Mozilla Co-Founder Blasts Crypto Donors as ‘Planet-Incinerating Ponzi Grifters’

The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the popular Firefox browser, announced Saturday that it has begun accepting donations in Dogecoin using BitPay. The open-source community was not impressed.

The backlash was swift, with some even threatening to cancel their donations to the foundation. What these critics failed to realize, however, is that Mozilla has accepted crypto donations since 2014. Nevertheless, one of the loudest critics of the foundation’s involvement with crypto came from the co-founder of Mozilla itself.

“Hi, I’m sure that whoever runs this account has no idea who I am, but I founded @mozilla and I’m here to say fuck you and fuck this,” wrote Mozilla.org co-founder Jamie Zawinski. “Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters.”

Zawinski co-founded Mozilla in 1998, leaving the project in 1999 to pursue other ventures. The Mozilla project released the first version of its eponymous browser in 2002. In 2004, Mozilla released the Firefox browser, which remains one of the most popular open-source internet browsers with over 211 million active users as of December 2021.

Mozilla first began accepting Bitcoin and cryptocurrency donations in November 2014, at the time through Coinbase. Using Bitpay, Mozilla can take a variety of cryptocurrencies donations, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Litecoin, USD Coin, and Shiba Inu.

It’s worth noting, however, that Mozilla may not even actually receive and hold crypto itself when it’s all said and done. Using BitPay, a crypto donation is sent to the payment service and converted into the currency the recipient (in this case, Mozilla) wants on the other end. But this nuance probably makes little difference to crypto’s detractors.

The environmental impact of cryptocurrencies has become a hot-button issue and a common critique levied against the industry. It’s well documented that proof-of-work blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum are energy-intensive, and their respective carbon footprints rival that of some countries. Yesterday, Kosovo banned Bitcoin mining after a committee recommended prohibiting the practice after declaring a 60-day energy state of emergency.