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Comment by gmd63 | Hacker News Reader

If you don't like it, start another payment processor that doesn't cave to pressure. Where are all the free market proselytizers at?

I expect all of you complaining about this to never once complain on legal grounds about Apple's 30% tax in the app store or when a bakery refuses to sell a cake to a gay person.

This is what unrestricted freedom for every entity looks like.

And this is why we need laws and regulations that are actually enforced. Because companies and larger organisms do not necessarily operate on timescales that are able to be reasonably responded to within a human lifespan.

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> If you don't like it, start another payment processor that doesn't cave to pressure.

Or, gosh, use bitcoin et al.

It's interesting that when people ask "what's the use case for cryptos?", "being an alternative to Visa and Mastercard" is not often mentioned. That alone is a good enough reason to support it.

Civitai has been recently forced by payment processors to crack down on AI-generated porn. Since then, given that the processors told them that they may want do restrict them even more, they have added ability to use cryptos to pay for their services.

I have been a crypto evangelist since it was a weird nerd hobby nobody knew about for this exact reason. It should be nobody's business who I transfer value to or why. The corpo-state has had control of the levers and dials of currency for way too long. They can still enforce laws, and if I'm causing some illegal event to occur by paying money to someone, that event is still illegal. Arrest me for that. But get rid of the rent seeking and monetary policy that seems to just make the whole problem worse.

I don't understand this assumption that crypto transactions are nobody's business. That's a feature of cash payments, which from what I understand can only be emulated in crypto by transferring control over a non-custodial wallet, which is cumbersome to the average person.

If you're crypto banking with a third party that muddles your wallet's transactions you've already added one of the institutions you claim to be against.

If you transact on the blockchain, you're broadcasting who your wallet transacts with on levels that are far more publicly transparent than how fiat is traded via institutions.

We need to change this perception. Setting up a hot wallet on a phone only takes a few minutes and is perfect for holding a small amount of crypto.

Projects like monero (https://www.getmonero.org/) ensure privacy and fungibility of the crypto you hold.

It should still be easier, but let's not pretend this is technology only available to those with deep tech experience.

The Monero download page requires me to choose my system architecture to get an installer, and insists that I absolutely must "verify the hashes" of the "archive". When I ran the installer, it first identified as "monero-gui-install-win-x64-v0.18.4.0" published by "Unknown", then as "Monero Fluorine Fermi GUI Wallet", and about 3/4 of the way through the setup my antivirus popped up to block it.

I don't think this is effectively available to anyone without deep tech experience, and any non-technical user who's willing to click through this kind of thing is definitely drowning in malware that will steal their crypto.

That is true in very unsophisticated systems. It's not true in zksnark based systems and it's not true on monero.

In any case, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying with crypto I need not ask permission to make a transaction. Whether that transaction should be open to government inspection after the fact is another matter entirely.

> I expect all of you complaining about this to never once complain on legal grounds about Apple's 30% tax in the app store

People complain that 24/7. The absolute majority of HN comments sided with Epic when they challenged that.

> or when a bakery refuses to sell a cake to a gay person.

It didn't happen. What happened was the bakery refused to make a cake for gay wedding. It's established that you can't refuse to sell something existing to someone just because of their sexuality.

IME people who propose absolute freedom in any regard (speech, use of power, use of money,...) fundamentally don't understand the difference of power between individuals, let alone individuals and organizations.

This is why anarcho- anything can't work. Some people specialize in building thing, since in providing a service, some specialize in making money and grabbing power. When the builders and providers don't unite to hold them back (like... forming a government) those people end up forming a mafia. Of course the state is a mafia too. You gotta pick your evils.

> fundamentally don't understand the difference of power between individuals,

Or they really do understand and are of the opinion that they will be the beneficiaries. That they are in a position to exploit this difference.

Absolutely. Some are really just sympathizers. I've known people who weren't rich by any means but acted and pretended to be and they supported greater inequality, less consumer protections, etc.

Same goes with abusive individuals and flying monkeys. Some people wanna be like those strong successful abusers so they take their side.

Absolute freedom can be achieved - as long as you're the one holding the gun. Other than that, it's social contracts all the way down (which are more or less letting someone else hold the gun)

> proselytizers

Off topic: I heard this word for the first time last night and now I’m seeing it here. Funny how that works sometimes.

Baader–Meinhof if you want to find more about this phenomenon.

Off topic, but when I was looking at cars when my old one died, I started noticing way more of the models I had been considering on the road. Funny how the mind works.

Okay. I walk into a Jewish bakery and want a red cake with a Nazi flag on it.

> Okay. I walk into a Jewish bakery and want a red cake with a Nazi flag on it.

This isn't a very good comparison, as this involves a payment processing company. An apt comparison would be the payment processor company demanding that you stop doing business with a Jewish store because that goes against their Nazi values.

It’s a perfectly good comparison. Nazi wants cake. Store owner is refusing to transact based on his own personal moral code. Just like any other business.

Contrary wise, consider a Jewish payment processor who wants to knock off a Nazi store. You can’t have it both ways.

Payment processor is the infrastructure, not the merchant itself. They neither make cakes nor eat them.

Bigger problem is that for most real world problems who is Nazi and who is Jewish depends on who you ask. Sucks to be Jewish in a Nazi world where even payment processors hate you.

We can, via laws. In the US, there are anti discrimination laws for protected classes in some areas. You won't find that Nazis are a protected class, but if you would like them to be you can run for office and try to pass a bill and see how the free market plays that one out for you.

> It’s a perfectly good comparison. Nazi wants cake. Store owner is refusing to transact based on his own personal moral code.

It's clearly not the case at all. Valve wants to sell third party games. Third party game developers want to sell their games. Customers want to buy third party games through Valve. Do you understand this bit?

A payment processor company is far excluded from the process. Users want to pay Valve money. Valve wants to receive the user's money. All fine, right? Except a payment company somehow feels entitled to tell Valve which products in their product line they can sell. WTF?

Going back to your far-fetched example, it would be like a supermarket selling all sorts of products their customers want to buy, but the Nazi bank somehow feels entitled to tell the supermarket they should not sell any product related with Jews. Does that make sense to you?

At least in your example there are some bakers to empathize with. They would have to manually bake the cake.

Now imagine your phone refuses to take a picture of the Nazi flag, because the owners of the phone manufacturing company have a certain moral code.

In that case, I don’t buy a phone from that manufacturing company. Maybe I want that on purpose in a different way, to prevent my kids from taking nudes.

Exactly. With the bakers we have competing interests of the guy who wants the Nazi cake and the baker who doesn't want to make one. Personally, I come down on the side of whether it requires any creative effort on the part of the baker. "Print this .jpeg on a cake"--content doesn't matter. "Draw me a Nazi flag on the cake"--content matters.

There's no human looking at each transaction, there's nobody to be bothered about the content of the game, and no justification for not processing offensive stuff.

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