As for the environmental impact: individual Bitcoin transactions don’t directly increase energy usage. Miners consume electricity regardless of whether any given person transacts. And while mining is energy intensive, it doesn't have an environmental impact in itself.
The context I was looking at related to storing data in the bitcoin ledger. I think I commented here, I'll have to look back and see.
When you send a transaction, you get to pick what fee you'd like to use. For this kind of service, transaction speed isn't really important so you can get away with setting a low fee.
Here's a 0.15$ fee transaction that was mined just 6 minutes ago: https://mempool.space/tx/2e66ba1758e233ff1b2395c7db55f8327de...
By "off-chain", I meant something like BuyMeACoffee letting users top up a wallet via an on-chain deposit, and then handling tips internally (e.g., in a SQL database). That way, small payments don't each require a blockchain transaction.
The only thing that can change value is if the global hash rate significantly changes. This is why we have the difficulty readjustment every 2016 blocks (give or take 2 weeks).
But in general, I agree that cryptocurrencies could help the problem, but it still carries the compliance and AML risks unless you can outsource that to a 3rd party. What happens if you accept funds from an OFAC or other sanctioned account? Violating AML can come with huge fines and is generally just a massive headache. Cash doesn't have these issues as the evidence is generally impossible to track well. With nearly all cryptocurrencies, the entire ledger is open, so if you accidentally accepted payment from the wrong person, you could get royally screwed at some later time.
The key is emissions, not energy use. If I have a process that benefits mankind (a global, decentralized, permissionless hard money that doesn't suffer from politics or unelected officials) and I am using 100% renewable energy, then there is no environmental cost.
Bitcoin mining is very cutt-throat. It is a bleeding-edge, hyper-competitive business of reducing margins. Because I only needs an energy connection, some HVAC and internet connectivity, miners are very mobile and can move from place to place after setting up shop somewhere. This means that they seek the absolute lowest energy cost (the difference of paying 1c more per kWh can be essential) means that they are the energy consumer of last resort. Hydrodams and other renewables often produce at moments that demand is lower, and having a bitcoin miner nearby that is willing to gobble up all your excess production means your solar farm or hydrodam suddenly makes a profit at most times of the day.
It also means that investors are more willing to invest in renewable energy in places where formerly, building this infrastructure was impossible. There is a village in Malawi, Afrika where building a hydro dam was possible, but not financially sensible. None of the villagers had electric appliances, so building the dam meant running it would not be profitable for a very long time. Now, you can just add a set of bitcoin miners and run the dam at 100% capacity until people start installing freezers, televisions, etc. This benefits the investors, the villagers, and the bitcoin ecosystem.
Bitcoin's environmental costs is a highly politicized complex puzzle that is hardly as negative as the mainstream media and anyone that hasn't researched it claims it is. It bothers me to no end.
Cynicism aside, I'd rather not receive compensation in a currency that's mainly used for speculation. And to exchange it back into a "meaningful" currency somewhat securely requires me to go through an exchange, which is usually again a company that can make up their own policies? Seems to me this is just making it more complicated and more resource intensive.
I regard all FinTech-type companies as unreliable, after incredible (in the literal sense of the word) experiences with Revolut (seven years to get an account closed and the money in it returned, and that actually happened only after I made a GDPR request, and they got it done - seems its less work for them to close than meet the request) and Transferwise (who shortly after the UA war started, blocked donations to the UA State bank military support account - yes, really, if you didn't know).
By all means have an account with them, but never, ever, ever, rely on it, and plan on the basis that the next morning you wake up to find the account, and everything in it, has gone, and that customer support is a defensive shield the company uses to keep customers at arms length.
If you want almost no-cost currency conversion (2 USD minimum, but you have to convert like 100k USD I think it is to go above that), use Interactive Brokers LLC. They won't let you have an account purely for currency conversion, but as long as you do a few trades now and then, it seems fine.
Oh wow. Well, at least donations to NGOs / individuals seem to work.
Agreed, IBKR are a nice bunch. I wouldn’t rely on them either, but it’s always better to have more options, in case everything else fails. And of course, when banks can block your accounts at any moment just because they don’t like your passport, crypto is king.
