BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)
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If everything else fails, I know I can still have two things to pay with: cash and crypto.
Bitcoin doesn't store any energy.
Bitcoin is like a F1 car going around a track forever, with your name scribbled on it.
It's a sort-of flex, showing off, a demonstration of (energy) wealth. Humanities's peacock feathers.
I think of them as representations of the idea that energy is (currently) so abundant and cheap that we can waste it on mining things like gold and crypto, a fundamentally ridiculous concept in terms of real actual human needs.
Once that stops being the case (when fossil fuel starts running out globally), the whole thing - cash, gold, crypto, stocks, bonds, property - everything falls apart.
Bitcoin is valuable because people accept that it’s valuable, same as with cash, gold, crypto, stocks, bonds, property. The price of an apple is $2 is because I offered it to you for $2 and you bought it.
Gold is a bit different. You could stop mining it today entirely and you could still have a gold currency. Stop mining bitcoin and it all effectively disappears!
Good luck buying groceries or paying the mortgage with Crypto.
(You conveniently left out “cash” from your reply. Cash. I’ll buy groceries with cash, if I can’t use my card.)
If "everything else fails" the internet has failed, and crypto will be worthless. Gold will probably still have some value, unless shit really hits the fan.
Then nothing short of planning a serious terrorist act can get you kicked out of all accounts.
You have to look at the reality. Crypto has been used overwhelmingly for scams and crime.
So has regular currency.
These transactions while not the majority of transactions I would wager is far larger in terms of dollar value that the whole crypto ecosystem.
The reality is that criminals will find loop holes in a system and they will exploit it if it is worth exploiting. Many of the checks done in banks now impede transactions. I was buying a car (private seller) and I couldn't transfer the cash without going through a fraud check, even though I had signed the transaction with a card reader in the app. It turned a 30 minutes of test driving the vehicle and checking docs into 3 hours of wrangling on the phone. BTW I am not the only person having these problems with banks in the UK.
As for what crime we are referring to as well in this scenario needs clarifying as well. I suspect that most of crypto transactions are through darknet drug markets. These markets reduce the risk of violence to basically zero when purchasing drugs. While I am not one of these people that is pro-legalising all drugs, the reality is that people are going to buying them.
Btw, crypto (like bitcoin) is only an alternative because of convention.
The complete history of bitcoins is globally trackable, and people could all decide that they'll pay more for bitcoins that came from Satoshi's initial hoard, or that they'll refuse to accept bitcoins that were ever seized by the FBI.
(Yes, there are mixers. But you'd just refuse to accept any bitcoin that took part in the mixer transaction, if any FBI coins were in there.)
I'd like to introduce you to Monero, which isn't globally trackable and also properly fungible so you can't refuse mixed transactions (since all transactions are protected).
Apparently it powered online drug marketplaces before Bitcoin existed.
Try doing that with crypto. Who are you going to arrest?
Every on- and off-ramp provider. EU legislation has basically created a database of real person to wallet mappings (for some subset of wallets). You can't take money from a wallet if you don't know who it belongs to (if you're an exchange anyways). The checks are a bit soft (ie. self attestation and stuff), but the public ledger part of crypto makes tracking far-far easier than with traditional banks.
The end game for this is that people in the West (and whoever they can pressure) won't be able to buy crypto to buy drugs or sell it when selling drugs, making it useless on a big scale.
This is essentially the purpose of localmonero and similar offerings. Trading cash for Monero in a p2p manner is going to be extraordinarily difficult to halt.
Second, Monero is still thought to be untraceable. In fact regulated entities are banned from exchanging it in the EU precisely because they can't trace it. (Zcash is also banned under the same law, but is considered technically inferior because not all transactions are private.)
Third, what do you even mean? Do you mean they'll go back to the last time those coins passed through a regulated on-ramp, and prosecute that person? For what? Buying cryptocurrency, then buying a legal product with cryptocurrency, is not illegal, and even if the product was illegal, the government most likely couldn't prove that. Also, the on-ramp was probably in a different jurisdiction. Perhaps for something like "acting as an unlicensed money transmitter" which is a thing they have done against users of cryptocurrencies. If they prosecute that in large quantities, will it fly?
Or do you mean they'll wait until someone takes the crypto to a regulated off-ramp, and then prosecute that person? For what - undeclared income? As far as I know, trading one cryptocurrency for another is a non-taxable currency exchange, at least in some EU countries, so they can't get you for that. And what if they declared it? Again, they might try "acting as an unlicensed money transmitter" of course. What if it never gets to a regulated off-ramp and just circulates peer-to-peer forever? It's more likely tyou think, since remember, regulated off-ramps are strictly banned.
Why do you believe it would suddenly make peer2peer cash to cryptocurrency exchanges unviable?
And if you meant tracing the Monero itself, I suggest you read up on how Monero works—and how it differs from BTC—first.
I agree with you on targeting the on- and off-ramps. But I think you got your use cases wrong.
Crypto has two major use cases these days:
- speculation (aka gambling)
- ransomware payments
Buying drugs is pretty far down the list. And so are pretty much all purchases of normal goods and services.
With crypto you don't hand over your coins to a third-party for safe keeping, you instead send coins directly to one another, just like with cash.
Hence my restriction to crypto that is 'like bitcoin'. Yes, you can use some tricks like zero knowledge proofs to make untrackable crypto-currencies. But as far as I can tell, they aren't all that popular. For currencies that offer both stealthy and 'regular' transactions (I think like zcash), the vast majority of transactions are of the latter kind.
https://en.econostrum.info/europe-restricts-cash-paymentss-n...
https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/shopping-internet/cas...
That cap is about as enforceable as a cap on bitcoin transactions. Ie only enforceable on law-abiding citizens.
Intentional mixers aren't even the half of it. You have large exchange operators that use a single wallet. They file KYC paperwork with governments, but that's not in the blockchain. From the perspective of the blockchain their whole exchange is one big mixer. A billion dollars goes in, a hundred was tainted, a billion dollars comes back out. The only information to trace which $100 that went in is the $100 that came back out isn't in the blockchain, it's in the exchange's private accounting database.
But if you propose to taint every coin that has ever passed through a major exchange, that's pretty much all of them.
All new ones. You can buy 'fresh coins' from miners directly.
You could also exempt some 'honourable' miners (ie a whitelist) from the taint.
All kinds of conventions are possible, depending on what people want to value.
The convention that all bitcoins are equally valuable is just that: a convention. And it's not even strictly adhered to, because some bitcoins are already more valuable than others.
Putting aside that there are a finite number of Bitcoins that will ever be mined, what good is that? You'd have "untainted" coins that you could hardly even spend without immediately tainting them because six degrees of Kevin Bacon means that everybody else's wallet has already interacted with the unclean.
> And it's not even strictly adhered to, because some bitcoins are already more valuable than others.
Is it the tainted ones that are the more valuable ones because you can still exchange them for the same number of dollars but they also have additional value for trolling people by sending trivial amounts of them to their untainted wallets without their permission?
