It's a high friction, culture-clashing payment flow. I certainly noped out of that form real fast.
For comparison: https://www.givedirectly.org/crypto/
And another campaign on The Giving Block, an anonymity friendly donation payment processor: https://thegivingblock.com/campaigns/ukraine-emergency-respo...
1. I wonder if they'll keep this enabled or not?
I was wondering the same thing -- hopefully they will, as I'd like to see that model succeed.
Yes, that’s known as KYC laws, which are required if you’re a payment processor of any kind.
As tax considerations with crypto are just getting off the ground
So you basically have this wide polar extreme of:
A) People using crypto and thinking there are no taxes
B) And entrepreneurs moving their premines to their own non-profits for massive tax breaks and exemption
leaving existing non-profits just waiting
People in A) move slightly towards the center year over year as reality catches up to them and more become loaded with appreciated assets or just have an inventory of crypto at all times
People close to B) are also loaded with assets and more likely to contribute to other non profits
Its better for a non profit to keep the door open and have the payment rails available. Large contributions could happen at any time. At the end of the day, money talks, pretty much all non profits figure it out when a donor wants to donate any large asset, including in crypto
This is very not true. Buying and selling anything has very clear tax implications. It's more that enforcement is slow, and people are willingly breaking the law because of it. Here's a good Twitter conversation explaining the situation:
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1501707876888240131
> I think the issue is mostly that the industry’s core request is “Can we have an outright exemption from securities regulation?”, the regulators say “Absolutely not you must follow the law.”, industry follows with “How high is this on your enforcement priority list?”, “Not very.”
> And so industry complains “My my this all seems so ambiguous and look at all these similar projects which never get enforcement actions. I wish we had Regulatory Clarity (TM).”
I was saying that crypto users willing to consider tax and more complex tax is just getting off the ground, not that the law itself ever ignored them
I think the rest of my post makes that clear
> People in A) move slightly towards the center year over year as reality catches up to them (the reality that tax always applied)
but I can see how it doesn't, especially if you are expecting a crypto tax / regulation protestor
The above statement is false.
I prefer to use cash and crypto to prevent my expenses from being tracked (although I absolutely am not avoiding any taxes). I pay cash, not crypto when I want weed (sadly it's still illegal in most of the places). I rarely hold more than $100 worth so don't care about where is the rate going. I presume I'm not unique.
[Citation needed]
Over the past years I've been able to book flights, shop hardware, get hotels and rental cars, renew my domain, pay for my server with cryptocurrencies.
You could buy fully modifiable/refundable first class tickets and use them as free options to bet on the crypto in question
Accepting payment with bitcoin means using bitcoin as the currency in the PNR, just like you can use euros or yen or pounds or whatever
I'm tired of these shifting goalposts in crypto conversations. They always go like this:
1. I derive value from crypto
2. There's no value in crypto! Show me a usecase!
3. <Presents usecase where crypto is used to derive value>
4. But that uses Fiat/off-chain/<something not crypto>/<vendor that doesn't know what crypto is>/<workflow that's replacable by fiat> so crypto has no value!
The claim the GP made is that an individual can derive value from crypto, not that this value is untainted by fiat, off-chain movement, or any of the other incidental claims. When you use USD or GBP to buy a good, the good itself has probably traded hands between many currencies before the final product was sold to you using the fiat you paid. Does that mean USD or GBP are "useless" because input costs for your product were paid for in RMB? No, you still derive value from fiat.
Sorry, I know, off-topic.
WP:NPOV is about article content, not payment systems.
> Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, nor a web directory.
Maybe an example would be clearer:
OK: The community doesn't like cryptocurrency, so decides not to accept it for donations.
NOT OK: The community doesn't like cryptocurrency, so turns the Bitcoin article into a hit-piece that only covers criticisms.
Let me just put this this way: you are interpreting the text wrong, and repeatedly circling back to your wrong interpretation won't make it right. Pithy texts usually don't impart a full, correct understanding when read in isolation.
