martin f krafft <madd...@debian.org> writes: > also sprach Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> [2014-08-26 19:24 -0700]:
>> +1. I believe Debian should only hold bitcoin if Debian >> anticipates future expenses in bitcoin. Otherwise, it should >> convert bitcoin to whatever currency in which expenses are >> expected. > So how do we decide whether we anticipate further expenses in > Bitcoin? This *is* what I am talking about. I am not saying we > should endorse Bitcoin or speculate. But support would come with > a decision for us to hold Bitcoin for future expenses. Well, what does Debian spend money on, and are those things available in Bitcoin? That feels like a question for the treasurer. I believe Debian's major expenses are Debconf, team meetings (mostly travel and possibly some lodging and food), and computing hardware. I would be surprised if Bitcoin were useful for the first two. The latter seems likely to have the most potential to take Bitcoin. However, I think there's another factor: I don't believe it makes sense for Debian to hold Bitcoin to buy things from vendors whose pricing is in regular currency (USD or EUR or the like), but who are willing to accept Bitcoin and immediately convert. Daniel's point about accounting best practices isn't that you hold money in currency you *can* spend, but rather you hold money in currency in which the prices of the things you will be buying are denominated. My understanding is that basically everything is denominated in USD or EUR or the like, even if Bitcoin is accepted. This matters because of the volatility: if Bitcoin suddenly drops in value by half (or doubles in value), do the prices stay the same, or do they immediately drop by half or double? If they stay the same, then we should hold Bitcoin, because that's the currency the prices track. If they double or halve, we should hold money in the currency in which the prices are stable, since that's the minimum risk position. There is an exception to that, and I should expand some more on my dubiousness about Bitcoin. My concerns are primarily around the movement to treat Bitcoin as a primary currency -- as equivalent to USD or EUR and usable for the same thing. But Bitcoin as a *secondary* currency could be useful to hold in small quantities for the same reason that one might hold small amounts directly in one's Paypal account instead of transferring it out to a bank, since it saves on hassle in shifting things in and out of the account. Bitcoin has some nice transactional properties separate from the whole "economic system hacking" aspect of the Bitcoin community that may make it more useful than regular currencies for, say, micropayments. If we have places where it's useful to use Bitcoin because, for instance, we're making micropayments and the transaction fees are much lower, then we should hold an appropriate amount of Bitcoin for those purposes to take advantage of the low transaction costs. I'm not sure if that's the case for anything yet; the treasurer would know more. I should also note, in response to Santiago's comments on debian-devel, that the reason to talk about Bitcoin in particular and not other cryptocurrencies is that support for Bitcoin is *far* more widespread than any other cryptocurrency so far as I can tell. (For example, many Twitch streamers accept donations in Bitcoin, although generally immediately convert to local currency.) -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/87ppfmvehy....@hope.eyrie.org
