The Czech grandfather who writes about Bitcoin on Wikipedia

We found this one on The Outline; the biggest editor on Wikipedia who writes about Bitcoin is Ladislav Mecir, a Czech computer programmer in his late 50s who edits under his real name; he lives in Jičín, an ancient town 85 kilometers (53 miles) northeast of the Czech capital of Prague. He was a high-school math (?) teacher doing side-jobs until he found Wikipedia in the pre-Essjay affair days and moved into programming, using things like the Lambda calculus he picked up in Jimbo's Jungle in the coding he does. In return, he edits Bitcoin articles for about two hours a day, even though he has never owned a Bitcoin in his life, which is a bit like being the Wikipedia expert on the Yaesu FT-101 series* of amateur ("ham") radio transceivers even though the expert never owned one of the radios or never even had a ham license. Mecir just thinks that Bitcoin is a cool technical topic, and he is a citizen of a society that has gone in deeply with that form of cryptocurrency - Alza, the "Czech Amazon" accepts Bitcoin as payment for items, and Slushpool, the first bitcoin mining pool, was Czech.

Of course, if you show any competence on Wikipedia, they will fight you tooth and nail. Ladislav Mecir's talkpage is shot through with arguments because he is fighting Peter "Smallbones" Ekman, a dude we've written about in the past; he was one of those free-market economists who showed up in Russia to tell Yeltsyn's crew how to do things, until he met his match in Mark Ames of the eXile. Now he is testily fighting Mecir over virtual computer money:

I've seen about 4 articles on you about bitcoin editing. Could you confirm that this is really the same person as you and that you don't mind these articles being publicly discussed. A couple of the articles mentioned "career" in relation to your work here, another says that you've made money from your articles. Could you review WP:COI and WP:Paid editing disclosure and see if you need to make a COI or PAID disclosure. Thanks. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:03, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

"I've seen about 4 articles on you about bitcoin editing." - could you please post links here?

"A couple of the articles mentioned "career" in relation to your work here, another says that you've made money from your articles." - could you, please, post links here? Ladislav Mecir (talk) 18:16, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

"...you've made money from your articles" - could you, please, reveal to me, which articles are "mine"? Ladislav Mecir (talk) 18:18, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

"...you've made money from your articles" - could you, also, please, reveal to me, which articles I made money from? Ladislav Mecir (talk) 18:25, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

• [3] mentions "career" in passing
• [4] "career" in passing
• [5] "career" three times
• [6] "Instead, he prefers not to invest in risky ventures, asserting that so far, he has made enough money from his articles."

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 21:42, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

As much as I dislike templating regular editors, I do think you ought to respond to the above.

Hello Ladislav Mecir. The nature of your edits gives the impression you have an undisclosed financial stake in promoting a topic, and that you have not complied with Wikipedia's mandatory paid editing disclosure requirements. Paid advocacy is a category of conflict of interest (COI) editing that involves being compensated by a person, group, company or organization to use Wikipedia to promote their interests. Undisclosed paid advocacy is prohibited by our policies on neutral point of view and what Wikipedia is not, and is an especially egregious type of COI; the Wikimedia Foundation regards it as a "black hat" practice akin to Black hat SEO.
Paid advocates are very strongly discouraged from direct article editing, and should instead propose changes on the talk page of the article in question if an article exists, and if it does not, from attempting to write an article at all. At best, any proposed article creation should be submitted through the articles for creation process, rather than directly.
Regardless, if you are receiving or expect to receive compensation for your edits, broadly construed, you are required by the Wikimedia Terms of Use to disclose your employer, client and affiliation. You can post such a mandatory disclosure to your user page at User:Ladislav Mecir. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=Ladislav Mecir|employer=InsertName|client=InsertName}}. If I am mistaken – you are not being directly or indirectly compensated for your edits – please state that in response to this message. Otherwise, please provide the required disclosure. In either case, please do not edit further until you answer this message. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:50, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