You can make an arbitrary number of new wallets. Some people even suggest making new wallets for each transaction.
Not long ago we lived in a world where currency from anywhere other than the nation you were in (or maybe somewhere close by) was impractical to use on a daily basis. Things have changed now and the government's use of money as a tool to keep control of citizens is loosening. For better and worse.
FT Alphaville has a good article about it: "How much does cryptocrime pay?": https://www.ft.com/content/f40b7ac7-bb50-4712-aa7f-5219c2b18... (free sign-up)
To quote:
2025 Chainalysis Crypto Crime Report ... The authors have so far tracked over $40bn of crypto transfers to illicit addresses made in 2024, though they reckon the final total will be north of $51bn.
Some drug dealer is making $20,000/year selling drugs, but the drugs are sold for $50,000 because they had to spend $30,000 on grow lamps and electricity and rent in order to produce them. The same drug dealer also uses the same wallet to sell ordinary lawful gift cards for cryptocurrency and they only make $5000 from that but it's against revenue of $200,000 because the markup on gift cards is small.
For that they're attributing $250,000 of "crypto transfers to illicit addresses" to this person but there was only actually $20,000 of unlawful gain. Overstating the problem to demonize the target.
"The estimated amount of money laundered annually worldwide is between 2% and 5% of global GDP, that is, something between US$ 800 billion and US$ 2 trillion."
source: https://www.unodc.org/lpo-brazil/en/frontpage/2013/10/29-uno...
The primary purpose of a bank is to issue debt. That’s why they were created. A bank has to be able to “print” money to issue debt. This isn’t a flaw as some crypto fans like to think, it’s a very important feature. Debt issued by banks replaced the informal promise-based debt people used before we had banks. You didn’t need money on hand, or to borrow some coins from some rich dude, to get help building a barn. You got help from people in the village in exchange for some other goods or service you’d provide them in the future. Bank issued debt with “printed” money is the replacement to that, and it only works if money can be created on demand.
Crypto can’t “print” money on demand, by design. So it can’t replace banks.
An important difference is that your new token can't ever be confused with base money. In banks, we have base money, and we have bank money, and we pretend they're the same thing because banks are pretty reliable (not 100% but pretty). In crypto, the system won't let you lie like that. (Though you can create another new currency backed by a mix of currencies - this is what DAI does.)
Another important difference is trust. I can easily issue bonds in the real world and then just run off with the money and not repay them. If I try, a lot of heavily armed men will hunt me down. That doesn't really happen in crypto, and as things are now it can't happen, because if you make your identity and location known and issue crypto bonds, the same armed men will hunt you down for issuing crypto bonds instead of ordinary bonds, which is a crime itself (see what happened to Kik/Kin). So you'd have to stake something else to make people trust you.
Is Binance Coin trustworthy? Hell no (but it's fast and cheap - because it's centralized all the transaction limits are turned up to 11). Is Terra trustworthy? It's a neat idea if it works - real-world evidence proves it doesn't. Is Jarwain-Immibis Bond Token trustworthy?
As for Jarwain-Immibis Bond Token, well that depends on how one assesses trust, which in the most cynical sense comes down to the repercussions involved in breaking the bond.
Another thing banks do is, Alice is in New York and wants to pay Bob who is in Miami, or Kyiv, so instead of getting on a plane with a sack full of Benjamins she tells the bank to send money to Bob. Cryptocurrency is clearly an alternative way of doing this, with the advantage that then there is no middleman to refuse the transaction when the bank is being leaned on by a despot.
Yes
> A bank has to be able to “print” money to issue debt
Absolutely not, especially not in the context which you just said ("that's why they were created"). When the banking industry started in various Italian city states, money was state issued and backed by precious metals, and banks didn't create any new money supply. They gave loans, invested, kept deposits, etc. but without touching the money supply, which was managed by sovereigns and sovereign states.
- Alice deposits $100 into the bank. The bank owes Alice $100.
- Bob wants a loan. The bank offers him a loan of $50, backed by the $100 from Alice. The bank owes Alice $100. Bob owes the bank $50.
- Bob withdraws the $50 to spend on coke and hookers. The bank uses $50 of the money deposited by Alice to give to Bob. Bob has $50. Alice still has $100 balance.
The bank has just created $50. Everyone is happy unless Alice (and everyone else) wants to withdraw their money and they aren't able to get it back from Bob. That's a bank run.
So in your example, the bank can lend $1000 to Bob, backed by Alice's $100.
The bank may buy a government bond with it. In that case there's $100 of physical cash (money) that the government has, a $100 government bond (also money) that the bank has, and a $100 bank deposit (also money) that you have. There is now $300 in total.
Stacking money on top of money is fundamental to the economy. Normally (and enforceably in cryptocurrency systems) the different layers may not be confused, nor may different assets at the same stacking level. But it benefits whoever is creating the higher layers when you confuse them with the lower layers. When people widely bank deposits with base money, this benefits the banks because now the money they print becomes almost as good as base money. When people widely confuse government bonds with base money, this benefits the treasury because now the money they print becomes almost as good as base money. If people were to widely confuse Apple stock with base money, it would benefit Apple and its existing investors.
(Base money doesn't have to be gold by the way. It's anything that's issued without underlying value and widely accepted as a store of value. Fed notes serve as base money just fine. They have about as much actual real-world value as gold bars, which is none.)
But eventually, Alice wants her money back, the bank cashes in the bond, the government repays the cash.
So part of that value is the value of trust as a function of time. Trust in the bank, trust in the government, trust that they'll pay back their debts on a defined schedule. Plus interest.
Yes, stacking money is based on trust. Realistically, a 6-month $101 government bond which costs $99 should be valued about $100, and a bank deposit stacked on $101 of government bonds should be worth about $100, as long as trust in those continues to hold. And this sort of thing does happen in cryptocurrency systems. Stablecoins generally trade for a fraction of a cent less than their corresponding fiat currency. Bonds may trade for more, if the promise of interest is accepted, but less than their redemption value.
If BuyMeACoffee was run like a dark web drug marketplace, it could support every country.
Over here (Belgium) we have legalized prostitution, but it's very hard for sex workers to open a bank account. There's some legislation that forces banks to offer them a basic bank account (at a steep fee) if they can prove that they've been rejected by N banks. Which is a start, I suppose.
Banks have basically become an extension of law enforcement, tax collectors, anti-terrorist operations, and morality police. Which is ironic, given how many banks brazenly break laws on the regular, how absolutely depraved parties with bankers are, etc. They're hardly paragons of virtue. Yet they get to gatekeep "virtue".
What with all the attention they have to put into cooperating with the authoritarians they also aren't particularly good at their theoretical purpose, which is pooling people's money and investing it productively. We're watching an ongoing capital crisis in the West where we've been out-invested by nominal communists; it is absurd. The banking system has sticky fingers all over that mess. Then they get political protection through financial crisises where they should be taken out by bankruptcy but the powers that be prioritise having reliable people in what is effectively law enforcement rather then putting good capital managers in charge.