It's
Neutral hardly exists.
as if banks don't spend billions in pointless air travel and (empty in past 2 years) concrete highrises. When WP goes down the ideological rabbit hole everyone loses.
maybe someone will follow up with an RFC to remove banks
Then paypal
> Common arguments in support include: issues of environmental sustainability, that accepting cryptocurrencies constitutes implicit endorsement of the issues surrounding cryptocurrencies, and community issues with the risk to the movement’s reputation for accepting cryptocurrencies.
it looks 100% ideological
What I would concede is that it does challenge the dominant ideology of the establishment.
As this former Federal Reserve economist describes, the Federal Reserve system is extremely centralized:
https://twitter.com/gordonliao/status/1484605701435523072?s=...
This is just one aspect of centralized economic control cryptocurrency threatens to upend.
Centralization will inevitably engender rent-seeking, so the dominant ideological framework being one that glorifies that centralized gatekeeping, and villifies a free market, is entirely predictable.
I don't see how energy efficient currencies and allowing safer ways for people in oppressive countries to donate is ideological
> so has the anti-crypto so we are at an impasse
No on both counts.
Also, the "cryptocurrency movement" isn't just regular ideological, it's particularly ideological. Cryptocurrency wasn't made to fill any practical need, it was made to fit certain peculiar ideological obsessions.
No I'm not. Also, with cryptocurrency you still have middlemen. To whom are you paying fees to clear your transactions on your dog-slow, unscalable, extremely inefficient network?
And why do these systems have the negative characteristics I just mentioned? The peculiar ideological obsessions I referred to earlier.
> Why do you think it's so popular in corrupt authorarian thirld-word countries? And if you live in the US/Europe, you'll get there eventually.
I'll believe it when I see it. And frankly, those use cases are nonsensical. How exactly is someone supposed to convert their Syrian Pounds into cryptocurrency, and after they do that, what use is it? It's not like it's an actual currency that you can buy things with. It's mainly speculative investment surrounded by enormous hype.
True, but that's as close as you'll get to P2P for a currency. Still, there's thousands of btc nodes and anyone could theoretically run one... unlike "just one bank" or "just one Mastercard".
It is slow, and inefficient precisely because there's no central authority (lool up Bizantine Generals problem). It has scaled extremely well for what it actually is.
Some people don't seem to understand this and compare it with, say VISA transactions.
>> It's not like it's an actual currency that you can buy things with.
It is. I can pay someone to build a website using bitcoin. Or, I can buy a car using bitcoin. You just need to agree on a number.
>> How exactly is someone supposed to convert their Syrian Pounds into cryptocurrency
You can always buy bitcoin from an individual in exchange for Syrian pounds. It's like bartering.
You can sell it back to an individual even if exchanges don't work.
>> It's mainly speculative investment surrounded by enormous hype.
That's just a byproduct. For example, I don't "save in bitcoin", I just use it for its intended purposes when I have to make a purchase.
By the way, my govt said exacty the same about the black market of US dollars, because people here use them to protect themselves from a quickly devaluing currency (>60% yearly inflation) and to avoid the corrupt govt control over their money (enormous taxes in exchange for nothing).
> Some people don't seem to understand this and compare it with, say VISA transactions.
The point is almost all people don't really care about that feature of having "no central authority." Cryptocurrency goes through extraordinary effort to solve "problems" people don't actually have and implement features people don't actually care about.
It's like if someone at Google decided all search absolutely must run on 486 machines for weird reasons, and as a consequence it starts taking two minutes to load a page of results. Maybe the two minute load times are a phenomenal achievement of some brilliant engineers, but none of that matters to me as a user who hasn't joined the cult of the 486.
>> It's not like it's an actual currency that you can buy things with.
> It is. I can pay someone to build a website using bitcoin. Or, I can buy a car using bitcoin. You just need to agree on a number.
