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Mozilla's call for cryptocurrency donations angers founder
- price 5y agoIn short: after Mozilla cheerily announced it's accepting cryptocurrency donations with BitPay, jwz tweeted about it with his unique style of entertaining vitriol: https://mobile.twitter.com/jwz/status/1478022085737803776 https://mobile.twitter.com/jwz/status/1478022085737803776
- 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
- 0x0nyandesu 5y ago[flagged]
- 3np 5y agoBitpay is probably the worst they could have gone from a PR perspective as they’re also facing a lot of hate from crypto people: they have always been incorporating dark patterns and questionable KYC procedures. Nowadays I think you’ll have to submit passport and a webcam recording to use them for payments or donations at all. They’re like a worse PayPal, except it happens to be with cryptocurrencies instead of credit cards. It’s kind of the worst of both worlds. But hey, at least they have a process for USD-denominated refunds on those donations. /s Mozilla should just have thrown up a self-custodied wallet address or two on their website and be done with it instead of awkward emoji-shill-tweeting about Dogecoin through Bitpay.
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoDoesn't sound questionable. In fact it sounds exactly what my bank does. Unless of course cryptocurrency really is about anonymity, tax evasion and laundering money.
- toolz 5y agoYou're presenting a false dichotomy. The options are not: 1. Give up your data 2. Be a criminal There are other options.
- irtigor 5y agoThe options truly are just those two in my country if I want to open a bank account, buy stocks and etc, so I expected less sketchy crypto exchanges, payment/crypto acc and etc to implement the same mechanisms because otherwise it is very likely that they are simply not following my local laws and are enabling money laundering, tax evasion and other criminal activities to gain market share. The only thing that is a bit different is that if you physically go to branch they will only record your id and address (they don't need a recorded video of you saying the bank name or similar to verify that those documents belong to you).
- toolz 5y ago> it is very likely that they are simply not following my local laws Places outside of your local jurisdiction are not beholden to your laws. Also, even you have a third option, which is to just not open a bank account. So again, it's a false dichotomy. Not to mention you could move somewhere that allows non-KYC banking. There are definitely more options than you let on.
- irtigor 5y agoWhat you said is false, if they are operating in my country (and that is true if they are opening accounts/etc to people in my country) they must comply, it doesn't matter that the server is located in another country or anything like that. About the second point sure if they are not operating from a country that requires id identification and are only dealing with clients from places like that it is true, otherwise they will get in trouble, it is just a matter of time (if I'm not mistaken there are even examples of less dumb crypto exchanges creating multiple entities in multiple countries with slightly different urls so that they can have it both ways).
- bawolff 5y agoI don't like cryptocurrency. But charities are there to do a job, if someone wants to give them money, it seems silly to refuse. Accepting a bitcoin and immediately turning it into USD does not mean you politically support cryptocurrency.
- jltsiren 5y agoAccepting money means whatever people perceive it to mean. Charities are unavoidably ideological, and their every action will be interpreted politically. If a charity accepts money from a source some people consider tainted, those people may now consider the charity tainted as well, and they may stop donating.
- roenxi 5y agoMozilla can't satisfy people who seriously see payment systems as an actionable political problem. Those people are too flighty to be courted.
- VectorLock 5y agoI think his objections is what the transactions to do this with the cryptocurrency consume a massive amount of energy and there by contribute to global warming.
- nefitty 5y ago> Hi, I'm sure that whoever runs this account has no idea who I am, but I founded @mozilla and I'm here to say fuck you and fuck this. Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters. This is an appropriate reaction to the promotion of a scam industry. The antiwork subreddit had to add a warning about crypto because a crypto shill managed to get his post on the front page. The more crypto is normalized, the more regular people will be tricked into worthless "digital property", with their money siphoned into the pockets of people like Gary Vaynerchuk.
- zpeti 5y agoThere clearly are a lot of scammers and grifters in this market, as with all upcoming markets usually, but how is crypto a scam industry? In 13 years the fundamentals of Bitcoin have not been exploited. Algorithmically I mean. Human element wise perhaps.