So, y'know. Upside is the banks do a great job of shutting down sex workers and political activism. 10/10 mark for reporting what everyone is doing to law enforcement. Downside is that turns out to be a big distraction from all the wealth creation banking can enable.
Investment funds of all sorts manage the world's money. Your retail bank might originate mortgages, but it almost certainly sells them on.
The Fed doesn't want to see an overnight switch to narrow banking, where banks sell you checking accounts and money transmission services and never make decisions about investing the deposits. It has declined to approve banks that would do that. But it seems OK with presiding over a managed decline of banking into that state.
Or consider sending a man to the Moon. Soviet Union eventually abandoned own efforts and was able to create a rocket with similar capabilities as Saturn V only in 1986.
Or consider that the best semiconductor production process comes from a Taiwanese company followed by South Corea and US. China is still not able to catch up despite all the efforts.
Or consider high speed trains. It was Japan and Europe that developed comprehensive network first, not China. And Soviet Union and later Russia never came close to implementing anything like that.
The point is dictators fail most often by ignoring things they consider small and not letting someone else take care of it.
The space race first astronaut (cosmonaut) was Yuri Gagarin, and Laika. Stating the space race was lost by Soviet Union is myopic at best. The Soviet Union defaulted due to being unable to compete, the costly Afghan War, and the inefficient system. But nowadays, how relevant are NASA and BMW ?
The liquidators of Chernobyl [1], to name another example. Another feat is winning the Great War. Shenzhen is also one of a kind. Where is the West's Shenzhen? China's equivalent of F-35 (J-10) shot down two Dassault Rafale a couple of days ago.
Far fetched in West? We got corruption, too. We got Boeing, and Trump.
As for train system, Russia's main transportation is via train and it is robust, but slow. That happens when your country is such a vast amount of land, without solid (direct) sea connections.
But in general, it is a myth, albeit a different one. It is part of the myth (façade) of the strongmen.
As for other counter examples I do not claim that democracy is inherently better. Rather that for big projects at least it is not worse than a dictatorship.
Fascism is not capitalism - fascists don't even think in economic terms except how it helps them.
I'm a classical liberal. Something like capitalism derives from liberalism, but it is derived from freedom of the individual, and not a value in itself.
Fascism is what happens when workers get too "uppity" and the upper classes decide it's better to let a strong man reign in the lower class via a combination of spectacular appeals, mythology, militarism, crackdowns, and external expansion. Working conditions in Nazi germany were terrible because they destroyed labor unions. Fascism to a great extent is operationalized anti-communism.
Communists like myself also value the freedom of the individual, but we value the freedom of all individuals and want to make it real, not a thing you just say and then shit on a homeless person or abuse an employee.
fascism is not an ecconomic system, and very much can be communist - though of course none of who we think of as fascist were communists.
Funny, because in the US right now, if something isn't on this one particular person's radar, then its is ignored. So by this reasoning, the US is a dictatorship right now.
The main business of banking is actually leveraging the capital of their owners (shareholders) to lend. Deposits are not the main game, and are there for two reasons - firstly that lending produces deposits, so banks may as well be able to hold deposits just for that reason, but also because deposit inflows create the liquidity banks need to lever up their capital. This is the real reason why banks pay interest on deposits - to encourage people to transfer money in and not transfer as much out. Actually just having the deposits sitting there doesn’t do much for the bank, so the bank more wants you to transfer money in to increase your balance and not just hold it.
>deposit inflows create the liquidity banks need to lever up their capital
Aren't these basically the same thing? There's complicated capital structure around how much tier 1 capital banks have to hold, and what deposits have to be backed by, but at the end of the day banks are taking money from depositors and investors, and using it to buy assets. More importantly if you deposit a dollar, that's not sitting around in a vault somewhere, it's used to buy treasuries or whatever. Most people would characterize that as "pool people’s money and invest it".
In this case though I said banking system, not retail banking system and I think the fairest reading given the ambiguity is just to treat it as "pool people's wealth" and shift to talking about the real economy.
The idea it’s a measurement is appealing but incomplete, you can’t exchange abstract gallons or other measurements in the abstract only in terms of a measurement of something.
I have an implement for doing exactly that on my desk - a cup. The people who made the cup don't know what I'm going to be filling it with but they have a very good idea of what volume it'll take up. I could go to the pub with friends and ask for a glass of something but I don't mind what. The point of a unit of measurement is it enables abstract handling of quantities. Otherwise we may as well have a unique system of measurement per thing.
And if you want a monetary example, there is barter. I can exchange $50 of work directly for $50 of food, abstracting out the money. That wouldn't be possible if the token itself were the important thing, because it isn't present anywhere in the example.
> Fiat money is a token of exchange backed up by the need for everyone in an economy to pay taxes using those tokens.
Obviously there is more than one type of money if you feel a need to add a prefix to explain what type of money you are discussing. The other types aren't backed up by a need for everyone to pay taxes, money can exist independently of a taxation system. Then it is called non-fiat money. You're focusing on the non-monetary aspects of the system, which is cool and all but missing the forest for the trees.
You’d very much mind you got a cup of bull sperm or diarrhea. That request is actually excluding the vast majority of possible liquids.
> if you feel the need to add a prefix
There’s only two types of money, fiat and barter.
If I’m exchanging a promissory note that I can exchange for 1 barrel of wheat or 1lb of gold or whatever that’s barter through an abstraction. If you’re using stamped gold coins people are just bartering precious metals of a known purity thus the need to weigh the coins not just count them.
Dear me. That got a good 5 minutes of chuckling out of me if you are aiming for humour. In the alternative I'm probably too far away to offer you a hug, but if you're having a bad day it might be a better bet to try going for a walk or some meditation rather than posting on HN.
> If I’m exchanging a promissory note that I can exchange for 1 barrel of wheat or 1lb of gold or whatever that’s barter through an abstraction.
The interesting implication of that is if you turn up at a foreign airport, change currency and buy a doughnut you couldn't be sure whether you're bartering or not until you've done some detailed analysis of the local legal system.
Either which way, if you want to call it barter through abstraction I can't stop you but we have a word for that - money. The reason most people use money is to abstract the bartering away whether they are in a fiat system or otherwise.
> I’d you want to call or barter through abstraction I can’t stop you
I was calling it money, but it’s really a spectrum. Is a coupon for a free burger money? What about gift cards?
IMO, it’s money when it’s worth more than the underlying commodity. Stamped coins were a net benefit by being of known purity and promissory notes benefited by being easy to transport. So people mostly didn’t melt the coins down or exchange the notes because easy of trade is inherently valuable on its own. At the other end wasting time exchanging or melting it down is a net cost.
Which in a roundabout way means using money is never barter. Non fiat money has a separate floor on value, but the actual value is generally set the same way fiat money is.
