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This is why we need a decentralized Internet payment system, like email. This was a non-controversial opinion not long ago.

by gfodor 4y ago

cwkoss 4y ago
Isn't that what cryptocurrency is?
politelemon 4y ago
Your sentence caught me off guard, maybe I am reading it wrong. Do you mean email as a payment system, or do you mean email as an example of a decentralized system?
- gfodor 4y ago
  The latter - a system that is like e-mail (decentralized) but allows people to send money to each other. We have many such systems being developed, but you get downvoted on HN for promoting them, since people assume you are a scammer, a criminal, etc.
  - ollien 4y ago
    Ironically, email is becoming increasingly centralized. See this story from just a few days go https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437
    - gfodor 4y ago
      Yes, as with any protocol email is always subject to centralizing forces. But protocols like email (to me) represent the best possible approach to trying to counteract these forces for Internet applications. They aren’t a silver bullet but maintain the best forms of optionality for undermining and correcting them.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    How can they still be in development when the underlying tech has been available for 12 years or so? In the real world, there is no anonymous e-money that doesn't end up having to be laundered back into good old cash.
  - ilaksh 4y ago
    Lol yeah so you are talking about a cryptocurrency but actually afraid to use that word. I know, I just did in my other comment and I know I will be attacked here.
aynyc 4y ago
If gmail/outlook/yahoo bans you or mark you as spam, you are not gonna get much done.
- gfodor 4y ago
  Yes the maximally centralized form of a protocol like email is the one we have now where a few large actors can collude to cut you off from large swaths of the network. However, that’s different than a singular actor, but more importantly, nothing is stopping a counterforce from coming in and correcting that regime. It’s possible we may see email revert to a less centralized form over time as various people choose to prioritize working that problem (and can make headway, because of how email works.)
  - Retric 4y ago
    The point is email as a protocol is extremely open, but email as a network is quite centralized. There aren’t any great options here because buildings a system is easy but interfacing it with the real world and all it’s laws and bad actors is hard. What people forget is interfacing with systems designed to operate in the real world is at best an abstraction over this difficulty and eventually it gets exposed for the mess it actually is.
  - sbdncuvh 4y ago
    This is unlikely the spam problem is too hard to solve at the small scale for you to ever be relevant.
jollybean 4y ago
We should, but the problem is consumers want the protections offered by PayPal and VISA who do fraud analysis and can clawback money etc. etc.. There's definitely a space for 'digital cash', for sure, but consumers will prefer the former. When it comes to money, there are just deeply inherent issues of dealing with fraud, spam, goods not delivered etc. etc.. which adds significant overhead to the whole system. Most people playing above-above board don't have a problem. Usually in these cases, it's because something semi-shady is being sold, and it usually contravenes one of the T&Cs of Stripe. The OP here didn't tell us what line of business they were in.
- gfodor 4y ago
  Yes, of course this is a huge challenge. That’s the point tho, the high order bit is we should want to solve these problems and support good faith actors who are actually trying to.
  - alphabettsy 4y ago
    What problems? There are organizations that are not Stripe where they have much better support.
jandrese 4y ago
A payment system like that would run face first into Know Your Customer (KYC) laws and bet shut down. This isn't a hard problem for technical reasons, it's all political. It's about preventing money laundering and trying to fight crime via financial instruments. But it also means any payment system that doesn't implement these restrictions will almost instantly be overrun by criminals because they are highly motivated to find ways of moving money.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  A payment system like that would run face first into Know Your Customer (KYC) laws and bet shut down. Great, then let's change those laws.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    Good luck, not going to happen. Democratic systems won't change these laws because there is no popular support for change - there is a reasonably large 'law-and-order' and 'corruption-as-main-concern' voter demographic who strongly support these laws, and the niche of HN techies and libertarians who'd oppose them is insignificantly small in comparison; and authoritarian systems won't change these laws because their leadership supports them even more.
    - mindcrime 4y ago
      I acknowledge that that is the prevailing sentiment, and the obviously correct conclusion. And yet I can't accept that kind of defeatist thinking. To embrace defeatism on that level is to basically accept that nothing will ever change, and we know that things do, occasionally, change. It's not always clear exactly what it takes to create wide-scale societal change, and yes one could easily spend their whole life engaging in activism and die with nothing to show for it. Yet people do still persist, for their own reasons. And sometimes the good guys do win.
      - PeterisP 4y ago
        It's not passive giving up - many people, including me, consider the social change you want to drive as harmful in aggregate, and would fight against it; and I'm asserting that at the moment we are in the majority. I understand the idealistic benefits of freedom of payments, however, the KYC/AML restrictions are there for valid reasons that simply have much more magnitude of importance (for example, the scale of corruption and its social harm is so big that even a slight decrease in that due to KYC/AML enforcement far outweighs all the current social costs of KYC/AML) and removing them would mean that in aggregate the bad guys have won. I'm not saying that you're a bad guy, but you are an "ally of convenience" to them as achieving your position would let the bad guys win and I would consider it immoral to allow that. We definitely should strive for better, more accurate AML/KYC implementations that have less impact on legitimate trade. But arguing for removing AML/KYC just because of that is effectively throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

