https://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Why-doesnt-Wikipedia-accept-Bitcoin-donations?srid=twa&share=1Joseph Fox, administrator at Wikipedia
Steven has hit the nail squarely on the head - the primary point is that, at the moment, Bitcoin is entirely unstable and it would not make any financial sense to accept donations in such a format.
So let me grasp this. Wikipedia wants funding. They don't sell a service that costs a fixed amount of USD, they do not have to pay a vendor a fixed amount in USD for something they sell in bitcoin. In reality, they have zero money in the 'fundraising account' when a fundraiser starts. If people donated bitcoins, these would be valuable to the foundation no matter if they were worth 1USD each or 200USD each. Since the total value of bitcoins Wikipedia posess equals zero, and the value of a bitcoin is likely to be non-zero, adding bitcoins to the 'fundraising account' of Wikipedia means that the 'fundraising account' will increase by a non-zero number, which would benefit Wikipedia and contribute to their continued operations. They would not even need to convert to USD, they could've used the bitcoins to pay for some services that they need to have online anyway, hosting, vpn's, graphic design and so on. How can Bitcoin be 'entirely unstable' ? It's been pretty stable for the last 4 years, except for one blockchain fork. When talking about the exchange rate, it's always over zero and how is not getting something worth more than zero interesting ?
It makes a huge financial sense to accept donations in such a format. I think he underestimates just how many geeks are into bitcoin, and how much we use wikipedia.
His arguments makes zero sense.
He would've been better off not answering at all or just say that management policy forbids it. Not making up stuff like this, I'm not sure he even believes in that himself...
On the subject of payment processors, without any real knowledge of how these are set up, I cannot give an informed answer. As Brandon mentions above, the impact of Bitcoin donations would not likely be high enough to warrant the effort.
The effort ? Is googling 5 mins a considerable effort ? I would think implementing and setting up a payment solution through BitPay would be rather straightforward as well. Too me, in reality what he says is that they do not want to accept bitcoins. That's fair enough - I just don't understand why people make up all these bullshit reasons, do they really believe in it themselves ?