> Retail banks actually don’t ‘pool people’s money and invest it’
However, the phrase "invest it" makes it sounds like they are gambling the money on speculative investments! There are very strict rules about what securities (classes and ratings) are allowed as investments.
I personally would lay far more of the blame at the feet of the slow-but-steady disassembly of a proper tax code which has rendered our Government all but unable to function from a fiscal perspective since the Reagan years. I'm curious if you would feel the banks are more responsible, and if so, how?
Everything I've read on the subject over the years pretty squarely lays it at the austerity movements that have utterly crippled most western countries but none more thoroughly than the United States, where the notion seemingly of spending any public money on anything no matter how needed that isn't Defense spending is Communist, alongside of course the general (and consequential of that) transfer of wealth from the working class to the extremely wealthy who dodge more taxes than ever before, perhaps in all of history of the practice of collecting taxes.
Federal Receipts as a Percent of GDP:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
There is not any kind of material long-term discontinuity initiated in the Reagan years. It has been approximately flat since the end of WWII, which implies a growth in real government revenue per capita consistent with the growth in real GDP per capita.
This chart is only federal receipts, not state; the total of the two in the US is ~30%. Countries that have taxpayer-funded healthcare systems have a higher total on paper because the cost of the healthcare system is then in the accounting as government revenue rather than private insurance premiums, not because they're doing significantly more non-healthcare government spending. In reality the US government spends more on non-healthcare government expenditures than most other countries because it runs such large deficits.
> Everything I've read on the subject over the years pretty squarely lays it at the austerity movements that have utterly crippled most western countries but none more thoroughly than the United States, where the notion seemingly of spending any public money on anything no matter how needed that isn't Defense spending is Communist
What's really going on here is that the government is already extracting approximately the amount of money from the economy that maximizes medium-term government revenue given the trade off between revenue extraction and GDP growth.
But the government is thoroughly captured by lobbyists, so every dollar the government spends on something that actually benefits the population is a dollar that isn't going to a well-connected government contractor or a union that wants a wasteful boondoggle and can shift enough votes for a representative in a vulnerable district that the party will sell out the general public to secure that seat, or to vote buying from retirees that has now reached the point that US Government spending on retirement benefits consumes more than half of all federal receipts and goes disproportionately to affluent retirees.
Which makes it hard to pass useful programs because you have to fight the incumbents for the money.
> alongside of course the general (and consequential of that) transfer of wealth from the working class to the extremely wealthy who dodge more taxes than ever before, perhaps in all of history of the practice of collecting taxes.
This is also a mischaracterization of the change that happened during the Reagan years.
If you look at nominal tax rates, on paper they went down under Reagan, but then you look at federal receipts and in 1979 they were 17.6% of GDP whereas in 1989 they were... 17.6% of GDP. As opposed to today, where over the last five years it has been in the range of 16% to 18.8%. Or the 1960s and 70s where it was in the range of, well, ~16% to ~18% of GDP. It really hasn't materially changed at all.
What changed under Reagan is that prior to that, tax avoidance was much easier. People were deducting everything. When they lowered the nominal tax rates, they also closed so many loopholes that the effect of the rate reduction on government revenue was zero. Which is to say, the amount of tax dodging is much lower now than it was historically.
If I still had a fortune file, this would go in it!
Not ironic at all. This is the design.
> Over here
I just Googled for: sex workers denied bank accounts in belgium
And found this: https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/blog/2024/-/asset_pu...
> Since summer 2023, a new law has extended labour rights also to sex worker employees, including rules around working hours and payment, the right to refuse clients and the mandatory availability of emergency buttons in every room. The new law also decriminalises third parties, who will no longer be penalised for opening a bank account for sex workers or renting out accommodation, and it allows sex workers to advertise their services.
Well, hopefully.
If legal, then why do banks have a problem offering an account. No risk of a bad actor, because it is legal.
It would be like a small business or contractor.
I guess that means that banks, in a way, have a database of sex workers.
But if I, as a donator, donate money to someone using your service, and you then don't give that money to its intended recipient, you've effectively defrauded me. Had you said in advance "I can't do that, because you're trying to give me money to $foo which I don't support", then that is your right as a business.
I tend to agree, but the same applies if one family member is in Belarus or Russia, and the other one is in the USA.
I.e. just because it's morally ok, it doesn't mean that it's without risk (if you lie about the purpose) and that the banks will facilitate it.
OTOH, before EO2022, I know that transfers between Russia and countries in Europe were sometimes still happening. Disappointintly (but it's not very surprising), sending small money to family would usually be impossible, but if you had to transfer substantial amounts of money, and you could prove that it was from e.g. sale of a home, that could still happen.
On one hand, that makes sense: the bigger the amount, the more it makes economic sense to allow extra time and effort to check that all the i are dotted and all the t ate crossed.
But OTOH, the people with lots of housing property are sometimes precisely using housing to launder the provenance, and they are also not necessarily the honest workers whose family end up split across borders.
Frankly, it's none of my state's damn business who I exchange money with. Their beef with other states is their problem—why are they dragging us through their bullshit?
If they want to collect taxes on it, at least that has the veneer of doing their job properly, and I'm happy to pay it.
Personally, I have little patience for the pretense that the geopolitical theatre we're all subjected to reflects the people who live in the states represented in such theatre. Baudrillard had it right all along.
I'm comfortable saying if a foreign nation rolls military vehicles across a border and starts shelling apartment buildings, those buildings' residents have every right to assert their existence with violence.
We certainly have little-to-no say in how the states in which we live behave, but we're all subject to their whims.
I can't say for certain how much my state listens to me specifically, but if they do, I'd tell them their whims should be such that other states can't do the roll-across-border-blow-up-apartments thing. (to anyone, not just me.) Those are good whims. Everyone should be subject to those whims.
Of course, I have nothing against sovereignty. I just think states greatly overestimate what they're owed for simply not mowing down their own citizens. If my state causes another state to invade me, of course I'll side with the invader—my own state has failed me.
I no longer believe that "sunlight is the best disinfectant", and haven't for a long time now.
One of my complaints about the Trump era is people are correctly identifying a bunch of problems with how the US government operates but for some reason they're only a problem when Trump does them instead of being a more general concern even if other people are involved.
Eg, Trump is almost certainly spying on his political opponents. Using infrastructure built by Bush/Obama/Trump/Biden that everyone who took notice at the time pointed out would be used by people to spy on political opponents. This isn't a Trump problem. It is people assuming the government is always on their side despite copious quantities of evidence otherwise and regular elections.
I loathe government, but I loathe monarchs more.
EU: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
Also, 100% dystopia is still worse than a "most part" one
This stuff is very common for "second-class" countries. It's happening all the time with all kinds of services. Most of them just don't want to be bothered (spend resources on) with figuring out how to work with those countries. I guess the payment systems provide convenient frameworks for them via which they do money related stuff. If there's no easy way to reproduce something in several unfortunate countries that was super easy to achieve in developed countries, then it's not worth it. The profits there are not gonna meet the expectations in relation to the spendings.
