Parallel Economy: Censor-Resistant Payment Processing
paralleleconomy.com
paralleleconomy.com
But what are they doing to actually prevent censorship?
This feels like an excuse to capitalize on the politically charged term of “cancel culture”.
My grift alert is blaring.
Payment processing.
edit: I have to say that I'm finding the replies unintelligible. The largest payment processors are banning organizations from receiving payments. This organization claims that they will not do that. Would that destroy censorship in the world, or keep Visa and Mastercard from banning people (or banning Parallel Economy themselves?) No. Does it stop censorship at your local high school paper? Also no.
As best as I can tell this is basically security through obscurity.
In other words: is the "censorship resistance" here just the pinky promise of someone who unironically writes a page like this[1]?
We are starting with payment processing. And keep building. We took on big tech and it was us who made Parler the most downloaded app in the world. Unfortunately we did not control Parler. We took on big tech and the success we had was unprecedented. We are back and we continue to take on all entities that want to abridge your freedoms.
It is pretty easy to assume that the "freedoms" they want to protect here is freedom to be a right-wing racist Q-nut.
The radical right-wingers are white supremacists frequently committing acts of domestic terrorism. They are hostile toward education and science. They support a free market with trickle-down economics and no regulations. They worship oligarchs, hoping to become like them. They regularly call for normalcy and the sanctity of the family unit, but they also think that women don't deserve rights, because they are thin-skinned and can't stand to lose any of their privilege. They call everyone snowflakes, sheeps and cucks, which is exactly who they are. They love watching oligarchs living it up on their dime. Most of their idols are scam artists preying on their fears.
If you do believe all of that in your comment, then I wonder if you’re victim to hateful disinformation intentionally meant to make it ok to censor, excommunicate, and violently attack a group of people with whom you would otherwise have minor policy disagreements.
Ironically, proving the need for “the other side” to have a parallel economy in the first place.
It’s mostly too bad because, if you believe all the things you said about desiring better education, better healthcare, higher wages being good; and that sexism, racism, and acceptance of business and political elites is bad, then you have a lot more in common with people on the right than you think, and are likely not seeing some aspects of the extremism on the left. (But not your fault - a function of the disinformation).
It’s too bad, because the extremists on both sides are also far more alike than they are different, and they are empowered when we’re against each other.
Not to say there aren’t elements of truth in your comment, too.
The funny thing about having a huge industry of hyper partisan right and left wing cable news and publications pumping out hateful caricatures all day, is that at some point it becomes somewhat self-fulfilling. A feature, not a bug, to be sure.
The worst example of left-wing extremism you can find is the BLM protests, and as unfortunately as they unfolded the griveances there were not unfounded. The American police is largely unaccountable, corrupt and infiltrated with white supremacists. Antifa itself is often discredited, but it's a response to the rise of far-right extremism. The difference is that antifa is not a major domestic terrorism risk.
Do I have to cite the worst examples of right-wing extremism? Between Trump's criminal conduct and messages and the Capitol attack there is an entire culture and media of political violence, culminating in several mass shootings, cults like QAnon and several militias. Right-wingers live in a bubble of paranoia and victim mentality. They contested the result of the last election violently. They've built a cult of personality around their leader, who must never be questioned.
Most scholars don't think there is an equivalence here, and I don't either. I'm not even a left-winger or whatever, I have my own thing, but they are not equivalent, and when I have to choose the choice is obvious.
I’m sure being extremely condescending and dismissive works wonders for turning people towards your politics. That’s basically the left winger stereotype response to everything (that plus “just trust the science”).
Another stereotype of left-wingers is conveniently ignoring facts and truth as soon as it becomes uncomfortable and challenges their narratives.
Your tolerance for ‘facts’ is more see-through than a pane glass window, and this cognitive dissonance is exactly what drives people to the right. Just look at Sweden
https://www.commonsense.news/p/two-bombings-in-one-night-tha...
> Antifa itself is often discredited, but it's a response to the rise of far-right extremism.
And the right wing extremism is a response to the rise of left wing extremism. I could rebut the right wing extremism with reasons why it is a response to grievances that are not unfounded. I could cite the worst examples of racism, bigotry and violence on the left, and use that to justify measures that would silence anyone with left wing ideas.
Then, ultimately, you'd reply with why the bad things on the right are worse or less justified and the bad things on the left are more justified, and before you know it, both of us are in deep justifying extremists that (presumably) neither of us agree with, really.
> I'm not even a left-winger or whatever, I have my own thing
I don't identify as a left- or right- winger either, I have my own things that don't fit any mold. So, the real question for me isn't which side is more justified or more of a threat to the other, but rather - how is it that you and I find ourselves arguing on behalf of not just political parties, but the extremists in them. How is it each of us is relatively blind to the extremism on one side, but hyper aware of the other's?
