Dear Max,
Thank you for your email. We have been looking into accepting BitCoins for some
time now, but at present we don't have the staff available to process BitCoin
payments as well as Direct Debits, Paypal and cheque/postal orders. There are also
concerns as to whether or not accepting BitCoins would be acceptable to the
Charities Commission - the currency is untraceable, which is something that the
Charities Commission may not be entirely happy with! That said, I'll put your
question forward to the Board, and they'll look into it.
Sincerely,
This can be solved in an instant by requiering the donor to fill in a email/name and phone number.
There you go. Not anonymous anymore.
So they mean that organizations that go out and ask for donations from people on the street should not take them because those people who give are anonymous? Are they kidding or do they not understand the foundation of independent organisations and donations?
It would be much better for them to get their money ONLY anonymously and here is why.
Case 1.Lets say that google or apple would give them $millions for each year, during a few years.
That one or two single companies stand for 80% of their budget. They become dependent on these money since those are the money that payes their server costs etc.
Now this means they cannot mention any bad things about Apple/google/facebook, such as them using sweatshop workers or whatever because they now find themselves in a dependency situation.
Its almost like if Apple/google/facebook would bribe them.
Case 2Even worse, lets say a mafia organisation or criminal individual gives them huge amounts of money non anonymously for a few years. Perhaps they dont even know yet that the person/organization is bad yet.
This buyes the mafia organisation good credibility and creates a dependency situation for wikipedia and associates them with this entity.
It also means that they can no longer take those well used money once this organisation is revealed to be a bad one and that their wikipedia name is dragged in the dust.
If they would they can no longer claim to be independent since they accepted/accepts donations from this entity.What if Usama Bin Ladin was one of their biggest donators before or during the attack? How would that affect their brand?
Or lets say they were an old organization and Hitler was revealed to be one of their founding donators?
However if the donations was only given anonymously they could allways claim to be independent!
Since they would never know who give them money.
So another problem with not accepting anonymous money is that this acctually gives them the problem of having to turn down money from
certain organisations just to be able to claim that they are independent.
Acctually
they should turn down money from non anonymous persons and companies etc just to be able to be trustworthy.
This means that they will get less money and be able to do less good. Not improving the world as much as they could.
This in fact is very important for a organization that wants to claim that we should trust their information to not be biased or censored.
So the truth is that its acctually way better for a independent media company to get anonymous donations, since this free them from any suspicion of dependency and links both now, in the future and in the past.
And it means that we can trust them to be as independent as possible and they are free to write what ever they want.
The fact is that they should preferably ONLY accept anonymous donations for the sake of independency.
I would say this.
Do not trust a media organisation that do not ONLY accept anonymous donations.
And if they still dont want anonymous money, they can simply ask for name and id number but they are not trustworthy anymore.
So this decision from wikipedia to not accept Bitcoins makes them not trustworthy anymore.
They cannot claim to be an independent trustable organisation until they only get anonymous donations such as Bitcoins or cash.
