Conversation

Replying to and
Look at shopify.ca/legal/terms-pa as an example of financial censorship. > Products or services that are otherwise prohibited by our financial partners > > phone services, and cell phones; telemarketing, telecommunications equipment and telephone sales Cannot even sell a phone...
1
1
Replying to and
A business can be destroyed at any moment when a payment processor decides to ban them from the platform. It puts a few massive corporations into the position of acting as a branch of law enforcement without due process along with arbitrarily policing morality as they choose.
2
3
Replying to
Banks and payment processors aren't allowed to provide privacy due to government regulation, and a lot of their aggressive censorship and freezing of payments is based on that. Often, the reason they don't tell you why they froze it is because they're forbidden from doing that.
1
1
Replying to and
The government requires that they know and confirm the identity of their customers. They require them to police payments to identify money laundering and various suspicious things. They aren't punished for being overly aggressive, so the cheapest approach is being very ban happy.
1
Replying to and
The way traditional payment systems work is pretty much like Content ID on YouTube. People have payments / accounts frozen all the time with no recourse for ridiculous reasons or because a heuristic wrongly triggered. It's understaffed and they won't take unnecessary legal risk.
1
Replying to and
I see a lot of people supporting private messaging, browsing, etc. while being against private payments, donations and money transfers. Cash is fading away and the replacement is a dragnet with tons of censorship. I think it's an authoritarian surveillance / censorship nightmare.
1
Replying to and
From my perspective, it's the same as end-to-end encrypted messaging. The same arguments apply to it. There's also the whole monetary policy issue, where the current system is an extreme form of rigged crony capitalism taking money from everyone and handing it to the richest.
1
1