Mozilla Foundation pausing cryptocurrency donations
Between this and Tesla citing climate change as a reason for dropping crypto, this is actually a very interesting shift, and one that might be very bad for crypto.<p>The amount of money people actually donated or spent with crypto has always been minimal. (Wish I had harder numbers to back this up, but you can see second-order effects from e.g. Steam adding Bitcoin support but then taking it away. Or how Bitpay has stagnated heavily, while a purely investment/speculation platform like Coinbase is worth billions.) However, for a long time, the benefit of accepting Bitcoin as payment was the <i>marketing</i>. Accepting crypto signaled that you were a cool company, you could put out a press release and the news media would run articles about how X service is now accepting cryptocurrency for payments.<p>The same thing happened again years later with "blockchain." Remember Kodakcoin? Remember Long Island Blockchain? Nothing ever really surfaced from these initiatives, but again, it was all about that big marketing hype that came from saying your company was going to use blockchain for... something.<p>Where it gets interesting is... what if crypto becomes anathema? What if accepting crypto or holding crypto starts become so closely associated with directly causing climate change, that no company is going to want to be openly associated with crypto, NFTs, etc due to the negative association?<p>You have one side hyping up Web3 as the next evolution as the web, but if the perception of crypto continues to be that it's a significant contributor to climate change -- regardless of how true that may be -- we could see a major decline in mainstream support.