Liberapay is in trouble
medium.com
medium.com
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Although I can't figure out who. Possibly https://www.byline.com/column/58/article/1409 ?
Lightning appears to be a failure too - it requires a lot of money to be comitted to the network and constant vigilance so as not to lose your funds.
Further, the market demand you talk about doesn't seem to be playing out - if anything the accepting of cryptocurrencies for actual transactions (rather than just speculation) seems to be on the decline.
As for Lighthing, I think you're singing its demise a little too early.
They are also not the only way to scaling and ease-of-use.
Wikileaks may well have been happy. That doesn't mean bitcoin is a good solution for wider use, especially with its transaction throughput limitations.
Ease of use in the cryptocurrency world is something of a joke...
As a "dumb user" I went to buy some crypto after the initial crash last winter. I found that: Most exchanges do not permit use in my state (Washington). Of those that did, Coinbase/GDAX ended up having technical issues, leading me on for months of useless support tickets, before blackholing me entirely, and once I finally obtained some eth on gemini, diversifying it into a handful of altcoins required yet-another "exchange search", learning how to do some very sketchy wallet transfers, and using MUCH less trusted exchanges that actually allowed my state and the pairings I needed. (And if I want to liquidate my position, I have to basically invert this whole mess of a flow.)
I very well could be going about this in a dumb way, or it could have improved, thus this post (in that someone can feel free to correct me). My perception is that ease of use is in fact a joke, and if crypto wants to become a thing for "Boring Normal People" it needs to fix that.
- hard to use because governments willfully get in the way
- intrinsically hard to use.
The latter is a real hard problem for crypto that will require an entire generation to die off (those who can't understand and will never understand that using a 3rd party to manage your money isn't compulsory or even desirable anymore) before things evolve.
1. Loss aversion - You lose your bitcoin wallet you lose everything. You can't have that with large amounts of money or you'll bankrupt people.
2. Anonymity - Thieves can steal money, and to get it back you have to expose yourself and claim the money, if you're lucky enough to get it back at all. Governments can also very easily track users.
3. Decentralized - You have no one single person to punish when things go wrong, or seek help from. You're alone just like everyone else.
This is not a description of why cryptocurrency is intrinsically hard to use. It's intrinsically hard to use because - - It requires insane levels of OpSec to keep safe - It can be sent to the wrong place with a typo, and never recovered - Its transactions are irreversible, this is not a feature for most users - The fees are opaque and variable - Transaction processing can take an arbitrary amount of time
It's not that people 'don't understand' that using a 3rd party is unnecessary, it's that these third parties provide a lot of valuable services. The use of cryptocurrency is a marked step backwards from the existing situation for most scenarios.
And how is that going to help with the OP problem, I wonder?
Gov't says your business ain't what we like, payment can't happen, business is dead.
If their policies were anything less than "we support any legal business", they'd be spending decades in the courts.
Conversely, a lot of private payment processors are beholden to the tastes of their clients and investors. Even if you have all the right metrics and tech about fraud, chargebacks, customer satisfaction, see how many processors close their doors if you say you're selling rifles or porn.
You're making it sound as though "being a utility" means "no fees". I cannot name any utility that is fee-free.
Lightning (layer 2 on top of Bitcoin) seem to be fitting the bill pretty well at this point.
I mean that's some users' fault, isn'it it? Isn't it the job of the payment processor to identify and handle problem users and crooks? What am I paying them for? I don't really understand how they can boot customers, _and_ boot them _without an explanation_. They should need at least a ruling from a judge. I can understand if my audience is "risky" and hence I get no discount on fees and so on, but this behaviour is unacceptable and - IMHO - it breaks business freedom and (potentially) competition.
I don't know if it's the same in the US, but in Italy, as an example, a "real" business operating in brick-and-mortar locations is considered a "public place" (pubblico esercizio) and it can't refuse its services to people that can pay for them (barring some legal limits, e.g. selling alcohol to kids or to people that are already drunk). I think that in a ruling some years ago those rights were extended to online shops and activities. If you want to give services to a restricted audience you can create a "private club", but then you're severely limited in what you can do in marketing/advertising and such.
I really think the same should happen for internet activities. This is blatant - albeit algorithmic - discrimination.
Likelier: Liberapay’s KYC was insufficient.
Mangopay probably received a call from the regulator, and they realized that they could not ensure that Liberapay was not (unwittingly) letting people launder money or finance terrorism.
The AML/CFT requirements that would have needed to be applied by Liberapay to all its users would probably have caused such friction that they would have grown much slower, however.
The fact that they stop the contract so soon without previous warning (unless Librapay is not disclosing everything) is what make it really weird for me.
No anti-money laundering law doesn't work that way
> The fact that they stop the contract so soon without previous warning (unless Librapay is not disclosing everything) is what make it really weird for me.
That is completely normal (in fact giving notice is pretty lenient), if a financial institution suspects you of money laundering weird things will begin to happen to you such as freezes, orders being ignored, surprise account closures, etc. You will under no circumstances receive an explanation as that in itself is a serious criminal offense because it is considered to be helpful to money launderers when you explain to them what they did that aroused suspicion.
Note to readers: if weird things start happening to your bank account (delayed or ignored payments, logouts, etc) get on the phone to the bank and be as helpful to them as you can be. That is typically the only way to get this resolved.
No harm would have been done by giving them a few months grace period.
Financing Nazis is illegal, especially in France, which had a bit of an economic setback about sixty years ago because of them. Oh, and a lot of death and suffering.
Indeed and that would be consistent with no explanation being offered as explaining is normally illegal under "tipping off" rules.
No. They mirror one-on-one Mangopay's: https://docs.mangopay.com/guide/kyc https://liberapay.com/about/faq#maximum-amount
>I have just received an email from mangopay saying that they want to terminate their contract with us because we have/had a few controversial users.
>I've replied, asking for confirmation, and information on how much time we have left.
B) Even though my point does not depend on whether you're right or wrong, you're wrong. I have USD in my bank but I have to cash them out into GBP. So according to your "reasoning", USD is not a currency? Of course it is, you're just talking nonsense.
Either a currency is something you can buy things with, or it's a label with exchange rates. In the first case it can't be something that needs to be cashed out. In the second case you can't buy something and the thing you buy other things with is money.
You're usage of Bitcoin, money, GDP, USD and currency is willynilly.
I didn't personally attack you. I said you have added nothing. That comment has nothing to do with your personhood.
I think you don't know what a "personal attack" is. Or a "currency", for that matter.
Your usage of the English language is wilynilly.
As a small-time donor, I had to give them the info listed there under "Light Authentification". People who give or receive more have to submit copies of their passport or governmental ID .
The article is dated February 2017, I didn't notice before "In 2017 we’re going to keep improving Liberapay." near the end. According to their frontpage today, 462 new donations were started in the past month (totaling €350/week). The headline seems misleading.
Edit: my bad, I opened the link from a comment..
[0] https://medium.com/liberapay-blog/the-first-year-of-liberapa...
Can you stop pressuring me to register when I open a link to you? I closed the tab without reading the article, and soon you'll piss me off enough that i'll remember to not open medium links...
Can you please fight this battle elsewhere and keep your comments on topic? I know it’s irritating. I agree. Just not the right place in my opinion. I came here looking for comments on the article.
Thanks,
I agree with you but there's other ways to do this than yet another unrelated comment.
Thanks for having reminded me how awful was the medium experience before; I hadn't even noticed I was on this site.
What do you expect?