A few days ago, Mozilla Foundation invited netizens on Twitter to send in cryptocurrency donations via a new payment service provider.
This move by the Firefox browser maker rapidly drew criticism, including that from Jamie Zawinski – who named the Mozilla project and was one of the original Netscape developers.
You can read the blistering thread here yourself; it gives short shrift to the concept of using cryptocurrencies. Zawinski described the payment processor and digital coins as “planet incinerating.”
“Hi, I’m sure that whoever runs [Mozilla’s Twitter] account has no idea who I am, but I founded @mozilla and I’m here to say fuck you and fuck this,” Zawinski wrote, adding that “everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision.”
Billy Markus, who co-created Dogecoin, one of the crypto-coins accepted by Mozilla, observed in response to the general condemnation: “Reading the comments in this thread, as much as I rag on crypto-bros being counterproductive at marketing, the vitriolic, hateful, hyperbolic, hypocritical, sanctimonious whining coming from the anti-crypto people is 1,000x more insufferable than the pro-crypto people.”
As recently as September, Moz’s web-standards lead Tantek Çelik condemned cryptocurrencies as being unsustainable, stating:
The Bitcoin-loving laser-eye brigade were predictably unhappy with Çelik’s observations.
Zawinski, aka JWZ, who named the CADT model of software development and has a Dunning-Krugerrands tag on his blog for crypto-cash-related posts, is a reliable source of insight and pithy quotes, such as: “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use…
