits to those who donate assets directly to a charitable organization.
Cryptocurrency advocates also pointed out that some people do not have easy access to conventional banking services.
“Bank transfers, credit cards and PayPal are not accessible to millions of people who do not have government ID and therefore cannot open an account,” wrote Wikipedia user AnarcioC. “They do not allow anonymous or pseudonymous donations (may be risky depending on your personal situation); and they can be easily monitored and censored.”
Growing Controversy Over Cryptocurrency
Ultimately, 232 longtime Wikipedia editors expressed support for ending cryptocurrency donations, while 94 opposed the move.
Such votes are not binding on the Wikimedia Foundation. Legally, the foundation is independent of the Wikipedia community and does not necessarily have to act on its requests.
Commenting in January, Foundation spokesperson Greg Varnum said: “Our teams will continue to monitor this discussion and listen to the feedback; we consider all that has happened here as we chart our way forward. †
We’ve asked the Wikimedia Foundation to comment on the vote and will update this story if we get a response.
If the foundation complies with the community’s request, it would not 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, although the latter is expected to convert to a proof-of-stake model in the future.
Last year, Elon Musk announced that Tesla would no longer accept bitcoin payments to buy Tesla vehicles. The announcement came just two months after Tesla started accepting bitcoins for Teslas.
Gaming company Steam stopped accepting bitcoin in 2017, citing the network’s transaction fees, which were then near record highs.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica†
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