- A longtime Wikipedia editor, Molly White, is urging the org to stop accepting crypto donations.
- Wikipedia raised about $130,000 in cryptocurrency in 2021, mostly in the form of bitcoin.
- Citing impacts on the environment and society, White says accepting crypto "is no longer ethical."
In response to donors' requests, the Wikimedia Foundation started accepting cryptocurrency donations in 2014.
Eight years later, a longtime Wikipedia editor is arguing "it is no longer ethical" to continue to accept crypto.
"Cryptocurrencies have been joined by a bubble of predatory, inherently harmful technologies," the editor, Molly White, wrote in an opinion piece for the organization's newspaper, The Signpost, published Sunday. White, known on the site by her handle GorillaWarfare, is also a software engineer at HubSpot and has written on blockchain technologies and privacy.
Early cryptocurrency advocates promised the tech would become an alternative to traditional banking. It was meant to create privacy, anonymity, decentralization, and freedom, particularly for those who couldn't afford traditional banking. It was to help those who couldn't open accounts, get loans or credit cards, or afford processing fees.
"The idea was that this would give financial freedom to a lot of people," White told Insider over email.
But, as cryptocurrency has matured into Web3, "those values don't really seem so central anymore," she told Insider. "Most projects are more interested in making a quick buck, and are in fact very centralized."
Instead of decentralized freedom, much crypto wealth has landed in the hands of the few while becoming a risky speculation investment that "resembles a landscape with scammers and marks," her piece argued in classic Wikipedia style — full of footnotes to document her points.
More than that, White maintains that crypto mining is harmful to the environment and is misaligned with the Wikimedia Foundation's Resolution for Environmental Impact — approved by the board of trustees in 2017 to "reduce the impact of our activities on the environment." She cites research on how China and Kazakhstan, the two largest centers for mining bitcoin, have relied heavily on coal to power such operations and have begun to crack down on mining.
She says continuing to accept crypto risks damaging the nonprofit's reputation.
"Tons of people dismiss concerns about the environmental damage of the Ethereum blockchain because the project plans to move to a proof-of-stake soon," she reflected. Proof-of-stake is an alternative approach to proof-of-work's computational-intensive approach, which validates transactions through a math puzzle. Instead, transactions are approved by individual validators through a consensus process.
"Problem is, Ethereum has been saying they will move to proof-of-stake 'soon' for years now, while doing enormous environmental damage," White said.
White doesn't stand alone. Mozilla paused cryptocurrency donations after a tweet announcing a partnership with BitPay drew backlash. The Mozilla cofounder Jamie "jwz" Zawinski went so far as to call the crypto world "planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters." BitPay is a processor that charges a 1% processing fee and is also used by Wikimedia.
Whether White's plea will have an impact is unclear, but the organization says it's listening to its community on the matter. "We are monitoring recent concerns raised by the community around cryptocurrency donations, and considering them seriously as we determine our path forward," a Wikimedia Foundation representative said.
The person also described cryptocurrency as "still a small portion of the overall revenue to the Wikimedia Foundation," bringing in $130,100.94 last year. That's 0.08% of revenue from donations, making it the foundation's smallest funding source.
Despite this, White argues against its optics.
"The fact of the matter is that most cryptocurrency donations to the WMF came in via Bitcoin, an enormously damaging currency with no intentions to move to a more sustainable model," she emailed Insider, using an abbreviation for the Wikimedia Foundation.
"People are trying to use technology alone to solve social problems, and that's never going to work," she continued. "Its promises weren't any more realistic ten years ago than they are now."