So while these are really shitty situations for people from those countries, these decisions are dictated by the market. And I don't think this is gonna change.
But one of the great points in the article is that services should be very clear, up to date and explicit about their policies.
And is been nearly a year since the events described in the blog : HAS a new company popped up ?
As for the supply, money will always find a way. Crypto, shady banks etc.
I think the established businesses which are common to EU and US people just don't want to deal with the government. It's easier for them to comply in a preventive way. Many immigrants in the EU face issues with banks (virtual and real) blocking or not willing to open accounts. Just to be safe.
I've had YCombinator funded leading Payment Gateways in India asking me to remove links to Hacker News claiming it to be 'redirection' or thinking I'm some kind of "Hacker man" for having the text "Hacker".
I've had trouble enabling subscription payments because I'm a govt. registered self-proprietor and these Payment Gateways decided they will support subscription payments only for Companies.
In fact I've become so versed in hopping between different payment gateways that I'm now building a self-hosted FOSS payment host[1] with support for all major payment gateways so people can have better control over their payments.
In regards to the fact they pulled out of countries that are hard to operate in, yeah it’s annoying but you know, can you blame them?
They were told that the US payments company couldn't send the money to their primary email address as (for vanity reasons) they have a .by domain from Belorussia. (They are a UK citizen living in the UK)
Off-topic, but I believe that might be interesting to some readers: FYI Belorussia is a non-state. That’s how Russians call Belarus.
Belarus is the official and correct name, the origins are from Rus. The medieval country, that was on the territories of modern day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus. Russia stole that name (Rus’ or Ruthenia), just recently — in the historical terms — a couple of hundred years ago. Their country was named Muscovy. About that time they invented their artificial language, which is mostly stolen from Belarus and Ukraine. During the occupation (1918—1991) period, they did their best to eliminate their (Belarus, Ukraine, but also all the other nations they enslaved) culture, language, most prominent people. The word to search for is genocide, if you feel like willing to explore this topic more. Belarus is still de-facto occupied by Russia, never recovering from Russia‘s barbarity of XX century, that’s why it’s a pathetic pro-Russian country now.
Ukraine too was under huge Russian influence since 1991, and technically only since 2014 (the revolution of dignity, Russia seized Crimea) they do fight for their independence. In fact, current war is the independence war for Ukraine. If they won, they’re just another thriving European (EU) democratic state. If they to lose, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland are the next in line. And Ukrainian people would be forced to fight for Russia.
Modern Russia in its current form cannot exist without Ukraine. Without Ukraine, there’s no Russian empire, there’s no USSR. That’s why Russia tries so badly to occupy Ukraine and name it Russia. Without them, Russia is just two cities, Moscow and St Petersburg. That’s why they desperately call them brotherly nations, Ukraine and Belarus. (And some other neighbouring states too.)
During the XX century, Russia invented derogatory names for all the countries they enslaved. That makes Belorussia or Byelorussia (notice Russia, not Rus, which is completely different country, despite Russia trying to claim the name). Also, the names are ‘on the Ukraine’ (Ukraine has no ‘the’ article, and is ‘in Ukraine’), that way they try to mock the name into the name Periphery (this word sounds very similar to Ukraine in Russian language), that way they present Ukraine as some distant and rural periphery, while Russia itself is a periphery. (Basically everything Russia claims of others, is actually about them and about what they do to others. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror for that)
Also, derogatory term for Baltic states is Pribaltics (in the same fashion to Ukraine, making it rather a territory), and also I know of Moldova, they call it Moldavia. And Turkmenistan, they call it Turkmenia (in the same fashion). Maybe there are other countries, but I’m unaware of them, since I haven’t been there. Russians claim that innocently, that that’s _just_ their language, that’s how they _always_ named these countries. So yeah, technically, we cannot tell other nations how they should name our countries. Except when we actually can. Recently (after 2020) some countries (I’m aware of Germany) renamed Belarus from being literally White Russia, to Belarus. Which historically can be translated as White Rusyns, but not White Russians, because Russia never existed by that point in history. Also see Turkey becoming Türkiye. It’s very similar thing, as far as I’m aware, and I believe calling them after the bird is disrespectful. Especially when they explicitly asked how they want their country to be called.
Hope that’ll help someone who is unaware why some people call these countries wrong names. I’m not giving links, because everything I wrote is very easily searchable and makes sense only for those who are far from Europe and the context to understand and/or care.
Apologies if I got the name wrong. Belarus/Belorussia/Byelorussia - I wasn't aware there was a difference. Thanks for the info.
Ha, yeah, your Kirby example makes sense. I lived in Belarus, and never thought of using their domain that way. But it looks good in this example. Possibly that’s because nobody of its (Russian speaking) population would use this by domain this way. I like the ‘by’ myself, it sounds good sometimes, but it seems like I’d never buy this domain, exactly because I lived there.
Sad that a domain name can generates problems, purely on political reasons. I wish there were no countries TLDs, except for the government reasons, like gov.uk. And we’d have ‘just letters’ domains regardless of countries, because why not?
I regard all FinTech-type companies as unreliable, after incredible (in the literal sense of the word) experiences with Revolut (seven years to get an account closed and the money in it returned, and that actually happened only after I made a GDPR request, and they got it done - seems its less work for them to close than meet the request) and Transferwise (who shortly after the UA war started, blocked donations to the UA State bank military support account - yes, really, if you didn't know).
By all means have an account with them, but never, ever, ever, rely on it, and plan on the basis that the next morning you wake up to find the account, and everything in it, has gone, and that customer support is a defensive shield the company uses to keep customers at arms length.
If you want almost no-cost currency conversion (2 USD minimum, but you have to convert like 100k USD I think it is to go above that), use Interactive Brokers LLC. They won't let you have an account purely for currency conversion, but as long as you do a few trades now and then, it seems fine.
Oh wow. Well, at least donations to NGOs / individuals seem to work.
Agreed, IBKR are a nice bunch. I wouldn’t rely on them either, but it’s always better to have more options, in case everything else fails. And of course, when banks can block your accounts at any moment just because they don’t like your passport, crypto is king.
In the end poor peasants shouting "crypto is king" are the ones owned from both sides. They are used for profit by their local oppressors/gangs and by western cryptobros. The peasants transactions are the rounding error but they are the ones who allow to pretend it's "freedom"
> They are used for profit by their local oppressors/gangs and by western cryptobros.
For a razor-thin margin, maybe. It’s still the cheapest way to move money out from Russia, meaning it’s not used there to pay taxes (i.e. fund the war!) And the alternatives are using banks or money transfer systems, which I think are more likely to be pro-government than just a bunch of local guys that want to make some cash.
facepalm. for the fake aura of legitimacy that keeps the whole charade going.
> but governments also just pay for stuff openly
they should stop doing it, but it doesn't change the fact thay the wins around sanctions for russian gov are incomparable with wins for regular people, and regular people suffer sanctions and all related stuff because of the gov in the tirst place
what was the “incredible experience” with Transferwise?
