Just before New Year’s, Mozilla posted a tweet talking about how they’re going to accept cryptocurrency as a donation method, and a lot of people in the replies are very upset about it. Jamie Zawinski, a Mozilla founder, has also directly responded to it.
What’s your thoughts on this?
Wayback Machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220105052253/https://twitter.com/mozilla/status/1476951030638260225
Update: https://lemmy.ml/post/140209
I think, it’s blown way out of proportion, like most criticisms of Mozilla are.
It’s not like they’re actually endorsing cryptocurrency, it’s just their usual non-profit call for “if you happen to have too much money, please gib money”.
Besides, Mozilla is a privacy-adjacent organisation. Cryptocurrency is horseshit for the environment, but it is a useful tool for anonymization.
And I have a feeling that people wanting to make a donation to Mozilla are largely not going to be the egoistic wealth chasers, but rather privacy-minded people that would prefer to stay anonymous as much as possible. I don’t think chewing those people up over their environmental impact is good.
Crypto is literally a public ledger, as anti-privacy friendly as you can be. Every exchange in almost every country requires an insane amount of data before it lets you trade, so they can easily follow your transactions around the blockchain. P2P trading in the US, Canada and other modern countries requires the seller collects your ID as well.
Some cryptocurrencies like Monero are private and anonymous
Hmm, alright, I’ll admit I have no clue about cryptocurrency, so that point might be moot.
I thought so too until I looked into it in more detail. After withdrawing from an exchange (if an exchange is used), one can use trust-less mixing to deposit fractional amounts into many different accounts generated from the same seed. I don’t know if any crypto has a fully functional trust-less mixing protocol already implemented, but it is a work in progress for at least the project that I follow. The algorithm has already been described and I expect that in the future it will be accessible to anyone.
For a regular person using crypto in their day-to-day transactions, shuffling the coins can work well enough.
Exchanges already block shuffled coins so that doesn’t work
Couple examples [1] [2] [3] [4]
Thank you for pointing out those examples, they provide some valuable insight.
The government is not going to want you to have privacy, and they will continuously push for KYC laws. The exchanges will choose to abide by regulations because of self-preservation. In those messages that you posted, the exchanges cite “risks” without specifying - the risk that they worry about is regulatory risk. They don’t want to be punished.
Once you have the crypto under your possession, you own it and you have control over it. You can take steps to make this private. Crypto deposited in an exchange is not under your possession.
These are not problems that show that crypto does not work. Quite the opposite. These are problems that showcase why we need to crypto! Adoption and development could allow us to stop relying on centralized exchanges.