PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter
eff.org
eff.org
Had a 15 year old Paypal business account (parent started it and I took it over ~7 years ago) and last year they shut it down because I, as the new owner, was not 18 when the account was created. Nothing from the support but "computer said you bad, nothing we can do".
In Ebays case I sold an item, got the regular email from Ebay (DMARK/SPF/IP verified) that they had received payment and was holding it until the item had been delivered. Then a week later I got another email from them saying they had blocked the buyer for abuse (i.e. a fraudulent transaction to them) and that I shouldn't ship the item they told me to ship a week ago. After 2 months of trying to get through to the support they just claimed that someone spoofed their DMARK, SPF, and servers IP. After explaining how impossible that would be their 'proof' that it was 'spoofed' was that there should be a copy of the message in the Ebay inbox where, after the reply, all messages about the auction ever existing were suddenly gone.
Was this before or after they had to force-reset everyone's account password because their user data was compromised?
I did get my PayPal account back by doing this, after I sent out an eBay order so fast they decided I was a scammer because the tracking info already said it arrived when I added it to the invoice.
https://cfpbactions.com/2021/03/24/cfpb-files-lawsuit-using-...
I explain it was an accident to click the PayPal button and it didn’t go through.
Banned for life :D PayPal can join the rest of the former tech giants anytime.
[1] https://www.guntab.com/payment-platform-firearm-policies
I know nothing about the industry you are in so far as payments go, but get the fees closer to 2% and you’ll own the market.
The whole thing is dumb though, so I honestly don't even attribute malice. It's a ~17 year old account and I've processed millions(?) of dollars through it. The killing they earned on the transaction fees dwarfs the interest they earn on the float over the period of time they are holding it. The only way this wouldn't be the case is if a lot of people just give up and never get their money out, which, frankly, sounds possible. So either they do this intentionally because people give up, or they think I'll never sell stuff online again (I sell stuff online, right now), or they're just kindof dumb and have an overactive suppression team.
It took three months to resolve the issue. I'm not saying that we had to _wait_ three months: we discussed almost every day with the support, for three months.
The process was a mix of infuriating exchanges, bugs on the PayPal site preventing to send documents (so serious that even the support was aware), and at the end we were wondering if this was on purpose or because of a total lack of intelligence/skills and process from PayPal.
Each day we would have a different support people on the chat, with the dialog summarized:
- Paypal Human Bot: How can we help you ? - Me: Our account is restricted and we don't really understand why. Would you mind telling us how to solve the issue ? ( Skip long re-explaining everything from the beginning; PayPal has no history of previous exchanges apparently) - Paypal Human Bot: You are not registered as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, can you send us the papers ? - Me: Indeed, we are outside the US, we can't do that. However we can send you the official papers from Europe - Paypal Human Bot: Okay, so you need to be registered as a commercial entity, please send us your commercial ID - Me: We are not a commercial entity, we are a small non-profit organisations, and we don't have such ID - Paypal Human Bot: Okay, so please send us the papers that prove you are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization - ...
We probably sent dozen of various official papers, etc. in the meantime. We had to guess what were the probable causes, as (once again) the PayPal site is riddled with bugs that may (or not) display warnings, ask for fields but that are read-only, etc.
If this was a bank, they would have been sanctioned by banking regulations.
And I am still unsure if this wasn't some kind of twisted social experiment made by some psychopath.
This should be illegal for Paypal to do, period. Absolutely illegal.
And if it is on behalf of a government or banking/fraud regulations, then the person should be referred to relevant agencies.
Let's be clear and drop the pretense: They are confiscating his property.
What can happen is when your credit card / other payment providers cuts you off is that you go out of business. You might fail to provide services to users - so they do a chargeback / ask for a refund from payment provider.
So when a payment provider is shutting you down, they usually want to hold onto some money to be able to handle those refund requests. Very common in travel situations as well.
They have data showing when they cut off a business from processing credit cards etc they may receive claims from customers who have already paid whose money they are either holding or have forwarded.
If they are holding it they refund that customer, and business can ask for payment using another method.
If they are not holding funds, they run into an issue of asking merchant for money (which is difficult to collect).
So most providers of this type when making a decision to end a business relationship hold onto the funds for a while to let everything settle. This is not unique to paypal.
Some providers don't hold funds if payor has no recourse. You usually need to be settling with what are called "good funds" for that to be the case, then merchant is paid out usually within 1 day under all circumstances. A fair number of B2B wire type clearing operations work like this.