In the end poor peasants shouting "crypto is king" are the ones owned from both sides. They are used for profit by their local oppressors/gangs and by western cryptobros. The peasants transactions are the rounding error but they are the ones who allow to pretend it's "freedom"
> They are used for profit by their local oppressors/gangs and by western cryptobros.
For a razor-thin margin, maybe. It’s still the cheapest way to move money out from Russia, meaning it’s not used there to pay taxes (i.e. fund the war!) And the alternatives are using banks or money transfer systems, which I think are more likely to be pro-government than just a bunch of local guys that want to make some cash.
facepalm. for the fake aura of legitimacy that keeps the whole charade going.
> but governments also just pay for stuff openly
they should stop doing it, but it doesn't change the fact thay the wins around sanctions for russian gov are incomparable with wins for regular people, and regular people suffer sanctions and all related stuff because of the gov in the tirst place
what was the “incredible experience” with Transferwise?
> the next morning you wake up to find the account, and everything in it, has gone
they’re all protected by the FCA via the FSCS scheme: https://www.fscs.org.uk/what-we-cover/
Which would help if Revolut went insolvent, which is not the case here.
> seven years to get an account closed and the money in it returned
Maybe OP can shed some light on why they wanted it closed. My bet is, it was frozen, and transfers blocked for some reason. Happened to my Revolut (LT) account, too, but I could transfer my money out at least.
Something like the underlying account(s) used by the FinTech are secured in this way, but your account with the FinTech is not.
This is why Revolut for example have accounts which are something like "vaults", which are in fact accounts which are covered, because they are actual accounts, one per person, with a normal bank.
That sounds incredible, it needs to be checked, about to leave the house so can't right now.
Edit: and apparently they’re now setting up a bank in the UK as well: https://help.revolut.com/help/more/legal-topics/is-revolut-a...
Wise is not, and it might be more difficult to get the money out if they are insolvent. For the customers in the EU, they’re a Payment Institution in Belgium: https://wise.com/help/articles/2932693/how-is-wise-regulated...
Please allow me to disagree (not really but yes). In the same spirit that some (fin-tech) companies prefer to _not_ do business with certain industries (e.g. porn) or countries (e.g. North Korea) for a wide variety of reason, doesn't make them unreliable. Makes them exactly what they are.
I am not trying to equate "access to my money" with "my favourite soft-drink is discontinued" because they have a very different impact to one's life (paying rent/mortgage/bills money vs sugar). I do understand though (I was working in a dairy company many-many years ago), that "we pulled this product because it costs X and makes 2x while product Z makes 5x, so bye-bye". In the same spirit many companies have profit margin requirements and they won't keep 'a service offering' that makes 'just a little'.
They're just like traditional companies, but with much less oversight, attention to regulation and transparency.
At the beginning there is plenty of support channels, but that's because of marketing and because there's investor money. But as soon as the money gets tight, people start suggesting dark patterns and everything becomes "you must contact us to do X".
Not only that but there is way less auditing, as technical auditors that deal with fintechs aren't really ready to deal with anything made after 1990. That's you, Deloitte.
Also regarding security, what I saw in practice was that everyone has access to absolutely everything and could do anything. Everyone but the lowest support people can transfer money from anywhere to everywhere, change passwords, view and edit personal information, collect private data. Customer personal data is sent around in Excel files in email like it's candy. There was SO MUCH logging that seeing suspicious employee activity was basically impossible without having a complaint from the customer itself and a thorough investigation (which rarely happened).
Also: AI and Data Science are mostly people running one or two queries per week in the production DB, exporting to CSV and calling it a day.
And I don't want to dox myself but: a popular German FinTech with "AI" in its name has way less automation than a 5 person startup. Every single operation is triggered manually and is super error prone. And such operations involve 20, 30 records, when there are 10 million in the database.
Recently there was allegedly a kerfuffle with a german Fintech bank banning hundreds of users because of suspicion that they had gang relations. Well guess why.
Customers should also be allowed to expose shady stuff done by such private services, warning other people.
Ukraine is on the one hand a fairly small market, on the other hand a very corrupt totalitarian country, where a huge part of the "donations" will be bribery, money laundering, fraud, buying illegal goods.
So, probably, the company simply decided that it was easier to abandon this market rather than to solve the potential problems.
>moral principle because I didn't want to potentially help launder money to revolting dictatorships.
