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Comment by analyte123 | Hacker News Reader

The writers aren't completely "sovereign" as long as they are using Stripe (and Visa and Mastercard) to process payments. It is basically inevitable that some entity in the payment system will eventually interfere with Substack even if Substack themselves hold the line.

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Substack themselves have a ToS. In theory Substack could always switch payment processors or allow crypto currency payment, but you can never get out from under their ToS.

For example, you couldn't publish something like 2600 there because they discuss illegal activities like blue boxing.

True, but messing with people like Greenwald, Tufekci, Taibbi, Yglesias, Sullivan etc. at the same time is bound to get Stripe into a world of hurt.

These are names with a following and they have strong incentive to stick together if anyone on Substack is threatened with financial cancellation.

Numerous people have been removed from popular social media platforms, and I've yet to see any of them make a comeback, let alone go up against Twitter/YT/FB etc.

It is unlikely we will ever even hear about Stripe openly leveraging their influence. They will talk to Substack, who will bring the issue to their investors, who will tell Substack that Stripe is higher up in the food chain than the writers.

That is extremely unlikely to happen, but there are plenty of other payment processors out there that I can't imagine any practical way of putting enough pressure on to stop them from processing payments. If facialabuse.com hasn't been de-platformed from their payment processor yet, then there is always somewhere to go.

This is kind of a use-case for Bitcoin, no?

It's the planned/future use-case for Bitcoin, yes. As of now, you cannot pay a lot of your daily expenses with Bitcoin so you still need a way of going from Bitcoin to USD/EUR/$LOCAL_CURRENCY so instead of Visa and Mastercard being the gatekeepers, the centralized exchange facilitating the fiat-trade is now the gatekeeper instead.

Not exactly future. It happened in 2014 when MasterCard and visa banned payments to wikileaks. Wikileaks continued to take Bitcoin.

I guess we're waiting to find out if Trump or someone will start writing there. The current big boys are all non-woke center left/right so they're not actually at all outrageous to the general public.

They are however outrageous to the far-left journos at mainstream publications, which is why there's so much attention focused on Substack right now. Trump won't go anywhere that he doesn't get to own a significant portion of the business, so he'll have to build his own site (which it is already reported that he is doing.)

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