

Wikimedia Foundation now accepts Bitcoin - kouiskas
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/30/wikimedia-foundation-now-accepts-bitcoin/

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jdfellow
Two thoughts:

1) About time! You'd have thought a crowdsourced open source software
community would have adopted Bitcoin sooner.

2) Why does the Coinbase donation form require my email and mailing address?
Just give me a QR code.

~~~
deweller
If this donation is tax deductible, I expect it is so they can send you a
receipt.

Still, an anonymous option would be nice.

~~~
_delirium
They also are legally required to collect donor information for donations
above $1,000 [1]. Mostly this is to ensure that nonprofits aren't playing
weird games with funneling money around, e.g. being registered as a 501(c)(3)
charity but actually being funded mainly by one person who also controls the
board/spending.

Maybe they can rework the donation flow so it allows anonymous donations below
that limit? But if that has the effect of making large donations seem
different/weird/complicated, it might be counterproductive: you have to get a
_lot_ of extra $5 donations to make up for a single lost $10,000 donation. I'm
no UI/flow expert though so maybe there's a good way of doing it. There are
basically three cases that would need to be worked in: 1) above $1,000,
information is mandatory; 2) between $250 and $1,000, information is not
mandatory but must be entered if the donor is American and wants a receipt
that would enable them to deduct it; 3) below $250, receipts aren't necessary
for tax deduction so donor information isn't needed at all.

[1] More precisely, they're required to report all donors who gave more than
$5,000 cumulatively in a given year (or possibly a higher threshold for very
large organizations), which requires keeping a running sum of per-donor
totals. Except that as a concession to ease of recordkeeping, individual
donations below $1,000 do not need to be included in the total, and therefore
I believe (?) could be accepted anonymously. Or so I read the IRS's
guidelines, but IANACPA; see Form 990 Schedule B or your local accountant
specializing in nonprofit law for details.

~~~
avar
How are you going to ensure that you're legally compliant with "only $X per-
year per-person" unless you keep track of who's making every Bitcoin donation
to you?

If you don't do that you could trivially go over the limit by just donating
>$X over multiple Bitcoin transactions.

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coryking
You mean, "Wikimedia now uses Coinbase as another payment provider to collect
US currency for donations"?

~~~
hayksaakian
Imagine they accepted Japanese Yen instead of Bitcoin.

They would still convert it to USD, but would your opinion still make sense?

~~~
runeks
When I used to donate previously, my DKK were converted to USD. But I still
use DKK every day.

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Two9A
I remember that there were multiple userbase attempts to lobby Wikimedia for
this in the past. Looks like Coinbase's recent partnering successes have made
the difference, in this case at least.

~~~
nullc
Some of these "userbase" attempts involved doing some things that people
perceived as unethical (e.g. bribes) and caused damage that took effort to
undo.

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ToastyMallows
Where is their address, how do I just send them bitcoins?

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orn
I started BTC donation, but they ask you for your name and address... what!
Anyway I found out you can go through with a bogus name and address.

~~~
davidgerard
I find myself unsurprised that the _very first_ reaction of Bitcoin fans to
this is to complain.

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thisjepisje
At the time of the last fundraising round I was quite surprised that they
didn't accept bitcoin. Good news.

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deweller
Looks like coinbase.com is not loading at the moment. Is it conceivable that
this crashed their site?

~~~
wyager
Interestingly, it seems to prevent BIP 0070 from working properly, although
the payment went through fine.