It is quite applicable to Ukraine as well.
People are literally being grabbed off the street and sent to die in storm troop units. Massive corruption, the main method of protection of which is that those who fight against it (or all their male relatives) are simply sent to die.
But I think it's more about the legal problems created by a small, toxic market than about high moral standards.
Almost everywhere there needs to be a on AND off ramp, or only the most diehard hobbiest or desperate economic actor will consider it. This stuff is just too new, and there is too small an ecosystem for all but a small handful of coins for them to actually act as a useful exchange medium.
Local currency does still get used, it’s unavoidable, and causes losses. There is no perfect solution.
One economy which fits the description is India - check out the boxes of cash hah! [https://www.livemint.com/Politics/eGzzHAcOe5VePoyCd7n0EN/Inc...], and [https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/mumbai-raid-...].
(FYI, a cr or crore == 10 million, a lakh == 100k. Even at current exchange rates, that is a lot of money anywhere, and an absolutely massive fortune in India).
But there is an element of this in ALL economies, including the US. It’s a matter of scale/ratios, not a yes/no thing.
(I do realize you are specifically speaking of stablecoins but as far as I know they struggle from all of the typical problems you'd expect, just with a less volatile value.)
So I'd send crypto to your address, then you'd trade it for cash with your local exchange/dealer etc.
Just use BTC if anything.
- Stablecoin as input adds a lot of friction on the donor with KYC again
Crypto is just massive overhead for everyone in its current state
If everything else fails, I know I can still have two things to pay with: cash and crypto.
Bitcoin doesn't store any energy.
Bitcoin is like a F1 car going around a track forever, with your name scribbled on it.
It's a sort-of flex, showing off, a demonstration of (energy) wealth. Humanities's peacock feathers.
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 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.
Gold is a bit different. You could stop mining it today entirely and you could still have a gold currency. Stop mining bitcoin and it all effectively disappears!
Good luck buying groceries or paying the mortgage with Crypto.
(You conveniently left out “cash” from your reply. Cash. I’ll buy groceries with cash, if I can’t use my card.)
If "everything else fails" the internet has failed, and crypto will be worthless. Gold will probably still have some value, unless shit really hits the fan.
You have to look at the reality. Crypto has been used overwhelmingly for scams and crime.
So has regular currency.
These transactions while not the majority of transactions I would wager is far larger in terms of dollar value that the whole crypto ecosystem.
The reality is that criminals will find loop holes in a system and they will exploit it if it is worth exploiting. Many of the checks done in banks now impede transactions. I was buying a car (private seller) and I couldn't transfer the cash without going through a fraud check, even though I had signed the transaction with a card reader in the app. It turned a 30 minutes of test driving the vehicle and checking docs into 3 hours of wrangling on the phone. BTW I am not the only person having these problems with banks in the UK.
As for what crime we are referring to as well in this scenario needs clarifying as well. I suspect that most of crypto transactions are through darknet drug markets. These markets reduce the risk of violence to basically zero when purchasing drugs. While I am not one of these people that is pro-legalising all drugs, the reality is that people are going to buying them.
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.)
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 it powered online drug marketplaces before Bitcoin existed.
Try doing that with crypto. 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.
This is essentially the purpose of localmonero and similar offerings. Trading cash for Monero in a p2p manner is going to be extraordinarily difficult to halt.
Second, Monero is still thought to be untraceable. In fact regulated entities are banned from exchanging it in the EU precisely because they can't trace it. (Zcash is also banned under the same law, but is considered technically inferior because not all transactions are private.)
Third, what do you even mean? Do you mean they'll go back to the last time those coins passed through a regulated on-ramp, and prosecute that person? For what? Buying cryptocurrency, then buying a legal product with cryptocurrency, is not illegal, and even if the product was illegal, the government most likely couldn't prove that. Also, the on-ramp was probably in a different jurisdiction. Perhaps for something like "acting as an unlicensed money transmitter" which is a thing they have done against users of cryptocurrencies. If they prosecute that in large quantities, will it fly?
