Bitcoin donations no longer welcome on Wikipedia

[nullama]

You see, this is the problem, and the example of Wikipedia is a good one.

Everyone comments here and there that it's "wonderful" and a big step when a company accepts Bitcoin. It's all well and good, but the reality is nobody uses it. In terms of return on investment, why would a company bother adding an option if nobody uses it?

So it may be great to start by admitting that most people are only interested in crypto for speculation. And a lot of you here too.
That's not the purpose of a cryptocurrency at all. Everything else (technology, decentralization, privacy) people don't care about at all. By the way, Cryptocurrency investors are psychopaths, study finds

If you think Amazon for example will start to add BTC as a payment option I can tell you the Apocalypse will be faster to come. There are very few places where people actually use it, such as i.e. Venezuela with its inflation, the Iranian government, or other countries seeking to evade economic sanctions...If we remove the reasons for politics, geopolitics, and economics, what is left? Almost nothing.

According to the 2021 financial year, the donations in bitcoins represented a value of only 0.08% of the foundation's revenues

the community has been voting on the issue since January 2022 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Stop_accepting_cryptocurrency_donations#Voting
Over 70% voted to stop accepting cryptocurrencies for the donations (unsigned contributions and new accounts were not taken into account to avoid attempts to manipulate votes)

And as donations have been possible since 2014 or 2015, I think people have had enough time to do something. It's a bit sad for Wikipedia, personally, it's one of my favorite sites where I can spend hours on it

You can buy stuff from Amazon with Bitcoin today. You even get a discount.

Not directly, but through 3rd party websites, like https://purse.io/shop for example. Their business model is to match Amazon gift card owners with people that want to buy in Amazon with Bitcoin:

Purse matches Amazon Gift Card holders with Shoppers. Shoppers receive a discount and Earners receive cryptocurrency.

[Darker45]

There you go, that's the direct result of having a currency that appreciates. Of course, a currency is meant to be spent. That's the intention. That should be easy with fiat. The fiat designers make it certain that people will spend their money. So it has to lose its value over time. That's not the case with Bitcoin. So the spending of Bitcoin is limited to what is necessary. The rest, people prefer to just HODL.

I guess donating to Wikipedia with Bitcoin has become less urgent nowadays, especially if compared to donating to the Freedom Convoy in Canada recently or to the freedom cause of Ukraine and other humanitarian efforts there. But I wonder, why does Wikipedia have to remove its Bitcoin donation option? Why don't they just leave an address? Does it cost them to do that? I'm sure, though, that by the time Wikipedia's existence is seriously threatened by the lack of funding support, Bitcoin donations would flow. Or so I hope.

[pooya87]

You shouldn't ignore the reality that very few people truly use it and that was my point. Not about debating between revenue or a donation.
2/3 of the transactions are related to trading activities (I'm lazy to post a blog post about it, sorry) It means the majority is only interested in the cryptocurrency market to speculate, not because they need it IRL.

Your arguments are still flawed because you are looking at the empty part of the glass and it still doesn't explain why they stopped accepting free money. You are saying yourself that the number of people who use bitcoin as payment is NOT zero which means there are people who would have donated to Wikipedia using bitcoin (somewhere around $100k to $150k free money if my calculations were correct).

Lets assume the 2/3 is correct and the blog post wasn't some false blockchain analysis like they always are. And lets assume there were 9 million bitcoin users that means 3 million bitcoin users use bitcoin for payment and when the adoption grows to 18 million that means 6 million bitcoin users use it for payment.
The fact that number of speculators is also increasing is not going to change the fact that number of payments is also increasing.
(some sources say it is close to 100 million which would make it 33 million user who would pay using bitcoin).

It's the same with El Salvador, it doesn't matter if majority of people were only interested in that $30 airdrop. What matters is that many people who weren't using bitcoin (even if it's just 1%) before it became legal tender are now using bitcoin.