BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)

Well, I'm glad that this kind of thing got in the spotlight.

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.

Isn't there quite a demand in "the West" to send money to Ukraine, meaning that they will be quickly replaced (and by a company that might later become their direct competitor).

And is been nearly a year since the events described in the blog : HAS a new company popped up ?

Well. There's always a demand in all the disadvantaged places. Not only Ukraine.

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.

Why hasn't crypto jumped in to the rescue? Sounds like a textbook case of "code is law"

I used to see the occasional crypto donation link, and you can still find several websites for companies offering to facilitate that, but I haven't seen one of those links in a long while.

The problem is the same. It still costs money to support crypto payments via taxes, payment fees, customer support etc that it's not worth to collect crypto from these countries. It's much more lucrative to just target US markets

Because no one wants to use a currency that is tightly (and correctly) associated with child porn and North Korean scammers.