Or do you mean they'll wait until someone takes the crypto to a regulated off-ramp, and then prosecute that person? For what - undeclared income? As far as I know, trading one cryptocurrency for another is a non-taxable currency exchange, at least in some EU countries, so they can't get you for that. And what if they declared it? Again, they might try "acting as an unlicensed money transmitter" of course. What if it never gets to a regulated off-ramp and just circulates peer-to-peer forever? It's more likely tyou think, since remember, regulated off-ramps are strictly banned.
Why do you believe it would suddenly make peer2peer cash to cryptocurrency exchanges unviable?
And if you meant tracing the Monero itself, I suggest you read up on how Monero works—and how it differs from BTC—first.
With crypto you don't hand over your coins to a third-party for safe keeping, you instead send coins directly to one another, just like with cash.
https://en.econostrum.info/europe-restricts-cash-paymentss-n...
https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/shopping-internet/cas...
Intentional mixers aren't even the half of it. You have large exchange operators that use a single wallet. They file KYC paperwork with governments, but that's not in the blockchain. From the perspective of the blockchain their whole exchange is one big mixer. A billion dollars goes in, a hundred was tainted, a billion dollars comes back out. The only information to trace which $100 that went in is the $100 that came back out isn't in the blockchain, it's in the exchange's private accounting database.
But if you propose to taint every coin that has ever passed through a major exchange, that's pretty much all of them.
Not long ago we lived in a world where currency from anywhere other than the nation you were in (or maybe somewhere close by) was impractical to use on a daily basis. Things have changed now and the government's use of money as a tool to keep control of citizens is loosening. For better and worse.
FT Alphaville has a good article about it: "How much does cryptocrime pay?": https://www.ft.com/content/f40b7ac7-bb50-4712-aa7f-5219c2b18... (free sign-up)
To quote:
2025 Chainalysis Crypto Crime Report ... The authors have so far tracked over $40bn of crypto transfers to illicit addresses made in 2024, though they reckon the final total will be north of $51bn.
Some drug dealer is making $20,000/year selling drugs, but the drugs are sold for $50,000 because they had to spend $30,000 on grow lamps and electricity and rent in order to produce them. The same drug dealer also uses the same wallet to sell ordinary lawful gift cards for cryptocurrency and they only make $5000 from that but it's against revenue of $200,000 because the markup on gift cards is small.
For that they're attributing $250,000 of "crypto transfers to illicit addresses" to this person but there was only actually $20,000 of unlawful gain. Overstating the problem to demonize the target.
The primary purpose of a bank is to issue debt. That’s why they were created. A bank has to be able to “print” money to issue debt. This isn’t a flaw as some crypto fans like to think, it’s a very important feature. Debt issued by banks replaced the informal promise-based debt people used before we had banks. You didn’t need money on hand, or to borrow some coins from some rich dude, to get help building a barn. You got help from people in the village in exchange for some other goods or service you’d provide them in the future. Bank issued debt with “printed” money is the replacement to that, and it only works if money can be created on demand.
Crypto can’t “print” money on demand, by design. So it can’t replace banks.
An important difference is that your new token can't ever be confused with base money. In banks, we have base money, and we have bank money, and we pretend they're the same thing because banks are pretty reliable (not 100% but pretty). In crypto, the system won't let you lie like that. (Though you can create another new currency backed by a mix of currencies - this is what DAI does.)
Another important difference is trust. I can easily issue bonds in the real world and then just run off with the money and not repay them. If I try, a lot of heavily armed men will hunt me down. That doesn't really happen in crypto, and as things are now it can't happen, because if you make your identity and location known and issue crypto bonds, the same armed men will hunt you down for issuing crypto bonds instead of ordinary bonds, which is a crime itself (see what happened to Kik/Kin). So you'd have to stake something else to make people trust you.
Another thing banks do is, Alice is in New York and wants to pay Bob who is in Miami, or Kyiv, so instead of getting on a plane with a sack full of Benjamins she tells the bank to send money to Bob. Cryptocurrency is clearly an alternative way of doing this, with the advantage that then there is no middleman to refuse the transaction when the bank is being leaned on by a despot.
If BuyMeACoffee was run like a dark web drug marketplace, it could support every country.
Over here (Belgium) we have legalized prostitution, but it's very hard for sex workers to open a bank account. There's some legislation that forces banks to offer them a basic bank account (at a steep fee) if they can prove that they've been rejected by N banks. Which is a start, I suppose.