Theoretically, but that's not what people actually use Bitcoin for. It's also a superfluous detour in those transactions, merely adding unnecessary exchange and other fees.
>>> Why do you think it's so popular in corrupt authorarian thirld-word countries? And if you live in the US/Europe, you'll get there eventually.
> You can always buy bitcoin from an individual in exchange for Syrian pounds. It's like bartering.
Which ones deal in Syrian pounds? Give me an example.
And even there is one, how is someone in a "corrupt authorarian thirld-word [sic]" country supposed to get their money there? The banking system, perhaps? Or some black market broker? Doesn't that defeat the point?
Or, if the on-chain parties are just Wikipedia and a few big payment service providers to avoid that everyone has to do the setup individually, you've basically reinvented paypal credits or, less evil-ly, liberapay.
The assumption is that Lightning users already have active open channels to other nodes in the network, and so making a new donation to Wikimedia would not require any additional channel opening, and no on-chain activity.
> “In a situation like this, where the national bank is not fully operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers, to make it very quick and get results almost immediately.”
NYTimes: https://archive.ph/3HVqU#
which are less than 1% of the yearly transaction volume according to Chainalysis lol
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/31/eu-parliament-vot...
[1] https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/kraken-to...
Sure there is. A lot of people have lots of value tied up in crypto, a very liquid asset. It’s also easy to send. I know nothing about wiring money to Ukraine, but I know how to donate to Ukraine organizations that accept crypto. If crypto is a small part of your revenue stream, maybe it’s because you haven’t nurtured it as a donation channel.
You go to your bank and ask them to start a wire transfer. The recipient’s bank will provide the instructions. You can even do this entirely online.
Haha, or, I can just click a single link from a donation page and send ETH from the wallet in my browser directly to the organization that I want to support, which I did in the case of Ukraine. No need to log in to any third party website, and the transaction was finalized in ~10 seconds with negligible fees.
Seems that crypto is just a technical solution to socio-political issues that plague parts of the world.
Did you ever bother to check that "single link from a donation page" to make sure it's really the correct one?
I love being able to call a bank if my VISA card gets stolen and charged up to high heaven and get that all reversed.
Meanwhile, good luck with that NFT that mysteriously landed in your wallet that has bad coding in it to wreck your day. But yes, mass adoption imminent!
[0] https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct...
Why would being physically in a bank be needed?
Interbank transfers work the same way regardless of country ( with the exception of sanctions - you can't wire money to Russia or Iran just like that), over the SWIFT protocol with an IBAN and BIC. Usually you pay a fee for the transfer and currency exchange - some banks abuse that, some are competitive.
I have transacted millions in crypto and wire transfers. Banking with crypto is like the 1970s - exorbitant fees. To do anything useful with it I have to offramp to fiat which drum rolls ends with a wire transfer.
I don't think I've ever wired money in my life. I guess I never needed to. And the few occasions I needed to send some money internationally, I've simply sent crypto, used Western Union, or something like PayPal or Revolut.
I’ll admit that the crypto UX is faster with just entering a destination wallet address. It would be good if banks could adopt QR codes to provide similar experienfe.
Sometimes you get charged a fee, but many institutions will waive that (e.g. Schwab) if your balance is high enough.
How do these people buy groceries or pay regular bills? Most places don’t accept crypto for payments.
If and when the whole world has moved to crypto payments I’m sure they’ll review it again. Until then the argument there are lots of people who have crypto and have not heard of / don’t know how to use a Visa card stretches credulity.
There are also cases in my own country where cryptocurrency is very useful for gambling, with nothing illegal taking place.
> Crypto was around 0.08% of our revenue last year, and it remains one of our smallest revenue channels.
Remember that Wikipedia is one of the top 10 websites on the planet, I'm also assuming that other websites trying to accept crypto have even smaller percentages rendering cryptocurrencies as payment useless, not to mention damaging to the environment.
What is really happening is that nobody is using it for payments at all, rather just holding crypto coins and hoping they'll go up and speculating on the price.