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.

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.)

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).

Apparently "Liberty Reserve" was a (now defunct) digital cash service. As in you'd mail them cash and they'd add it to your account, and you could withdraw and they'd mail it back, minus a fee. And you could log in and transfer it.

Apparently it powered online drug marketplaces before Bitcoin existed.

You're not wrong. But Liberty Reserve was able to be shut down because it was centralized. Banking regulators in various western countries leaned on the Costa Rican authorities to shut it down.

Try doing that with crypto. Who are you going to arrest?

> Who are you going to arrest?

Every on- and off-ramp provider. EU legislation has basically created a database of real person to wallet mappings (for some subset of wallets). You can't take money from a wallet if you don't know who it belongs to (if you're an exchange anyways). The checks are a bit soft (ie. self attestation and stuff), but the public ledger part of crypto makes tracking far-far easier than with traditional banks.

The end game for this is that people in the West (and whoever they can pressure) won't be able to buy crypto to buy drugs or sell it when selling drugs, making it useless on a big scale.