Banks have basically become an extension of law enforcement, tax collectors, anti-terrorist operations, and morality police. Which is ironic, given how many banks brazenly break laws on the regular, how absolutely depraved parties with bankers are, etc. They're hardly paragons of virtue. Yet they get to gatekeep "virtue".
What with all the attention they have to put into cooperating with the authoritarians they also aren't particularly good at their theoretical purpose, which is pooling people's money and investing it productively. We're watching an ongoing capital crisis in the West where we've been out-invested by nominal communists; it is absurd. The banking system has sticky fingers all over that mess. Then they get political protection through financial crisises where they should be taken out by bankruptcy but the powers that be prioritise having reliable people in what is effectively law enforcement rather then putting good capital managers in charge.
So, y'know. Upside is the banks do a great job of shutting down sex workers and political activism. 10/10 mark for reporting what everyone is doing to law enforcement. Downside is that turns out to be a big distraction from all the wealth creation banking can enable.
Investment funds of all sorts manage the world's money. Your retail bank might originate mortgages, but it almost certainly sells them on.
The Fed doesn't want to see an overnight switch to narrow banking, where banks sell you checking accounts and money transmission services and never make decisions about investing the deposits. It has declined to approve banks that would do that. But it seems OK with presiding over a managed decline of banking into that state.
Not ironic at all. This is the design.
> Over here
But if I, as a donator, donate money to someone using your service, and you then don't give that money to its intended recipient, you've effectively defrauded me. Had you said in advance "I can't do that, because you're trying to give me money to $foo which I don't support", then that is your right as a business.
I no longer believe that "sunlight is the best disinfectant", and haven't for a long time now.
One of my complaints about the Trump era is people are correctly identifying a bunch of problems with how the US government operates but for some reason they're only a problem when Trump does them instead of being a more general concern even if other people are involved.
Eg, Trump is almost certainly spying on his political opponents. Using infrastructure built by Bush/Obama/Trump/Biden that everyone who took notice at the time pointed out would be used by people to spy on political opponents. This isn't a Trump problem. It is people assuming the government is always on their side despite copious quantities of evidence otherwise and regular elections.
EU: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
Also, 100% dystopia is still worse than a "most part" one
If you are interested in building this, I have product and engineering experience
For Wise, it could be that, but also they’ve been putting out a ton of features lately, which aren’t supported by Wise. Not idea why they didn’t add a bunch of if statements.
The solution is... uh, not sure? Crypto might work for payouts, but it’s too complicated for most users. For the donation page itself, we definitely need to accept cards somehow. There are payment providers that can accept cards and payout to these countries, so I think it should be possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44002850
My guess is buymeacoffee isn't the problem, but their payment provider. They maybe can't justify the resources to switch providers and so its easier/cheaper to just drop those countries.
If you can find a payment provider that will service a "buymeacoffee-like" business in the open countries, then I'd be interested.
Many of Telegram payment-related services use https://smart-glocal.com/, which is registered in Hong Kong (with a UK company handling EEA operations). They don’t say it on the website, but I believe they do work with Ukrainian (and apparently even Russian) citizens and can handle payouts there. (Note, however, that Smart Glocal is owned by a pro-Kremlin guy from Russia: https://en.zona.media/article/2022/08/08/premiumdonate-trl)
There is a reason why the system is as shit as it is.
In regards to the fact they pulled out of countries that are hard to operate in, yeah it’s annoying but you know, can you blame them?
The card I mostly use for online impulses purchases is from a semi paranoid bank that turns down non 3d secure transactions by default. Sometimes they call you for confirmation.
Needless to say, that means no impulse purchases from Stripe using merchants. And no buying coffees for anyone.
Guess it's cheaper for me in the long run...
So someone like BackerKit just didn't bother catering to EU customers.
Plus I saw a chapter about "reducing friction" in the Stripe docs. Via such honest practices as charging automatically after a free trial if the customer has a credit card on file? This has been discussed on HN recently wrt to i-forget-what-service.
I suppose not requiring the extra 3d secure step is also "reducing friction".
Not all merchants will opt-in to 3d Secure as they might see a greater loss in revenue due to the friction it creates versus the risk. They might be taking payments in a low risk sector and use other fraud checking factors, or it might not make sense for them - examples where you end up having to produce the same card in person anyway so "card not present" fraud doesn't factor in so much.