This is why we need a decentralized Internet payment system, like email. This was a non-controversial opinion not long ago.

by gfodor 4y ago

This is why we need a decentralized Internet payment system, like email. This was a non-controversial opinion not long ago.

cwkoss 4y ago

Isn't that what cryptocurrency is?

politelemon 4y ago

Your sentence caught me off guard, maybe I am reading it wrong. Do you mean email as a payment system, or do you mean email as an example of a decentralized system?

gfodor 4y ago
The latter - a system that is like e-mail (decentralized) but allows people to send money to each other. We have many such systems being developed, but you get downvoted on HN for promoting them, since people assume you are a scammer, a criminal, etc.
- ollien 4y ago
  Ironically, email is becoming increasingly centralized. See this story from just a few days go https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437
  - gfodor 4y ago
    Yes, as with any protocol email is always subject to centralizing forces. But protocols like email (to me) represent the best possible approach to trying to counteract these forces for Internet applications. They aren’t a silver bullet but maintain the best forms of optionality for undermining and correcting them.
- rchaud 4y ago
  How can they still be in development when the underlying tech has been available for 12 years or so? In the real world, there is no anonymous e-money that doesn't end up having to be laundered back into good old cash.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  Lol yeah so you are talking about a cryptocurrency but actually afraid to use that word. I know, I just did in my other comment and I know I will be attacked here.

aynyc 4y ago

If gmail/outlook/yahoo bans you or mark you as spam, you are not gonna get much done.

gfodor 4y ago
Yes the maximally centralized form of a protocol like email is the one we have now where a few large actors can collude to cut you off from large swaths of the network. However, that’s different than a singular actor, but more importantly, nothing is stopping a counterforce from coming in and correcting that regime. It’s possible we may see email revert to a less centralized form over time as various people choose to prioritize working that problem (and can make headway, because of how email works.)
- Retric 4y ago
  The point is email as a protocol is extremely open, but email as a network is quite centralized. There aren’t any great options here because buildings a system is easy but interfacing it with the real world and all it’s laws and bad actors is hard. What people forget is interfacing with systems designed to operate in the real world is at best an abstraction over this difficulty and eventually it gets exposed for the mess it actually is.
- sbdncuvh 4y ago
  This is unlikely the spam problem is too hard to solve at the small scale for you to ever be relevant.

jollybean 4y ago

We should, but the problem is consumers want the protections offered by PayPal and VISA who do fraud analysis and can clawback money etc. etc.. There's definitely a space for 'digital cash', for sure, but consumers will prefer the former. When it comes to money, there are just deeply inherent issues of dealing with fraud, spam, goods not delivered etc. etc.. which adds significant overhead to the whole system. Most people playing above-above board don't have a problem. Usually in these cases, it's because something semi-shady is being sold, and it usually contravenes one of the T&Cs of Stripe. The OP here didn't tell us what line of business they were in.

gfodor 4y ago
Yes, of course this is a huge challenge. That’s the point tho, the high order bit is we should want to solve these problems and support good faith actors who are actually trying to.
- alphabettsy 4y ago
  What problems? There are organizations that are not Stripe where they have much better support.

jandrese 4y ago

A payment system like that would run face first into Know Your Customer (KYC) laws and bet shut down. This isn't a hard problem for technical reasons, it's all political. It's about preventing money laundering and trying to fight crime via financial instruments. But it also means any payment system that doesn't implement these restrictions will almost instantly be overrun by criminals because they are highly motivated to find ways of moving money.

mindcrime 4y ago
A payment system like that would run face first into Know Your Customer (KYC) laws and bet shut down. Great, then let's change those laws.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Good luck, not going to happen. Democratic systems won't change these laws because there is no popular support for change - there is a reasonably large 'law-and-order' and 'corruption-as-main-concern' voter demographic who strongly support these laws, and the niche of HN techies and libertarians who'd oppose them is insignificantly small in comparison; and authoritarian systems won't change these laws because their leadership supports them even more.
  - mindcrime 4y ago
    I acknowledge that that is the prevailing sentiment, and the obviously correct conclusion. And yet I can't accept that kind of defeatist thinking. To embrace defeatism on that level is to basically accept that nothing will ever change, and we know that things do, occasionally, change. It's not always clear exactly what it takes to create wide-scale societal change, and yes one could easily spend their whole life engaging in activism and die with nothing to show for it. Yet people do still persist, for their own reasons. And sometimes the good guys do win.
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      It's not passive giving up - many people, including me, consider the social change you want to drive as harmful in aggregate, and would fight against it; and I'm asserting that at the moment we are in the majority. I understand the idealistic benefits of freedom of payments, however, the KYC/AML restrictions are there for valid reasons that simply have much more magnitude of importance (for example, the scale of corruption and its social harm is so big that even a slight decrease in that due to KYC/AML enforcement far outweighs all the current social costs of KYC/AML) and removing them would mean that in aggregate the bad guys have won. I'm not saying that you're a bad guy, but you are an "ally of convenience" to them as achieving your position would let the bad guys win and I would consider it immoral to allow that. We definitely should strive for better, more accurate AML/KYC implementations that have less impact on legitimate trade. But arguing for removing AML/KYC just because of that is effectively throwing out the baby with the bathwater.