Jimmy Wales From Wikipedia Playing Around With Bitcoins

Who’s the latest notable person int he techsphere to start playing around with bitcoin? Jimmy Wales, President of Wikia, or better known as the co-founder of Wikipedia.

Wales announced on Sunday evening via Twitter that he has just gotten started with the digital currency:

“Playing with BTC today: I just bought 0.1 bitcoin with @Coinbase!” he wrote.

He’s since followed up his tweets with his bitcoin address, and has even taken to the Bitcoin page at Reddit.com to answer community questions.

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.

Certainly, it’s great to see him dabble in bitcoin, but there’s an elephant in the room.

Will Wikimedia accept bitcoin donations?

We’re not the first to pose the question. Wales has shed some light on the situation by indicating that he plans to bring up the topic of donations to Wikimedia (the non-profit that runs Wikipedia) at the next board meeting.

He says:

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.

If you’re interested, you can follow this link for the full question & answer session with Wales.