Wikimedia Foundation now accepts Bitcoin(blog.wikimedia.org)
blog.wikimedia.org
Wikimedia Foundation now accepts Bitcoin
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/30/wikimedia-foundation-now-accepts-bitcoin/
7 comments
If this donation is tax deductible, I expect it is so they can send you a receipt.
Still, an anonymous option would be nice.
Still, an anonymous option would be nice.
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.
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.
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.
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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You mean, "Wikimedia now uses Coinbase as another payment provider to collect US currency for donations"?
Imagine they accepted Japanese Yen instead of Bitcoin.
They would still convert it to USD, but would your opinion still make sense?
They would still convert it to USD, but would your opinion still make sense?
When I used to donate previously, my DKK were converted to USD. But I still use DKK every day.
It's that you can donate in BTC that matters, not that they're exchanging it for USD.
It matters. Automatically exchanging large amounts of BTC for USD creates a downward pressure on the BTC exchange rate.
Organizations which truly support Bitcoin would choose to keep it.
Organizations which truly support Bitcoin would choose to keep it.
If what you said was true the exchange rate would have collapsed in the last 2 years (BitPay and Coinbase accumulated 60,000+ merchants who began accepting Bitcoin over the last 2 years and most of them automatically convert BTC to USD). But instead, the exchange rate rose from $10 to $580: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg730ztgSzm1g10z...
Why? Because as Bitcoin is accepted in more and more places, it increases its subjective value, so more and more people are looking to get some bitcoins, which counterbalances the downward selling pressure.
Why? Because as Bitcoin is accepted in more and more places, it increases its subjective value, so more and more people are looking to get some bitcoins, which counterbalances the downward selling pressure.
I'm not sure why you disagree. Of course there are multiple factors and some of them counterbalance. And of course what I mentioned is just one of these factors.
The price rose primarily because of the Willy bot, aka Mark Karpeles artificially inflating the price. Read the willy report.
Baby steps. Maybe an employee will ask to be paid partly in BTC which I'm sure they'll be happy to oblige to avoid the conversion fees.
Organizations which truly support Bitcoin would choose to spend it, not hoard it.
Spend it for products or services - sure. Immediately exchange all of it for a fiat currency - not so much.
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.
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.
Where is their address, how do I just send them bitcoins?
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.
I find myself unsurprised that the very first reaction of Bitcoin fans to this is to complain.
At the time of the last fundraising round I was quite surprised that they didn't accept bitcoin. Good news.
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.