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Everytime I see this kind of discussion I remember that there are companies not breaking the law whose only way of surviving is bitcoin, because the big two pay

Everytime I see this kind of discussion I remember that there are companies not breaking the law whose only way of surviving is bitcoin, because the big two payment circuits (visa and mastercard) have decided in concert, to not process their payments. Gab and Parler come to mind.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
Those are certainly two ... examples.
- curtisblaine 2y ago
  "Free speech is for the speech you hate, not for the speech you like"
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    Free speech as in speech protected by the 1st amendment? That's very specifically meant to curtail the government's powers, not the powers of merchants who decline to do business with others. You could make a pretty strong argument that overly stringent regulations that result in sex workers, etc., being unable to process payments are a violation of that, but I'm not aware of why Visa/Mastercard don't support Gab & Parler. If it's that, you have a point. Otherwise, not really.
    - curtisblaine 2y ago
      They didn't, back in the days. I remember diatinctly the only way to send money to Gab / Parler was Bitcoin. Maybe now they do, but that's not very important.
    - syntaxfree 2y ago
      Who said anything about amendments?
      - pavel_lishin 2y ago
        It's a reasonable assumption to make when someone invokes the term "free speech" in a majority-American forum. (I'm making some assumptions about visitors of HN here, who are probably more international than most places I'm in, but still.)
- yellowapple 2y ago
  I can think of plenty of others, like that time PayPal took $1.3m of Flipper Zero's money and ran because reasons: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/ And that's just a particularly high-profile example; smaller organizations and individuals routinely face this sort of thing from centralized payment processors. Said risk is nonexistent with any competently-developed cryptocurrency (and even most incompetently-developed ones).

pavel_lishin 2y ago

Those are certainly two ... examples.

curtisblaine 2y ago
"Free speech is for the speech you hate, not for the speech you like"
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  Free speech as in speech protected by the 1st amendment? That's very specifically meant to curtail the government's powers, not the powers of merchants who decline to do business with others. You could make a pretty strong argument that overly stringent regulations that result in sex workers, etc., being unable to process payments are a violation of that, but I'm not aware of why Visa/Mastercard don't support Gab & Parler. If it's that, you have a point. Otherwise, not really.
  - curtisblaine 2y ago
    They didn't, back in the days. I remember diatinctly the only way to send money to Gab / Parler was Bitcoin. Maybe now they do, but that's not very important.
  - syntaxfree 2y ago
    Who said anything about amendments?
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      It's a reasonable assumption to make when someone invokes the term "free speech" in a majority-American forum. (I'm making some assumptions about visitors of HN here, who are probably more international than most places I'm in, but still.)
yellowapple 2y ago
I can think of plenty of others, like that time PayPal took $1.3m of Flipper Zero's money and ran because reasons: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/ And that's just a particularly high-profile example; smaller organizations and individuals routinely face this sort of thing from centralized payment processors. Said risk is nonexistent with any competently-developed cryptocurrency (and even most incompetently-developed ones).