Some merchants don't opt-in as it would lose them millions of dollars of payments an hour due to the friction: Amazon for example.
I worked on the 3d Secure (and, formally, "Verified by Visa") integration at my previous job, and for a long time I was thinking I should write a blog post on what a complete mess of a protocol and implementation it [still] is. Haven't ever gotten around to that though.
Banks are banks :)
> so it's down to the merchant
... or down to the implementation team that may not even have mentioned it to the merchant if said merchant is in an area used to insecure credit card payments ...
Opting out is still customer hostile if you ask me.
That's debatable - I really dislike my own card issuer's implementation as they will ring me, rather than prompt for a OTP, which is a long process and not always convenient. Other card issuers have other implementations. That's one of the, er, issues with the protocol - a lack of consistency. There are many other problems with it.
I'm using this with a credit card, and that already has strong consumer protections if fraud should happen. I, as the consumer, do not get to opt-in to this poorly implemented protocol.
Merchants are sold the protocol with the argument that it reduces chargebacks, i.e. reduces their costs, not that it is good for their consumers. If I (or someone else) makes a payment with my card, and it passes the 3d Secure process, then the chargeback option is a liability that it taken by the issuing bank - and they shift that liability further by passing it on to the card holder: "This transaction when through 3d Secure, your charge back option for it is revoked".
That's hostile to the customer.
Like I said, I have a tonne of material for a blog post. I just need to be bothered to write it.
If we're philosophising, wouldn't it be better to have a honest system where the user authorizes all charges and the merchant doesn't get to auto renew subscriptions without user input just because they feel like it?
It's not about work it's about the burden of cost due to fraud not being passed on to a consumer such that it could put them in financial difficulty. Chargebacks are there to protect the consumer and not the merchant - The 3d Secure "liability shift" (they literally call it this in the spec) flips that arrangement. Merchants are compelled to reduce their chargeback levels as they have to pay for each chargeback case, and should it become frequent their ability to process payments will be revoked.
Just turn on 3d Secure and your merchant chargeback costs reduce significantly. Nice? Not for the consumer. But I repeat myself.
> If we're philosophising, wouldn't it be better to have a honest system where the user authorizes all charges and the merchant doesn't get to auto renew subscriptions without user input just because they feel like it?
Merchants probably should notify their users with subscriptions, sure - I got one a couple of months ago from F1TV that my subscription will renew and maybe I don't want that subscription any more, or perhaps I want to change the level of my subscription. Other merchants won't be as nice, and dark patterns will creep in. Some companies have business models built on these recurring subscriptions.
I can't recall the rules around these, but I can recall that there are (were, we're going back 12 years here) systems in place to reduce issues for recurring payments. Even when a cardholder's details are updated, including replacement of a card and its PAN[1]. Any subscriptions would be retained to avoid interruption to the consumer's subscription, which might be critical for them (the consumer).
Maybe it's BackerKit's choice. I don't know.
Does a Stripe implementer have to do extra effort to have 3d secure?
I would be happier if this were configurable by the user, because I too would be happier if all my online payments required my second factor.
Yeah, my regular payments invoke 3d secure only ... randomly. I'm talking about new places (new to my card) here.
It's not "fair", but people get pissed when you can compare before/after. And to a reason, it means some users relying on that support are now left SOL, when they could have made different choices if the service couldn't handle them from the start.
Lawyering aside, really now? If someone holds money that should be mine with no way for me to get it out and me never getting a way to get it out, it’s not different to me no longer having that money. If the entire purpose of them having that money was for me to be able to get it out, it really feels a lot like theft.
It’s no different than you having money on your PayPal account, it getting suspended for some dumb reason and them just taking your money.
I have used Wise in the past to send money to some gaming friends abroad with weird banks, I really hope that it or some other option that supports as many countries as possible remains available.
I hate to sound like one of those “crypto bros” but I’ve also used BTC in the past for similar use cases and it’s refreshing, you just need to have an exchange available in a given country and also not store too much money in crypto due to the high volatility, unless that’s what you’re going for.
