The Dark Future Where Payments Are Politicized and Bitcoin Wins

I find the HN attitude to cryptocurrency to be fascinating. This is the site where I first learned about Bitcoin in 2011. At the time it was treated enthusiastically. People would "Show HN" projects they made that used BTC, people were intellectually curious about it. Then somewhere around 2014 it turned negative. I'm not sure what drove this change. IS it that engineers liked experimenting with it, and when those experiments didn't bear fruit they moved on? Is it that the engineers were replaced with marketers and financial analysts in the cryptocurrency community?

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts cannot find a legitimate use for bitcoins, so they dream up hellscapes where "both sides" are bad and apolitical bitcoin saves the day

This reads like a fan fiction that’s written by 13 year old, who was 0 idea his economy works, and is just trying to exploit and deepen political dive for personal gain.<p>Cutting ties with racist militia means that in the future I won’t be able to buy cupcakes across the street, because owner supports different party? That’s classic “where does it stop” argument, used to justify inaction to obviously wrong things, because it could be abused in the future. Omission bias at its best.

By advancing vapid imagination only to take the whole thing back at the end (writing paraphrasing OK that dystopian future won&#x27;t happen) ... Coindesk tries to ... oh, never mind I can&#x27;t pretend: OP&#x27;s link is a giant waste of time, another too political emotion saber rattling rag. Move-on.

The users in the author&#x27;s fantasy have <i>get</i> some Bitcoin in the first place. And either they or the person who would supply it to them are going to have to get over their fear of going rogue, just like a tax avoider does currently.<p>Given the author is a fan and won&#x27;t even risk <i>writing</i> about a more convincing example like sci-hub (I&#x27;m assuming out of fear that the publishing industry would come after them for advocating for their illegal competitor), what makes them thing regular folks would take an even bigger risk?

I see a different future. As layer 2 comes online, and capital continues to flood into Bitcoin, I imagine people having a layer 2 “checking” account which consists of Liquid or Lightning funds for instant low-fee transactions, and a “savings” account of Bitcoin. When they earn money or get paid large amounts, they will put it in savings to preserve the value, instead of losing it to inflation. Periodically they will transfer some to their checking account to pay for goods and services.

Payment processors already deplatform sexually explicit content that features minors. (They also don&#x27;t process payments for digital-only sexual content, likely because of high fraud and chargeback rates.) But I haven&#x27;t seen PayPal fall down the slippery slope of banning kinky&#x2F;less mainstream sexual content.<p>Right now, these payment processors are deplatforming racists and neo-Nazis who openly advocate for the creation of a white ethnostate. To assume that eventually these payment processors will be successfully pressured into deplatforming moderately-right publications like the WSJ is classic slippery-slope fallacy. There is a huge difference between believing conservative ideas and advocating for violence against ethnic minorities.<p>&gt; social network Gab, which describes itself as pro-free speech but has high concentrations of toxicity.<p>Give me a break. Gab is a haven for white-supremacists and neo-Nazis. PayPal deplatformed Gab after a verified neo-Nazi user posted anti-semitism on the site, then shot up a synagogue killing 11 and injuring 6 [0]. &quot;Toxicity&quot; is terribly bad faith argument.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gab_(social_network)#2018_Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gab_(social_network)#2018_Pitt...</a>

Unfortunately, I can totally see this happening in the next decade or so.<p>:(

Paypal canceled people just because they were thought criminals. At the point where you become a global payment processor (Paypal, Mastercard,...) a different ruleset should apply to you: no banning unless directly criminaly charged.<p>Because as it is now Paypal can ban you for whatever reason you want.<p>When you become global and directly affect people&#x27;s livelyhoods it should be illegal to cancel people just like that.<p>The &quot;it&#x27;s a private business it can do whatever it wants&quot; argument simply doesn&#x27;t apply anymore (unless you want to end up with corporations for nations since you now have to bow down to private corporations if your opinions are not acceptable. In other words: corporations own your mouth, they own your speech, you cannot go against privot corps. Nightmare fuel. Well you can go against them but you will then lose all of your income which is centralized in a few global corps who also most likely share data on dissidents).