I reviewed the informations you provided here and respond to your requests as follows

• I was neither directly nor indirectly compensated for any of my Wikipedia edits in the past.
• I am neither directly nor indirectly compensated for any of my Wikipedia edits now.
• I do not expect to be compensated either directly or indirectly for any of my Wikipedia edits in the future. Ladislav Mecir (talk) 12:16, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

And this stuff before this weekend:

Just to let you know that I've mentioned you at Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard#Bitcoin_Cash
Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:25, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Plus he was dealing with Jytdog, the subject of a Wikipedia Sucks messageboard thread:

The comment you made here was bizarre, unsupported, and amounted to personal attacks on other editors.
If there is evidence of off-WP posts recruiting people to come here to lobby for "Bcash" please post that on the Talk page, and be careful not to associate any user with that post.
If you continue making edits like that you are likely to end up topic banned.
Hello, I'm Jytdog. I noticed that you made a comment on the page Talk:Bitcoin Cash that didn't seem very civil, so it has been removed. Wikipedia is built on collaboration, so it's one of our core principles to interact with one another in a polite and respectful manner. If you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. Jytdog (talk) 15:25, 14 May 2018 (UTC) Noting this diff. Jytdog (talk) 15:38, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

"The comment you made here ... amounted to personal attacks on other editors." - Well, it obviously did not:

• Let's consider a Wikipedian XY that is not a proponent of rebranding of the Bitcoin Cash to Bcash. Then, maybe surprisingly for you, the comment I made, speaking about "proponents of the rebranding" does not concern XY at all. Thus, logically, it could not amount to "personal attack" on her.
• Now let's consider a Wikipedian XZ that is a proponent of rebranding of the Bitcoin Cash to Bcash. Then, maybe surprisingly for you, the comment I made is not a personal attack on her either, since it just claims that XZ wants to claim that the Bcash name is at least as notable as the Bitcoin Cash name, which is exactly what the "proponent of rebranding" implies.

Summing up, you should be more careful when accusing anybody of wrongdoing and deleting their comment based on unfounded accusations. Ladislav Mecir (talk) 03:36, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

You wrote the proponents of the rebranding are now trying to use the Wikipedia for the purpose. That is a claim about people who edit Wikipedia - personal attacks on people who !voted "support". There is no source that says that anyone has come to WP to rebrand Bitcoin Cash. I have requested you to be topic banned per the notice below. Jytdog (talk) 03:48, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

That wasn't a personal attack Jytdog. I think WP:ICANTHEREYOU would have been a better wikilaw to try and get him with. Woscafrench (talk) 21:31, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

 And on it goes....

The Future of Fake Money

There is a good chance that Bitcoin will be shut down due to the ridiculous amount of power it's gobbling up (67 Terrawatt hours, just under 7.7 Gigawatts of electricity, according to a recent Ars Technica article; supposedly it's using more power than all of Denmark), plus the constant series of scams, value crashes, trading board implosions, and other pre-FDIC behavior we've ironed out of real money makes Bitcoin and all other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies look extremely sketchy to more conservative investors. Ladislav Mecir knows all of this and he wants the repeatedly-deleted Bitcoin article kept for historical reasons if Bitcoin dies. As you can see from the photo below, Mecir is smiling.

                                          (Stolen from The Outline article, of course.)

                                     Pretty much the socialist Czechoslovak prediction of Wikipedia in 1977. 


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* The Wikipedia article on the FT-101 series is full of scraped material from elsewhere, such as echoing the claim that the output power in sideband mode is only 130 watts, when users have reported up to 140 watts in a non-overdriven FT-101E. The radio is a hybrid; transistorized receiver, tube output amplifier connected to two final tubes of a type meant for sweep control in TV cathode ray tube circuits, but they turned out to be very useful in sideband transmitters. Go here for a better rundown of the series, which was manufactured from 1970 to 1978, then modified into the FT-101Z and 101ZD series that was built until 1984.