Wikipedia May Move to Start Accepting Bitcoin Donations Soon

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March 10, 2014 3:37 PM EDT
Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, posted the following to reddit on Monday:

So I set up a personal account at Coinbase to play around with [Bitcoin]. I thought I would buy and sell some, and try to spend on real world things, etc. I've been watching bitcoin for a long time, of course, and I thought it past due to test it as a consumer - how hard is it, how confusing is it, etc.

Anyway, I mentioned this on twitter and a guy asked for my BTC address (which is: 1McNsCTN26zkBSHs9fsgUHHy8u5S1PY5q3 ) and last night a bunch of people got all excited and sent me BTC. Obviously I'm going to cash all that out in a few days and send it onward to the Wikimedia Foundation so if you want to keep doing that, I'm ok with it.

In the meantime, I am still learning and I've seen some chatter about me moving the BTC from that address. I think people are referring to this: https://blockchain.info/tx/29f8972043a293ad2168b62a85e8c9576d8ce6a02d624b9728e33143cae44d64[1]

I didn't do that. When I first saw it (I'm a newbie, remember!) I was slightly alarmed. But someone else said that maybe it is coinbase moving it into cold storage. And when I log into my coinbase account, I don't see anything missing, i.e. I see incoming transactions but no outgoing ones.

How can I best confirm?

I'm planning to re-open the conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Directors at our next meeting (and before, by email) about whether Wikimedia should accept bitcoin. One reason (not the only reason) that we haven't is that setting it up as an option during the fundraiser has a lot of implications (we know, for example, and you will likely find this counterintuitive, that the more payment options we give people, the less they donate). But it occurs to me that they could just set up an account on coinbase and announce it via social media, and not bother with integrating it into donation screens and all that. The BTC community is pretty close-knit and generous, so that'd probably work pretty well.

tl;dr - I'm playing with bitcoin, thinking about it, and have some questions about how to look at blockchain.info.

You can confirm the address above by looking at my twitter: https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/441634501265862657[2]

And this reddit account is known to be associated with me, I think I confirmed it by posting on my wikipedia user page or something like that.

You can find Wales on reddit at u/jimmywales1.

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