> the next morning you wake up to find the account, and everything in it, has gone
they’re all protected by the FCA via the FSCS scheme: https://www.fscs.org.uk/what-we-cover/
Which would help if Revolut went insolvent, which is not the case here.
> seven years to get an account closed and the money in it returned
Maybe OP can shed some light on why they wanted it closed. My bet is, it was frozen, and transfers blocked for some reason. Happened to my Revolut (LT) account, too, but I could transfer my money out at least.
Both the email address and phone number I had with the account had gone.
It was impossible to recover the account.
It was also impossible to close the account - until I issued the GDPR request.
Something like the underlying account(s) used by the FinTech are secured in this way, but your account with the FinTech is not.
This is why Revolut for example have accounts which are something like "vaults", which are in fact accounts which are covered, because they are actual accounts, one per person, with a normal bank.
That sounds incredible, it needs to be checked, about to leave the house so can't right now.
Edit: and apparently they’re now setting up a bank in the UK as well: https://help.revolut.com/help/more/legal-topics/is-revolut-a...
Wise is not, and it might be more difficult to get the money out if they are insolvent. For the customers in the EU, they’re a Payment Institution in Belgium: https://wise.com/help/articles/2932693/how-is-wise-regulated...
Please allow me to disagree (not really but yes). In the same spirit that some (fin-tech) companies prefer to _not_ do business with certain industries (e.g. porn) or countries (e.g. North Korea) for a wide variety of reason, doesn't make them unreliable. Makes them exactly what they are.
I am not trying to equate "access to my money" with "my favourite soft-drink is discontinued" because they have a very different impact to one's life (paying rent/mortgage/bills money vs sugar). I do understand though (I was working in a dairy company many-many years ago), that "we pulled this product because it costs X and makes 2x while product Z makes 5x, so bye-bye". In the same spirit many companies have profit margin requirements and they won't keep 'a service offering' that makes 'just a little'.
The web-pages to upload identity documents did not work; the process would get so far, then just stop working.
I contacted Support, Support were unable to grasp the situation, let alone help.
I had 30 days before the account would be terminated for not uploading documents.
A couple of days before that happened, I tried again, and now upload worked.
They're just like traditional companies, but with much less oversight, attention to regulation and transparency.
At the beginning there is plenty of support channels, but that's because of marketing and because there's investor money. But as soon as the money gets tight, people start suggesting dark patterns and everything becomes "you must contact us to do X".
Not only that but there is way less auditing, as technical auditors that deal with fintechs aren't really ready to deal with anything made after 1990. That's you, Deloitte.
Also regarding security, what I saw in practice was that everyone has access to absolutely everything and could do anything. Everyone but the lowest support people can transfer money from anywhere to everywhere, change passwords, view and edit personal information, collect private data. Customer personal data is sent around in Excel files in email like it's candy. There was SO MUCH logging that seeing suspicious employee activity was basically impossible without having a complaint from the customer itself and a thorough investigation (which rarely happened).
Also: AI and Data Science are mostly people running one or two queries per week in the production DB, exporting to CSV and calling it a day.
And I don't want to dox myself but: a popular German FinTech with "AI" in its name has way less automation than a 5 person startup. Every single operation is triggered manually and is super error prone. And such operations involve 20, 30 records, when there are 10 million in the database.
Recently there was allegedly a kerfuffle with a german Fintech bank banning hundreds of users because of suspicion that they had gang relations. Well guess why.
Maybe their Cobol programmers are too busy writing an all caps function for a month, instead of providing forms to their employees or customers with default values already configured to shorten each process's cycle.
I wish I'd known this four years ago. I had US$2000 to send from US to Canada and the cheapest method (~$50) I found was, to my surprise, to send BTC within Coinbase (the recipient was another Coinbase user).
As long as UA authorities keep ignoring this problem, the situation will get worse.
Baltic states report a horrendous amount of phone scam coming from UA, no surprise Wise just does not want to deal with claims.
Tip for content creators: Please use services like https://UseCode.net to host all your sponsor/referral codes in one place, as this will be very helpful for users.
Remember all could not afford to pay a zillion content creators out there
Lawyering aside, really now? If someone holds money that should be mine with no way for me to get it out and me never getting a way to get it out, it’s not different to me no longer having that money. If the entire purpose of them having that money was for me to be able to get it out, it really feels a lot like theft.
It’s no different than you having money on your PayPal account, it getting suspended for some dumb reason and them just taking your money.
I have used Wise in the past to send money to some gaming friends abroad with weird banks, I really hope that it or some other option that supports as many countries as possible remains available.
I hate to sound like one of those “crypto bros” but I’ve also used BTC in the past for similar use cases and it’s refreshing, you just need to have an exchange available in a given country and also not store too much money in crypto due to the high volatility, unless that’s what you’re going for.
Not to badmouth some need for regulation or whatever is actually going on behind the scenes (assuming a charitable interpretation of whatever it is), but not being able to support a content creator or send pizza money to an acquaintance or whatever for reasons like that seems... dumb. Plus, a "proper" way to handle discontinuing the support for entire regions would be something along the lines of:
1. public announcement and timeline for upcoming changes
2. "Here's how you transfer out all of your money off of the platform before the change: ..." (with regular reminders)
3. "Here's how you migrate your follower base to another platform that supports your region: ..." (maybe a collab of some sort, at least offering each patron the ability to register on the new platform if they want to keep supporting the person)The card I mostly use for online impulses purchases is from a semi paranoid bank that turns down non 3d secure transactions by default. Sometimes they call you for confirmation.
Needless to say, that means no impulse purchases from Stripe using merchants. And no buying coffees for anyone.
Guess it's cheaper for me in the long run...
So someone like BackerKit just didn't bother catering to EU customers.
Plus I saw a chapter about "reducing friction" in the Stripe docs. Via such honest practices as charging automatically after a free trial if the customer has a credit card on file? This has been discussed on HN recently wrt to i-forget-what-service.
I suppose not requiring the extra 3d secure step is also "reducing friction".
Not all merchants will opt-in to 3d Secure as they might see a greater loss in revenue due to the friction it creates versus the risk. They might be taking payments in a low risk sector and use other fraud checking factors, or it might not make sense for them - examples where you end up having to produce the same card in person anyway so "card not present" fraud doesn't factor in so much.
Some merchants don't opt-in as it would lose them millions of dollars of payments an hour due to the friction: Amazon for example.
I worked on the 3d Secure (and, formally, "Verified by Visa") integration at my previous job, and for a long time I was thinking I should write a blog post on what a complete mess of a protocol and implementation it [still] is. Haven't ever gotten around to that though.
Banks are banks :)
> so it's down to the merchant
... or down to the implementation team that may not even have mentioned it to the merchant if said merchant is in an area used to insecure credit card payments ...
Opting out is still customer hostile if you ask me.
