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.

Maybe I didn't explain it well, gold and bitcoin are the 'memory' of used energy, they are not energy sources themselves.

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 isn’t valuable because of used energy. The energy here is just a way to limit the rate Bitcoin is produced, and to help prevent double spending.

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.

The people appreciate the value exactly because of used energy (entropy), if you want to rewrite Bitcoin history you are going to spend no less then it has boon spent. The limit of producing of bitcoins is not related to energy.