George Floyd was a defining moment for me. For the first time in a long time, both left and right saw the same video, the same way. Some on the right would qualify their anger with "maybe there's an explanation", but few disagreed that the scene was unjust, and deeply disturbing. For the first time, we had a semblance of unity. Even some Fox News hosts condemned it. The right started to see the police problem for what it is.
So what happened? People wanted to help. They wanted to donate, and march in solidarity.
Cancel culture came for anyone who wanted to donate but questioned whether the official face of the protests, BLM (the organization) was the best place for corporations to be sending money in lieu of other efforts (and rightfully so).
Then riots happened. Groups of (often very white, very male, non-local) people started burning things down, destroying and looting buildings.
So where did that come from? From the peaceful protesters on the right who joined the left in solidarity? No.
Did it come from the peaceful protesters on the left? No.
People were angry, but they did not march down city blocks to burn down the very communities they were supposedly supporting.
But very quickly, the solidarity turned into Fox News saying "this is who the left is" and CNN saying "show me where protests are supposed to be peaceful". Before you know it, extremists successfully hijacked a positive movement and turned it against the very thing the movement was for. And the best part - those extremists are now defended by a population that doesn't even agree with their violence.
So where's the outrage from the peaceful protesters, against the extremists like Antifa who hijacked a peaceful movement? Well, it's there. In plain sight. MANY people who marched in those protests feel hurt and betrayed, but not just by Antifa - by the media and politicians, who STILL haven't even asked them what happened, or how they feel about it. The only way you would know they even exist is if you know them and speak to them personally (as I have).
Now, those peaceful protesters get to be pawns used in Fox News montages lumping them in with Antifa, and they get to be entirely ignored by CNN and MSNBC that spend more time covering up or justifying the violence than they do talking to anyone who was betrayed by it.
And that's the pattern. It repeated on the other side with the 2020 election protests, and it will repeat again, with one side or the other, sometime soon I'm sure.
There's a fray in this country that we're all unwittingly part of. Don't know who's doing it or why just yet, but it's there. And it's so hard to see the fray when you're in it, and it's even harder to pull yourself out of it, but pull ourselves out we must.
I suspect, if they can stay ahead of the regulators, we'll be looking back at services like this in 20 years and note:
1. Riddled with scams and fraud.
2. Better overall results than the well regulated banks. The banks tend to rely on regular bailouts to maintain the illusion of competence, and don't fund a lot of ideas that would be good.
As we see in any of the social media platforms with things like selective enforcement of rules: people are policy.
There continues to be good money in playing the middleman, I suppose.
As far as I can tell, what is meant to make them censorship-resistant is that they claim they will not drop customers based on pressure from censors. They're selling that resistance to censors as "censorship-resistance."
Palestinians are cancel culture victim #1, and the only reason anyone has ever heard of Bari Weiss is that she was a college campus cancel culture warrior.
You know what I'm going to say here: if it's a private company, they get to choose (modulo illegal discrimination) who they do business with. That doesn't make it right, but it doesn't make it censorship either.
Palestine deserves international recognition and their natural right to self-determination; they don't deserve a grift-driven cashout operation run by conspiracy theorists. The latter won't help them much, either.
If you really want censorship resistant payment processing you should not use some central custodial service extracting an obscene rent.
By comparison, Ethereum is highly censorship resistant and its fees are relatively low right now, about 30¢ to transfer ETH and have it settle in ~30 seconds[1].
I laughed out loud. I'm stealing this.
It may turn out to be a marketing gimmick but it seems to me like there's a niche for a high risk payment processor that focuses on the perceived risk of being "cancelled" as the risk they help manage. How they'll deal with all the other issues a high-risk processor has to handle is something I'm curious about.
Media is dividing along partisan lines and apparently payment processing is too. What else? How broad will the parallelism will become?
Companies like PayPal may incubate potential competitors in this way. PayPal is somewhat handicapping itself by accepting a smaller market, as if they had decided to cancel a particular race if that were legal.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
—Martin Niemöller
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-nie...
His mistake was his belief that the Nazis were good Lutherans rather than Jungian Hindu UFO mystics.
"Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a prominent Lutheran pastor in Germany. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he sympathized with many Nazi ideas and supported radically right-wing political movements. But after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Niemöller became an outspoken critic of Hitler’s interference in the Protestant Church. He spent the last eight years of Nazi rule, from 1937 to 1945, in Nazi prisons and concentration camps."
I don’t understand how you manage to maintain merchant accounts with the credit card vendors. It seems likely that they’ll shut you down, as soon as someone tries to fund a peaceful protest that goes against the elite’s allowed belief matrix (like the Canadian Trucker’s Convoy)?
Many of these points applies to BLM protests. Should those organizers be booted from the financial system as well?
>or the fact that nobody wanted them there, or that the protesters were protesting the COVID-19 vaccination mandate
should this be a factor in determining the acceptability of a protest? Can you do it in a principled way that doesn't simply boil down to "if it's for a Just Cause then you can do whatever you want"? Finally, what does this mean for past movements which were also super unpopular? LGBT rights protests come to mind.