- cookiengineer 5y ago> 13 years I am not sure where you've lived the last 13 years, but in this reality lots of projects that were aspiring use cases of that technology were founded, somebody got wind of it with their disciples...and the coin got dumped afterwards. So yeah, I would say crypto coins overall are a ponzi scheme. Doesn't matter how good your tech is, people will exploit it to get rich. And they successfully did, otherwise everybody (meaning the whole society) invested in BTC would be a millionaire by now and the current oligarchic structure with almost neverending wealth through manipulation of other people would not exist. Count the coins, count the IPOs that successfully were dumped. They have a different view on it. Also ask them about whether or not two years after the IPO they've build any actual code or any actual program. Most of them, even the successful ones, abandoned their ideas because they got money out of it and that was the thing they cared about the most. People in the crypto bubble always forget to ask these questions, because they themselves think that they are already invested into crypto and have no alternative way of using their resources anymore. But that's not true either. Coming back to BTC: a stable coin does not have more than 20k$ difference in worth per day. Sorry, BTC failed. And now it's the competition of high frequency traders that you as a citizen have no chance against anymore. That is why I'd say BTC also has failed.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- charlieyu1 5y agoCryptocurrency as an open source form of money should have been more popular.
- HHC-Hunter 5y agoI think BTC & ETH (not random shitcoins) have a place and I honestly think they're better unit's of currency than fiat. However, unfortunately I would now say that it's been co-opted by US-centric grifters/charlatans/hustlers. The grifters need to go, but the crypto community doesn't really seem to want this to happen, as if the movement has been co-opted by these exact types of people. Sidenote: I would hazard a guess that the people memeing about "oh my energy use" haven't looked into it with all that much detail. Fiat is MUCH worse in this position.
- tsimionescu 5y agoWithout the community of grifters, neither BTC or ETH would have any serious market value, and so they would be extremely easy to attack. The only reason vast mining networks can exist is because of the huge amounts of money that grifters have been pumping into the system. The "community" probably understands this very well. > Sidenote: I would hazard a guess that the people memeing about "oh my energy use" haven't looked into it with all that much detail. Fiat is MUCH worse in this position. No, fiat is processing literally millions of times the amount of transactions of BTC & ETH combined for a fraction of the energy use. Sure, the whole financial sector is larger in energy use than BTC and ETH, but most of that is all the parts that BTC and ETH don't cover at all - insurance, loans, risk eval, customer support, investments, KYC and AML, and many other functions that are crucial to the economy.
- morelisp 5y agoMozilla dabbled in cryptocurrency donations before, when they were far less controversial, and still decided it was a bad idea. I wonder what changed - or have they just lost so much institutional knowledge at this point they can't remember their 2014 mistakes? https://blog.mozilla.org/foundation-archive/fundraising/bitcoin-donations-to-mozilla-17-days-in/ https://blog.mozilla.org/foundation-archive/fundraising/bitc...
- xuki 5y agoBTC wasn’t using that much energy in 2014, of course nobody gave a shit back then.
- morelisp 5y agoYour comment would make sense if I had asked why nobody protested against BTC donations in 2014, but I asked why Mozilla started taking BTC donations again sometime after 2014. (Also, it was still using an awful lot and the trendline was clear.)
- xuki 5y agoHa, I totally misread your comment. My apologies.
- capableweb 5y agoFrom https://wiki.mozilla.org/Donate_Bitcoin https://wiki.mozilla.org/Donate_Bitcoin: > Does giving cryptocurrency result in more of my charitable donation going to transaction fees? > No. Bitpay’s service fees, at a flat 1%, are actually lower than credit card or Paypal transaction fees. How does that answer the question? The question was about cryptocurrency fees, which is not answered. Or is BitPay eating the transaction costs, if so, how is their business model viable? (Bypassing the issue that using BitPay is nowhere near decentralization and defeats the entire purpose of cryptocurrencies) > What personal information does Mozilla require cryptocurrency donors to provide? > In most cases, Mozilla requires only an email address [...] That seems false, the form is asking me for Name, Address, Phone number and more AFK details if I try to donate. Again, antithetical to the original purpose of cryptocurrencies.