That's debatable - I really dislike my own card issuer's implementation as they will ring me, rather than prompt for a OTP, which is a long process and not always convenient. Other card issuers have other implementations. That's one of the, er, issues with the protocol - a lack of consistency. There are many other problems with it.
I'm using this with a credit card, and that already has strong consumer protections if fraud should happen. I, as the consumer, do not get to opt-out of this poorly implemented protocol.
Merchants are sold the protocol with the argument that it reduces chargebacks, i.e. reduces their costs, not that it is good for their consumers. If I (or someone else) makes a payment with my card, and it passes the 3d Secure process, then the chargeback option is a liability that it taken by the issuing bank - and they shift that liability further by passing it on to the card holder: "This transaction when through 3d Secure, your charge back option for it is revoked".
That's hostile to the customer.
Like I said, I have a tonne of material for a blog post. I just need to be bothered to write it.
If we're philosophising, wouldn't it be better to have a honest system where the user authorizes all charges and the merchant doesn't get to auto renew subscriptions without user input just because they feel like it?
It's not about work it's about the burden of cost due to fraud not being passed on to a consumer such that it could put them in financial difficulty. Chargebacks are there to protect the consumer and not the merchant - The 3d Secure "liability shift" (they literally call it this in the spec) flips that arrangement. Merchants are compelled to reduce their chargeback levels as they have to pay for each chargeback case, and should it become frequent their ability to process payments will be revoked.
Just turn on 3d Secure and your merchant chargeback costs reduce significantly. Nice? Not for the consumer. But I repeat myself.
> If we're philosophising, wouldn't it be better to have a honest system where the user authorizes all charges and the merchant doesn't get to auto renew subscriptions without user input just because they feel like it?
Merchants probably should notify their users with subscriptions, sure - I got one a couple of months ago from F1TV that my subscription will renew and maybe I don't want that subscription any more, or perhaps I want to change the level of my subscription. Other merchants won't be as nice, and dark patterns will creep in. Some companies have business models built on these recurring subscriptions.
I can't recall the rules around these, but I can recall that there are (were, we're going back 12 years here) systems in place to reduce issues for recurring payments. Even when a cardholder's details are updated, including replacement of a card and its PAN[1]. Any subscriptions would be retained to avoid interruption to the consumer's subscription, which might be critical for them (the consumer).
Sorry, that's complete and utter bullshit. Even if you think you're defending the customer's position, everything you said is in the vendor's favour. It "reduces friction" but only when it's in their interest.
I'm saying that's how it is, not how it should be.
Related - I gave a talk a couple of weeks ago about banking interchange formats, which is related to all of this. The slides are here (top one) and the recording of the talk (which I will link) should appear soon: https://leejo.github.io/code/
Maybe it's BackerKit's choice. I don't know.
Does a Stripe implementer have to do extra effort to have 3d secure?
I would be happier if this were configurable by the user, because I too would be happier if all my online payments required my second factor.
Yeah, my regular payments invoke 3d secure only ... randomly. I'm talking about new places (new to my card) here.
1. Offer multiple choices for payment => people need to sift through to find what works for them and give up after first fail.
2. Use a payment [processor] aggregator => unreliable (as with this case) and takes a cut (sometimes chained).
3. Use crypto only => the only thing that works reliably, but severely cuts your audience to those comfortable with it.
This reminds me of something. Russian foreign reserves, perhaps? The irony.
If you are interested in building this, I have product and engineering experience
For Wise, it could be that, but also they’ve been putting out a ton of features lately, which aren’t supported by Wise. Not idea why they didn’t add a bunch of if statements.
The solution is... uh, not sure? Crypto might work for payouts, but it’s too complicated for most users. For the donation page itself, we definitely need to accept cards somehow. There are payment providers that can accept cards and payout to these countries, so I think it should be possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44002850
Wanna chat about it for a bit? hn@ale.sh or https://cal.com/notpushkin/45m
My guess is buymeacoffee isn't the problem, but their payment provider. They maybe can't justify the resources to switch providers and so its easier/cheaper to just drop those countries.
If you can find a payment provider that will service a "buymeacoffee-like" business in the open countries, then I'd be interested.
Many of Telegram payment-related services use https://smart-glocal.com/, which is registered in Hong Kong (with a UK company handling EEA operations). They don’t say it on the website, but I believe they do work with Ukrainian (and apparently even Russian) citizens and can handle payouts there. (Note, however, that Smart Glocal is owned by a pro-Kremlin guy from Russia: https://en.zona.media/article/2022/08/08/premiumdonate-trl)
There is a reason why the system is as shit as it is.
They get fixed instead!
Unfortunately, "things" begin nicely until it gains major attention. Then it loses most of the nice things.
It's not "fair", but people get pissed when you can compare before/after. And to a reason, it means some users relying on that support are now left SOL, when they could have made different choices if the service couldn't handle them from the start.
But now we have governments opprobriously trying to impose laws on entities outside of their jurisdiction.
Almost everywhere there needs to be a on AND off ramp, or only the most diehard hobbiest or desperate economic actor will consider it. This stuff is just too new, and there is too small an ecosystem for all but a small handful of coins for them to actually act as a useful exchange medium.
Local currency does still get used, it’s unavoidable, and causes losses. There is no perfect solution.
One economy which fits the description is India - check out the boxes of cash hah! [https://www.livemint.com/Politics/eGzzHAcOe5VePoyCd7n0EN/Inc...], and [https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/mumbai-raid-...].
(FYI, a cr or crore == 10 million, a lakh == 100k. Even at current exchange rates, that is a lot of money anywhere, and an absolutely massive fortune in India).
But there is an element of this in ALL economies, including the US. It’s a matter of scale/ratios, not a yes/no thing.
(I do realize you are specifically speaking of stablecoins but as far as I know they struggle from all of the typical problems you'd expect, just with a less volatile value.)
So I'd send crypto to your address, then you'd trade it for cash with your local exchange/dealer etc.
Just use BTC if anything.
- Stablecoin as input adds a lot of friction on the donor with KYC again
Crypto is just massive overhead for everyone in its current state
If $0.0001 in tainted funds can taint a wallet containing a billion dollars then everything will end up tainted immediately, whether a result of trolls or just funds being transferred by ordinary users in jurisdictions that don't enforce the same sanctions. But if nothing is tainted because everything is then the sanctions are meaningless because someone with sanctioned funds would just deposit them at a major exchange in a foreign jurisdiction and then withdraw them again as untainted funds.
Well one of the problems here was the sanctioning of a technology, which AFAIK has never happened previously.
Exchanges have the means to work with regulators, demonstrate good faith, and get themselves removed from any accidental sanctioning. This doesn't exactly apply to small tips akin to BuyMeACoffee.
Customers should also be allowed to expose shady stuff done by such private services, warning other people.
Ukraine is on the one hand a fairly small market, on the other hand a very corrupt totalitarian country, where a huge part of the "donations" will be bribery, money laundering, fraud, buying illegal goods.
