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BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)

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330 points beeburrt | 1 comments | 16 May 25 06:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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rwarfield ◴[16 May 25 07:07 UTC] No.44002548[source]▶
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.
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ngruhn ◴[16 May 25 07:19 UTC] No.44002616[source]▶
The alternate is crypto. That will service anyone for ANY reason.
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eru ◴[16 May 25 07:38 UTC] No.44002727[source]▶
Well, that and cash.

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.)

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lawn ◴[16 May 25 08:00 UTC] No.44002865[source]▶
You can't send cash digitally, hence crypto.

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).

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1. eru ◴[17 May 25 03:49 UTC] No.44011903[source]▶
> I'd like to introduce you to Monero, [...]

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.