There are some decent arguments supporting their accepting bitcoins, including those that involve automatic conversions to US dollars or whatever, but I don't think the original post is a very good argument, unless you already agree with it.
Wikipedia, in how many ways must we reiterate this hypocrisy which runs perfectly counter to your stated mission?
Well, here's
Wikimedia's stated mission:
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.
There's nothing in there that even begins to suggest that bitcoin would be accepted by them.
Why is your prerequisite for donation that the medium be backed by coercion and tyranny? By what silly logic do you permit donations to advance your cause of openness via currency that is controlled, but not via that which is open?
What about their mission statement suggests that they're against control at all and for openness in anything but educational content they themselves provide?
Why do you approve of the freedom of expression when it comes to speech, but not when it comes to money?
They don't approve of freedom of expression, as you can see by all their policies preventing certain expressions, but even if they 'approved' of freedom of expression with money, why would they have to accept all forms of money rather than the kinds they freely chose based on whatever criteria they wanted?
The arguments also seem dishonest. The arguer isn't actually asking for every new currency that someone comes up with to be accepted by Wikipedia, but the argument is asking for that, as implied by the freedom of expression with money argument. Why would only one open currency be sufficient to satisfy that argument? Why couldn't everyone argue the same for their currency?
I get a different impression. As
the EFF put it:
3. People were misconstruing our acceptance of Bitcoins as an endorsement of Bitcoin. We were concerned that some people may have participated in the Bitcoin project specifically because EFF accepted Bitcoins, and perhaps they therefore believed the investment in Bitcoins was secure and risk-free. While we’ve been following the Bitcoin movement with a great degree of interest, EFF has never endorsed Bitcoin. In fact, we generally don’t endorse any type of product or service – and Bitcoin is no exception.
This is directly what is being asked above: that Wikipedia not only accept bitcoins but that they do it through support of the ideological tenets above. Why should they?
