The Mozilla Foundation announced on Twitter on New Year’s Eve that it was going to be accepting crypto donations. However, this decision has since come under fire by one of the firm’s co-founders, and it looks like Mozilla is rescinding the decision.
Mozilla Foundations Rejects Crypto
Jamie Zawinski – one of the people involved in creating Mozilla – says he’s happy to play a role in preventing the firm from making such a “terrible decision.” He has long been a big critic of blockchain and cryptocurrency, with nasty verbiage about the world’s number one digital currency by market cap going back as far as 2013.
Not long ago, Zawinski said:
Anyone involved in cryptocurrencies in any way is either a grifter or a mark. It is 100 percent a con. There is no legitimacy.
It looks like this attitude and the decision of the Mozilla Foundation is beginning to rub off on other groups as well. Not long after Mozilla decided it was no longer going to be accepting crypto, Wikipedia opened the window to see about ending crypto donations for itself, saying that the decision from Mozilla is what’s largely inspiring it to move in this direction.
Zawinski says he is surprised that Wikipedia is now making such a move, but he hopes this is the start of a long, anti-crypto attitude amongst similar organizations. He says:
I’m actually a bit surprised (and pleased) to see that the conversation seemed to be going in an anti-cryptocurrency direction. Good for them.
Both these firms are now working against what crypto was initially designed for. As fun as it is to trade crypto and get involved in the space, the digital currency world was not simply designed for speculation. Rather, these assets were designed to give people new payment tools for everyday goods and services. The idea was that BTC – along with its altcoin cousins – would potentially knock things like fiat currencies, checks, and credit cards aside, but this has been a rather slow journey given how volatile these assets tend to be.
Going Against the Grain
Many stores, retailers, and companies have ultimately said “no” to crypto payments throughout history in that they are worried about potentially losing profit, and to an extent, we cannot really blame them. If you go into a store and pay for $50 worth of merchandise with bitcoin, and then the price of BTC goes down and that $50 turns into $35, the company has lost $15 in profit while you still get to walk away with everything you bought. Is that a fair scenario? Not everyone thinks so.
One of the big reasons, however, why the Mozilla Foundation is no longer interested in taking crypto payments is because the organization is worried about how much energy is required to mine assets, particularly bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin.
Source: https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/mozilla-says-no-to-crypto-donations/