Re: bits from the DPL -- mid-April to mid-August 2014
On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 09:28:11AM -0700, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> Donations in Bitcoin
> ====================
>
> Crytocurrencies have been the subject of a lot of attention recently.
> Debian received its first Bitcoin donation, which was handled in a ad-hoc
> manner as we don't have any infrastructure for them yet. The Debian
> auditors are looking into various options around this, and to understand
> where we should be going with cryptocurrencies donations, we would like to
> hear from people interested in making such donations. Specifically, would
> it matter to you that Debian tries to keep and use those donations as
> bitcoins? Or on the contrary, would you prefer Debian to convert them into
> USD or EUR to limit the risks raised by the higher volatility of Bitcoins?
I don't think Debian should accept donations in Bitcoin, as such thing
could be considered as an endorsement of Bitcoin. The EFF has a very
well written rationale why accepting Bitcoins is not necessarily a
good idea, see point 3 here:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/eff-and-bitcoin
In fact, I consider Bitcoin to be some kind of collective hallucination,
as it violates so-called "Mises regression principle".
When we used gold as money, we did so because it was already a valuable thing.
But with Bitcoin, people pretend it to be money *before* or *at the same time*
it has a value, which is some kind of "bootstrapping problem".
Sure, their advocates consider it to be "already bootstrapped", I
consider it too much similar to a scam.
As for whether Debian should keep some of its assets in Bitcoins or not, that
would be like asking whether Debian should keep some of its assets in
gold. I think the answer is clearly not.
To summarize:
* I feel unconfortable with the fact that Debian accepts Bitcoins and
I think we should not do that.
* If we have to accept them, we should convert it to whatever usual
money we are already using.
Thanks.
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