- celticninja 5y agoYou miss the point that the transaction fee is paid by the sender. If I am donating to Mozilla then I send my cryptocurrency, pay the required fee and then Mozilla gets the sum I sent. In this case bitpay take 1% of the donation and probably bundle them all up and pay Mozilla at the end of the week/month in cryptocurrency (1 transaction so only 1 fee) or in fiat.
- lottin 5y ago> the transaction fee is paid by the sender You don't know that. The sender can pass the transaction fee on to Mozilla simply by deducting it from the donated amount.
- nathias 5y agoI don't know how anyone could make the "it's bad for environment" argument in good faith. It's green compared to the alternatives and has less hidden externalities.
- tsimionescu 5y agoVisa alone processes more transactions per second than all PoW coins combined, for a fraction of a fraction of the energy consumption of BTC.
- nathias 5y agoVisa isn't a currency, you could compare it to a payment provider on the BTC chain not to BTC itself. The $ is a better equivalent, it requires a military, thousands of banks, people flying private jets to organize etc.
- tsimionescu 5y agoA dollar is just a bit value in someone's DB. The military, thousands of banks, and people flying private jets are all propping up the economy, not the dollar. They are propping up the value of BTC in fact, more or less as much as they are propping up the dollar. Visa is exactly the right equivalent to the BTC network.
- nathias 5y agoReally? You don't think there might be something more to currencies than a bit in someone's DB? You're confusing representation for the thing.
- randomhodler84 5y agoYeah, cos if so, I’d rather trust an immutable globally replicated write only db protected by the largest computational network on the planet than some mutable db sitting in a rack in a banks data center :-)
- gpvos 5y agoDo they finally accept normal money donations though?
- strogonoff 5y agoMozilla Foundation has accepted donations for a long time. However, if you want to support MDN or Firefox, it’s questionable whether donating accomplishes that[0]. Almost all of the revenue is going to Mozilla Corporation, with ethically questionable CEO[1]. Same goes for donations in croins, I presume. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20895624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20895624 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28954390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28954390
- hda2 5y agoLike it or not, cryptocurrency is real money and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Rather than throwing a tantrum, it might be a better idea to work on a solution to its downsides (PoW or whatever irks you about crypto). Until then, people like this will continue to get outraged while the pro-crypto crowd carries on unaffected.
- hocuspocus 5y agojwz is exactly trying to solve the problem, in the only way that can work: politically. The only technological solution to the downsides of PoW is to not use PoW. Nice logical fallacy by the way, "opponents just have to solve the problems we've created..." no thanks.
- danuker 5y ago> opponents just have to solve the problems we've created... Cryptocurrency being in use means people perceive the cost of using them being less than the benefit from using them. If the problem is the carbon emitted for power generation, then tax the carbon emissions (which already happens in lots of jurisdictions). About Bitcoin being a Ponzi scheme, if this is true, then so are the current stock and bond market at absurd valuations (1.75% interest while inflation is 6.8%), where investors play musical chairs until the Fed and commercial banks stop printing money.
- extra88 5y ago> Cryptocurrency being in use means people perceive the cost of using them being less than the benefit from using them. Most of the cost isn't born by those who benefit from it, it's an externality to them. > If the problem is the carbon emitted for power generation, then tax the carbon emissions (which already happens in lots of jurisdictions). There's still the opportunity cost of available low-carbon energy being frittered away on cryptocurrencies instead of something more useful.
- paulgdp 5y agoWhy shouldn't it be a valid opinion to not like cryptocurrencies? And to not want to contribute? Why is not ok to prefer money regulated by the rule of law? Moreover, I have no idea how I could help with the problem of recovering stolen cryptocurrency/NFTs or lost private keys.
- _el1s7 5y agowho gives a fuck?