If you live in China or the USA, no payment system is guaranteed invisible
from state agents. There is no reason to believe that cryptocurrency
transactions going in or out of countries with sophisticated security
agencies could be any more anonymous or trustworthy than, say, an anonymous
payment using Paypal.
At the same time, the Wikimedia Foundation has legal and ethical
obligations to not benefit from the proceeds of crime nor use its donations
to fund crime, human rights abuse, or terrorism. Though it can choose to
respect the anonymity of donors as requested during the donation process it
is required to cooperate with US legal investigations which may make
complete anonymity impossible especially for large donations or large
projects that it provides money or chooses to invest its slush fund in.
It would be great if the Wikimedia Foundation made a clear and measurable
statement about its financial policies beyond vague statements that human
rights are nice, or that money laundering is bad.
On Wed, 12 Jan 2022 at 12:37, Nickanc Wikimedia <nickanc.wiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I am honestly shocked about how the whole discussion
does not touch the
fact that for many people in many countries supporting wikimedia is
politically inconvenient and doing so in a very transparent way such as
through the banking system might result in a backslash from the authorities.
We should first of all be neutral towards our readers on the question "do
you trust the state?", if their answer is no, a covert zero-trust way to
donate should be available.
Il Mar 11 Gen 2022, 04:25 GorillaWarfare <
gorillawarfarewikipedia(a)gmail.com> ha scritto:
> Hello all,
>
> I have created an RfC at Meta to discuss no longer accepting
> cryptocurrency donations. You can read the proposal, discuss, and vote at
>
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Stop_accepting_cryptoc…
> .
>
> Sincerely,
> Molly White (User:GorillaWarfare)
>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GorillaWarfare
> she/her
>
>