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. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140827000803.ga2...@cantor.unex.es
