BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)

We have normalized the treatment of the financial and payments systems as things that exist primarily to perform law enforcement surveillance functions. It's the same dynamic that leads to debanking of small accounts - payments firms exist on thin margins and the potential fines for inadvertently servicing a bad actor are stratospheric, so it's entirely logical to play it safe by refusing to service anyone whose profile looks even the slightest bit risky.

The alternate is crypto. That will service anyone for ANY reason.

Which is not necessarily a good thing.

But not necessarily a bad thing either.

If everything else fails, I know I can still have two things to pay with: cash and crypto.

Gold being the ultimate. Cash can be diluted and crypto has unlimited supply (via alt coins). Gold is backed by physics and minted in neutron stars!

Strictly speaking, directed energy is the ultimate. Both crypto and gold are both just embodiments of energy, gold being the physical embodiment (via mining and refinement) and crypto being the virtual embodiment.

Not really. Gold has no more energy than carbon per gram. E=MC^2. And total energy is unavailable. Carbon had more available chemical energy. (Why we can burn coal not gold).

Bitcoin doesn't store any energy.

Bitcoin is like a F1 car going around a track forever, with your name scribbled on it.

Both gold and bitcoin are a variant of "proof of wasted energy" or more euphemistically "proof of work". Why that makes it valuable is beyond me, but it isn't really a new thing considering the historic value of gold being much more than its utility as a material.