Nick Szabo  🔑

People make the mistake thinking that censorship-resistant payments are only about the product being purchased. "Who would censor buying coffee". But censorship resistance is also about the individual or organization doing the purchasing.

Indeed, it is increasingly common to see financial censorship based on the professed beliefs of the individual or organization. As I'm using it here censorship resistance is also about the reliable operation and indeed the very survival of the payment or settlement system itself.

Sorry, Nick. I'm confused. What is "censorship" in this context? What distinguishes it from mere refusal of patronage? Let's say I or my firm has a philosophical aversion to some currency, and refuse to do business with anyone who offers it to me. Would that count?

Yes. "Censorship resistance" is an engineering term, in which "censorship" refers among other things to the ability of a payment or settlement service to discriminate in such a fashion, whether based on third party pressure or coercion or of its own volition.

This has been going on already with many verifiable examples. Wrongthink gets you banned from having accounts or raise money or even renting an establishment for an event. People who hate crypto hate the freedom of their opponents and the free market alike.

Is Wrongthink not a voluntary network? Or, to rephrase, suppose I don't want to rent you my establishment. (1) does that make me an opponent of the free market? and (2) what has it do do with free choice in currency? I'm really missing something here.

What you are missing is that today's digitally centralized finance is eminently censorable, with far more completeness a to much finer granularity than previous forms of money, especially the most common ones like bearer bank notes, coins, and jewelry, allowed.

“On the one hand, a centralized system with disenfranchised participants, like the electronically tagged animals in feedlots, and, on the other hand, a system where each participant is able to protect its own interest, like buyers and sellers on a town market square” @chaumdotcom