So, probably, the company simply decided that it was easier to abandon this market rather than to solve the potential problems.
>moral principle because I didn't want to potentially help launder money to revolting dictatorships.
It is quite applicable to Ukraine as well.
People are literally being grabbed off the street and sent to die in storm troop units. Massive corruption, the main method of protection of which is that those who fight against it (or all their male relatives) are simply sent to die.
But I think it's more about the legal problems created by a small, toxic market than about high moral standards.
Briberies, illegal goods, sheesh…
This description sounds suspiciously similar to the situation in Russia for any male of fighting age or anyone who fights against corruption. I suppose a difference being that one country is forced to throw all its resources at stopping an invasion, and the other country is taking all its young men off the street simply to invade its neighbor.
That is factually not true. There is no forceful conscription in Russia and generally relatives of those who fight corruption doesn't discriminate against.
>throw all its resources at stopping an invasion >its resources >resources
Do you mean "violently, under the threat of murder, send tens of thousands of people to horrible die against their free will for the sake of the dictator's political ambitions"?
This is if we call what is happening there by its proper names, and do not consider people as "resources" of the dictator.
"It's a private service so they can do what they want" is missing the issue. Every private service in the jurisdiction is under the same legal constraints, so if the law is creating the incentive for them to screw their users, that is a problem with the law. Because then they all have the same incentive and converge on the same behavior and the usual defense to customer abuse by private companies -- switching to a competitor -- isn't available as a remedy.
I get the impression that those buttons don't exactly get many clicks anyway
BuyMeACoffee seems to be a service based on an extremely flawed premise: that of exchanging money for nothing tangible in return. That is normally known as a "donation", but this is not charitable giving; this is more like tipping. But even tipping is customarily associated with receiving some kind of service in the first place. This is more like tossing $2 bills at a stripper in a dark room, but 3,000 miles away.
Now most of these buttons were traditionally labeled "Buy Me a Beer" and I found them oftentimes on the web pages of starving F/OSS authors. The hackers would definitely be seeking to monetize their free and open-source software by any means necessary. It certainly stood to reason that they deserved a beer (or a coffee) for fixing bugs or simply providing a nice app to me that does something I want. Fair's fair. [Let's not forget that alcohol and caffeine are drugs, though!]
But essentially, if BuyMeACoffee is a payment platform that's disconnected from any tangible product or service being received, it could be warped to any use at all. Can I buy you a coffee if you show me one boob please? Can I buy you a coffee if you unalive my boss? Oh look, a package of (ammunition|fentanyl|CSAM) has arrived on our doorstep, let me buy you ten kilos of coffee to celebrate this unrelated event?
So I think that typically for capitalism to work, we should be scrupulous about correlating goods and services received to the monetary transactions we make for them. Or we should establish a good way to at least correlate a "creator" of software or content with the in-kind payments of "coffees" that they'll receive for actually doing work. Because if this is not properly regulated, we really do end up supporting a lot of shady stuff.
Who knows if we're buying coffee for terrorist cells or a human trafficking ring. I really feel like coffee money can be better spent on legitimate businesses with aboveboard ways of making transactions for tangible things. Sorry if I am being a real stick-in-the-mud about this, but this seems to be the main issue for regulators and law enforcement, and we need to admit that it's not an ideal way to do business.
Suppose there is an "artist" and you like their "art" and want to commission a piece. You send them money for "art", they email you some doodle or AI-generated image and simultaneously mail you some drugs.
Assigning the label "art" or "code" to the payment doesn't provide any information more than having no label whatsoever, because the label is a lie but the only way to prove the lie is to uncover what the transaction is actually for, which the existence of the fabricated label doesn't help you to do any more than having no label at all.
Establishing what a payment is actually for is not something the payments system is suited to do and attempting to use it for that causes only problems, because the honest users who put down something legitimate that makes the bank skittish are unjustly harmed, whereas the actual illicit users simply lie because there are several easy lies with no viable way to verify the contrary.
"BuyMeACoffee" appears to be a Patreon-like platform for "artists and creators". I would say it is more than a payment platform, because it is a marketplace and a venue for people to do business.
Now we have plenty of marketplaces, such as eBay, or Etsy or Amazon. These marketplaces have strict requirements on what vendors and customers can do and how they can transact business. If you went on Amazon and purchased art+drugs, that would quickly be shut down. It's also Amazon's responsibility. Now they are brokering those payments from customer to vendor but they are more than a payment platform, because they are hosting both parties.
BMAC is not merely, blindly transacting payments like Visa or Mastercard. They're providing a venue for stuff to be put out there. If they are collecting payments from fans and disbursing it to creators and artists, then I say that they have a responsibility to ensure no illicit activity goes on and people are getting what they paid for.
"Getting what you paid for" is obviously an extremely subjective thing when we're talking about electronic art or media, and especially when customers can buy "memberships" or send "tips" because now we're just funnelling money to a personality influencer who is into crowd-pleasing. And the opportunities are vast for organized crime and nation-state threat actor sort of activities when you scale that up and go crossing international borders with your service, wouldn't you agree?
In meatspace, you're going to have a comedy club or a concert venue, an art gallery, you know, someplace that showcases artists and may sell their work, or enable them to work for money. And any such venue will necessarily have controls that protect the customers, and protect the artists, and if there is money changing hands for illicit purposes, the venue is on the hook for this. Because they're doing the matchmaking.
And there are mainstream marketplaces that are doing this, but to do it large-scale and internationally is going to run up against legal and regulatory hurdles and it's not as simple as turning a blind eye.
Would it? Amazon has no way to know that it's a payment for drugs, as far as they know it's just art.
The primary reason that doesn't happen much is that Amazon and eBay charge higher fees than simple payment processors and the drug dealers have no reason to pay a premium to have their "art" show up in the Amazon search results to people who don't know that it's really for drugs and therefore aren't going to buy it anyway.
> If they are collecting payments from fans and disbursing it to creators and artists, then I say that they have a responsibility to ensure no illicit activity goes on and people are getting what they paid for.
Why is this their responsibility any more than it's the responsibility of a bus driver to search through all your luggage for drugs, or the responsibility of a hardware store to prevent you from using the duct tape you bought to commit a kidnapping? They're merchants and common carriers, not law enforcement.
> In meatspace, you're going to have a comedy club or a concert venue, an art gallery, you know, someplace that showcases artists and may sell their work, or enable them to work for money.
Do you know how much "money laundering" goes on at "legitimate" art galleries?
> And the opportunities are vast for organized crime and nation-state threat actor sort of activities when you scale that up and go crossing international borders with your service, wouldn't you agree?
Neither of those entities have any use for small time payments systems. Nation states and large criminal organizations have their own value transfer systems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
Every large organization with shady dealings has an internal system that works like that. They don't need "buy me a coffee" services to transfer money, they just put a stack of cash or a sack of gemstones on the same truck as the drugs and guns. So all you get by harassing the retail payment services is harm to innocent people who get shut out for no benefit.