5 ms·

GoFundMe is a facilitator for fundraising efforts. If someone wanted to start a far-right crowdfunding site they could without involving digital gold.

darawk 5y ago
Or we could just have a politically neutral monetary system in the first place. Imagine that.
- wyldfire 5y ago
  The money's pretty neutral but brokers like GoFundMe aren't and IMO shouldn't be compelled to be.
  - darawk 5y ago
    I agree with that, except in cases where the number of brokers is small and monopolistic. That's not strictly true for platforms like gofundme, but it is true for payment processors, who are the real choke points in the ecosystem. My issue with Gofundme isn't that they aren't politically neutral, it's that they took the money first, and then just decided to hold it hostage. Had they not accepted the trucker's money, or just refunded all the donors, or disbursed the funds to the org and then refused to accept anymore, any of those things would have been fine. But what they are doing here is tantamount to theft, and that I do believe brokers should be compelled not to do.
  - password4321 5y ago
    They are compelled not to discriminate against protected classes.
- joelbondurant1 5y ago
  [dead]
- cortesoft 5y ago
  I mean, we do? Dollar bills are politically neutral.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- timeon 5y ago
  This rules out Bitcoin.
magicjosh 5y ago
My understanding is a lot of interesting stuff gets blocked at the payment processor level. So far-right dildos, drug parphanelia etc may have issues that cryptocurrencies solve. If you've never tried to break the rules it's easy for this stuff to be invisible. Here's a post from Stripe on this issue: "Behind the scenes, we work closely with payment networks (such as Visa and Mastercard) and banking partners across more than two dozen countries. Each institution has strict legal regulations that govern them and specific rules about the types of businesses they do and do not work with." https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed
notreallyserio 5y ago
IIRC that's what Hatreon was intended to do, provide crowdfunding for far-right organizations, but it shut down. I wonder if it would have been successful if it went with Bitcoin instead of relying on Visa et al.
- magicjosh 5y ago
  I had not heard of Hatreon so went looking. According to a few sites, Visa shut them down. After that Hatreon didn't (yet) get another payment processor setup. Their homepage [1] says: "This site's services were suspended by VISA in November of 2017." Kicking alt-right people off platforms is a band aid solution. A storm is forming that will explode at some point. You can't just silence people like that an expect good outcomes long term. I imagine the next big wave of cryptocurrency use will be by alt-right users. They're coordinated, resourced, and tech savvy enough. Crypto-enabled Spotify, crypto-enabled Patreon/Kickstarter, Crypto-enabled YouTube...basically writes itself at this point. I wonder if there's an alt-right HackerNews out there already. [1] https://hatreon.net/ https://hatreon.net/ Also the founder is the 3D printed gun guy!
  - cSoze 5y ago
    Are they tech savvy though? The "alt-right twitter" was prominantly hacked exposing a ton of personal information. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/03/gab-the-far-right-website-has-been-hacked-and-70gb-of-data-leaked/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/03/gab-t...
    - magicjosh 5y ago
      No, alt-right as a whole is not tech savvy. But I have to imagine there's some subset of alt-right that is indeed tech savvy.

darawk 5y ago

Or we could just have a politically neutral monetary system in the first place. Imagine that.

wyldfire 5y ago
The money's pretty neutral but brokers like GoFundMe aren't and IMO shouldn't be compelled to be.
- darawk 5y ago
  I agree with that, except in cases where the number of brokers is small and monopolistic. That's not strictly true for platforms like gofundme, but it is true for payment processors, who are the real choke points in the ecosystem. My issue with Gofundme isn't that they aren't politically neutral, it's that they took the money first, and then just decided to hold it hostage. Had they not accepted the trucker's money, or just refunded all the donors, or disbursed the funds to the org and then refused to accept anymore, any of those things would have been fine. But what they are doing here is tantamount to theft, and that I do believe brokers should be compelled not to do.
- password4321 5y ago
  They are compelled not to discriminate against protected classes.
joelbondurant1 5y ago
[dead]
cortesoft 5y ago
I mean, we do? Dollar bills are politically neutral.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
timeon 5y ago
This rules out Bitcoin.

magicjosh 5y ago

My understanding is a lot of interesting stuff gets blocked at the payment processor level. So far-right dildos, drug parphanelia etc may have issues that cryptocurrencies solve. If you've never tried to break the rules it's easy for this stuff to be invisible. Here's a post from Stripe on this issue: "Behind the scenes, we work closely with payment networks (such as Visa and Mastercard) and banking partners across more than two dozen countries. Each institution has strict legal regulations that govern them and specific rules about the types of businesses they do and do not work with." https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed

notreallyserio 5y ago

IIRC that's what Hatreon was intended to do, provide crowdfunding for far-right organizations, but it shut down. I wonder if it would have been successful if it went with Bitcoin instead of relying on Visa et al.

magicjosh 5y ago
I had not heard of Hatreon so went looking. According to a few sites, Visa shut them down. After that Hatreon didn't (yet) get another payment processor setup. Their homepage [1] says: "This site's services were suspended by VISA in November of 2017." Kicking alt-right people off platforms is a band aid solution. A storm is forming that will explode at some point. You can't just silence people like that an expect good outcomes long term. I imagine the next big wave of cryptocurrency use will be by alt-right users. They're coordinated, resourced, and tech savvy enough. Crypto-enabled Spotify, crypto-enabled Patreon/Kickstarter, Crypto-enabled YouTube...basically writes itself at this point. I wonder if there's an alt-right HackerNews out there already. [1] https://hatreon.net/ https://hatreon.net/ Also the founder is the 3D printed gun guy!
- cSoze 5y ago
  Are they tech savvy though? The "alt-right twitter" was prominantly hacked exposing a ton of personal information. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/03/gab-the-far-right-website-has-been-hacked-and-70gb-of-data-leaked/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/03/gab-t...
  - magicjosh 5y ago
    No, alt-right as a whole is not tech savvy. But I have to imagine there's some subset of alt-right that is indeed tech savvy.