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Comment by r3bl | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that they'd require a payment method to rent the server somewhere else or to use a non-US company that doesn't offer a generous free plan. The most prominent payment providers (Visa, MasterCard, PayPal) are all US-based.

> (and is not required to follow US sanctions due to trade agreements, that'll be hard).

I really don't know much about sanctions against Syria and Crimea, but Iranian developers could use every country that hasn't withdrawn from the Iran deal: EU, UK (separate signature, regardless of Brexit), Russia, China.

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It's unfortunately not that easy. Iranian students studying in the UK for example, currently have a lot of trouble to pay their tuition fees. Because the U.S. insists that any bank (from the EU or wherever in the world) that wants to do business in the U.S. must comply to U.S. sanctions, which means an U.K. bank has to choose if it wants to block Iran or get blocked itself in/by the U.S. for doing business with Iran. More about this can be found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_sanctions_agains....

These are very good points. Especially the one about the major payment providers.

Re: countries that have withdrawn from the Iran deal. Even those who haven't (AFAIK, Brazil) are still in grey waters because local companies with business in the US are afraid to do business with Iranian companies. For example, two ships weren't allowed to be refilled in Brazil for 50 days while a legal battle at the supreme court was ongoing to decide if the Brazilian oil company could even refill them, because it was afraid to be sanctioned by the US govt (while doing business in the US or with US companies in the future).

Even before the US withdrew a lot of financial institutions wouldn't allow doing any kind of transactions with iran.

It's not like the sanctions were actually dropped even though they were supposed to. That was the whole point of the critiques of the JCPOA.

Enter... crypto

Between the speculative get-rich-quick rollercoaster of Bitcoin and the fraud of other crypto currencies it feels like the promise of decentralization has been forgotten.

That's just shifting the problem one inconvenience further. How do you purchase cryptocurrencies without Visa/MasterCard/PayPal?

I'm not sure what options they have, but ideally, for convenience some kind of local country bank transfer, which could be to a local crypto dealer. That might take days but you might "stock up" on crypto to compensate.

Or peer to peer cash/crypto swap might be required.

Or businesses themselves sell some of their services with crypto.

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