Not to badmouth some need for regulation or whatever is actually going on behind the scenes (assuming a charitable interpretation of whatever it is), but not being able to support a content creator or send pizza money to an acquaintance or whatever for reasons like that seems... dumb. Plus, a "proper" way to handle discontinuing the support for entire regions would be something along the lines of:
1. public announcement and timeline for upcoming changes
2. "Here's how you transfer out all of your money off of the platform before the change: ..." (with regular reminders)
3. "Here's how you migrate your follower base to another platform that supports your region: ..." (maybe a collab of some sort, at least offering each patron the ability to register on the new platform if they want to keep supporting the person)They were told that the US payments company couldn't send the money to their primary email address as (for vanity reasons) they have a .by domain from Belorussia. (They are a UK citizen living in the UK)
Tip for content creators: Please use services like https://UseCode.net to host all your sponsor/referral codes in one place, as this will be very helpful for users.
Remember all could not afford to pay a zillion content creators out there
This stuff is very common for "second-class" countries. It's happening all the time with all kinds of services. Most of them just don't want to be bothered (spend resources on) with figuring out how to work with those countries. I guess the payment systems provide convenient frameworks for them via which they do money related stuff. If there's no easy way to reproduce something in several unfortunate countries that was super easy to achieve in developed countries, then it's not worth it. The profits there are not gonna meet the expectations in relation to the spendings.
So while these are really shitty situations for people from those countries, these decisions are dictated by the market. And I don't think this is gonna change.
But one of the great points in the article is that services should be very clear, up to date and explicit about their policies.
And is been nearly a year since the events described in the blog : HAS a new company popped up ?
As for the supply, money will always find a way. Crypto, shady banks etc.
I think the established businesses which are common to EU and US people just don't want to deal with the government. It's easier for them to comply in a preventive way. Many immigrants in the EU face issues with banks (virtual and real) blocking or not willing to open accounts. Just to be safe.
They get fixed instead!
Unfortunately, "things" begin nicely until it gains major attention. Then it loses most of the nice things.
I get the impression that those buttons don't exactly get many clicks anyway
As long as UA authorities keep ignoring this problem, the situation will get worse.
Baltic states report a horrendous amount of phone scam coming from UA, no surprise Wise just does not want to deal with claims.
1. Offer multiple choices for payment => people need to sift through to find what works for them and give up after first fail.
2. Use a payment [processor] aggregator => unreliable (as with this case) and takes a cut (sometimes chained).
3. Use crypto only => the only thing that works reliably, but severely cuts your audience to those comfortable with it.
This reminds me of something. Russian foreign reserves, perhaps? The irony.
BuyMeACoffee seems to be a service based on an extremely flawed premise: that of exchanging money for nothing tangible in return. That is normally known as a "donation", but this is not charitable giving; this is more like tipping. But even tipping is customarily associated with receiving some kind of service in the first place. This is more like tossing $2 bills at a stripper in a dark room, but 3,000 miles away.
Now most of these buttons were traditionally labeled "Buy Me a Beer" and I found them oftentimes on the web pages of starving F/OSS authors. The hackers would definitely be seeking to monetize their free and open-source software by any means necessary. It certainly stood to reason that they deserved a beer (or a coffee) for fixing bugs or simply providing a nice app to me that does something I want. Fair's fair. [Let's not forget that alcohol and caffeine are drugs, though!]
But essentially, if BuyMeACoffee is a payment platform that's disconnected from any tangible product or service being received, it could be warped to any use at all. Can I buy you a coffee if you show me one boob please? Can I buy you a coffee if you unalive my boss? Oh look, a package of (ammunition|fentanyl|CSAM) has arrived on our doorstep, let me buy you ten kilos of coffee to celebrate this unrelated event?
So I think that typically for capitalism to work, we should be scrupulous about correlating goods and services received to the monetary transactions we make for them. Or we should establish a good way to at least correlate a "creator" of software or content with the in-kind payments of "coffees" that they'll receive for actually doing work. Because if this is not properly regulated, we really do end up supporting a lot of shady stuff.
Who knows if we're buying coffee for terrorist cells or a human trafficking ring. I really feel like coffee money can be better spent on legitimate businesses with aboveboard ways of making transactions for tangible things. Sorry if I am being a real stick-in-the-mud about this, but this seems to be the main issue for regulators and law enforcement, and we need to admit that it's not an ideal way to do business.
rdtsc•5h ago