The millions of people who supported this strong and effective display of resolve value their liberty so deeply that those subject to the “totalitarian impulse” are unable to comprehend it.
The unprecedented measures of “group punishment” deployed to stop it were stunning in their overreach, and have re-set the assumptions of compliance with government and police for millions of citizens.
You have absolutely NO comprehension of the beast you’ve unleashed.
Seems to me the folks in the fringe minority (as the convoy types are) are the ones with a "Distorted" perception of reality.
anti-rational? There is no risk in forced medical intervention on a global scale?
ethno-nationalist? Do you know who drives trucks here?
nazi-enabling? Wut?
fringe minority? Hundreds of thousands of families directly supporting with presence, materiel and finances in the face of threats from the highest levels of government, law-enforcement and (unified) media?
This example of a very, very commonly recited trope appears bizarre, when confronted by the reality of what actually happened, as observed by the people who were there, across the nation of Canada. But, since this support was conspicuously unreported in the media, how would people actually know how bizarre, how divorced from reality, it is?
And for the record the Freedumb Convoy was reviled by VAST majority of Canadians who saw it as the Nazi-enabling, grift-funded, reality-denying, anti-rational cesspool it truly was.
I look forward to this "economy" stabilizing in the same way that Truth Social or Parler did - at about a tenth of the scale of their competition. Happy to let the pill-sellers and woke-fearers spend their money in their own little walled garden, well away from where I every have to hear about it (or be advertised to).
There is, to date, no evidence that it is effective as a treatment for the Covid-19 variants. However, it's certainly harmful to post in a public forum that it's just "horse de-wormer", which could lead patients to reject approved treatment for these other diseases.
I wish they were all at that scale, instead of being part of oligopolies/monopolies that depend on the silence/support of government to maintain that position.
And, to be clear, that's not to say that they don't evolve. It's been a VERY recent trend for financial institutions to deal in social responsiveness as a metric for financial success. The whole "ESG" framework wasn't thought up by controlling parties, it was DEDUCED by analysts and bureaucrats watching market trends as the world changed. And this type of evolution is WHY finances are so rock solid - finances offer the most auditable ledger humans have ever created. We can run data analytics on finances for the rest of eternity and get amazingly predictive results.
So yeah - when other parties show up to the plate, offering to either disrupt the status quo based on solid analytical data, or to throw their own weight around (wherever it came from) within the status quo - I'll be 100% on board. But there's nothing I find substantial about a company that is pretending that eschewing the ESG methodology will make them competitive. Happy to invest some interest if they start making some headway, but until then it's just another tantrum thrown by people who are mad that they can't make money and say they hate people at the same time.
But I will at least commiserate that we deserve better than our monopolistic overlords. I'm hoping there are more people willing to play the game in our favor (rather than for the interests of the money class), even though that isn't immediately and overwhelmingly profitable.
I think that there's a nicer way to refer to the competition of large monopolists than as "side-shows."
But, again, I don't see the linked site as doing that. Instead, it's trying to say that it can achieve the same goals by playing an entirely different game. And that's fine, if they can back it up. But everything that does that is a side-show until they do.
A grocery store isn't competition to Wal-Mart or Amazon. If they want to be, they have to tackle the scale of supply and demand that those monopolists do. If they say "we're doing exactly what they did, just cheaper", that's competition. If they say "we're doing exactly what they did, but we have this localized scheme for deliveries that will save us a ton of money", THAT'S competition (assuming some evidence it's true). If they say "we're going to do something entirely different, and here's a bunch of convincing data to say why that would work, or work better", that is, once again, competition.
But if your grocery store says "we're going to do it completely differently, because we are aggrieved!", that is a side-show. There's nothing there to engender confidence. If the store says "we're going to do it completely differently, by doing it backwards because that SHOULD work out better", that is another example of a side-show. The salient bit being that it MIGHT work. That's what's great about capitalism. But you'll forgive me if I don't get too particularly enthused about yet another right-wing think-tank pivoting into new ways for people to invest a ton of money before they agonizingly drag out their corporate demise, insisting that they are doing "fine", the whole time. It's not myopic or short-sighted to contextualize real patterns that you've observed into actionable investment or divestment of interest.
Who are you talking about?
> invest a ton of money before they agonizingly drag out their corporate demise
What is so challenging about the business that they're going into other than the fact that they will be under constant attack by censors and monopolists? They seem to be safe as houses otherwise, considering that they're requiring TINs and EINs from business customers, and W-9s and SSNs from individuals.
And you wonder what the challenges are, of building and maintaining your own sub-economy? I mean, it seems pretty obvious, but if you're really curious, just pay attention to this group. You'll see the challenges play out in real time and, most likely, overcome them.
Really?
Are they? Is it?
> We facilitate voluntary exchange between consenting adults and it is that exchange which promotes peace and prosperity.
who decides what peace and prosperity is?