I'm just explaining what happens. They don't generally closely evaluate the reasons or likely outcomes of account closures, and there is enough fraud and profit motive / cost cutting in system that the rules tilt pretty heavily against merchant.
That said, if OP is not lying and they really do confiscate the funds there will be an issue for them. Especially individuals, they'll send the unclaimed funds to the state generally even if not claimed by the person.
It sure as heck ain't the consumer's bank that pays for that.
Nor is it Visa or Mastercard or whichever company owns the card network the card is part of.
No, it is the merchant bank that processed the charge. To be allowed to process charges through Visa, MC, etc, the merchant bank has to agree to cover all credits the issuing bank gives when consumers successfully dispute charges if the merchant cannot cover them.
Merchants that want to accept credit cards have to get an account with a merchant bank. It acts as an interface between the merchant and the credit card system, submitting charges and collecting the payments from the issuing banks, and depositing them in the merchant's regular business bank.
Merchant banks hold back some of those payments to maintain a buffer to cover their potential obligations in the case of disputed charges. How much they hold back and how long they hold it for varies depending on things like changes in your sales volume, how risky your line of business is, how often you've been getting chargebacks, and probably a ton of other factors their actuaries have identified.
PayPal doesn't look like a traditional merchant bank from the merchant point of view, but if people are able to use credit cards to buy your stuff there is a traditional merchant bank or something else with the same obligations as a traditional merchant bank somewhere in there, and that means that for a merchant using PayPal they are going to have someone holding back a reserve.
When you use a traditional merchant bank and are directly exposed to all that you know it is going to happen, and quickly realize that the whole damn credit card system is designed to make sure that if anything goes wrong anywhere in the chain it is the merchant that is going to eat it.
With these services that try to do it all in one and make it easy to accept payments, such as PayPal, it is easy to not realize that credit cards work that way and so you get surprised when PayPal won't let you take all your money out right away.
Your merchant bank will know you, there is a relationship manager who wants the rest of your business, they may have lent you money etc etc. In short, someone spends more than 5 seconds dealing with you. And they do charge more for sure.
PayPal - no one there cares at all about you. They offer something convenient, but that's it. You are SOL when things go wrong.
Besides, if that was their business it'd be in their S-1 and it isn't. (IIRC it says they keep customer funds in interest free accounts)
exercise for the one's imagination - you come to a banker and say "i'm thinking about keeping with you an N billions of dollars, interest free. Any ideas?" (in mid-199x i did some work around large Russian municipal funds to be kept in banks, and what i saw helped develop my imagination :)
I explained to them that if they didn't release the funds they would most certainly have charge backs because we'd be out of business and thus unable to deliver on the work promised for the money.
Nothing we said did any good. That is until I looked up the laws in Washington State about money transmitters. Turns out based on the specific license they had in Washington State at the time, it was illegal for them to hold funds for longer than 7 days.
Me telling them this did nothing at all, but when I sent a letter to my state governor explaining my predicament and someone from that office sent a letter to the folks at PayPal, suddenly my funds were released and a note was placed on my account to never withhold funds on that account ever again. Been smooth sailing ever since :-D
Did PayPal just tell you this or did you find out another way?
Did you stay with Paypal after that? I'd have run for the hills.
If you want to reduce liquidity risk, store your funds in an escrow account. The funds in an escrow account are legally your property, and the custodian is legally required to follow your orders (simplified).
In the US, it *is* illegal for any bank or other regulated financial company. But PayPal claims that they aren't that.
There are lots of other ways to send or receive money and most of them don't have the reputation that PayPal has.
My business does ~$100-250k monthly revenue, and probably 1/3 of transactions are via PayPal. I'd never not have them - it helps conversions too much.
But, I made sure to call their support and enable the "auto-sweep" feature, so that I can withdraw everything above a balance that I set into my bank daily.
This way, I never need to worry about too many funds getting frozen should anything go wrong.
It’s proof (not that we needed any) that centralized finance does not have your best interests at heart, and they can and will abuse their power.
Unfortunately, at least near term you'll still need fiat-tether "on ramps" to convert your local currency back and forth to tether before you move them to a distributed (or at least a non-KYC) exchange to Monero, then sending to your local wallet, then use online.
Nothing stops an exchange refusing to do business with you.
Ideally, in the long run, cryptocurrency takes on a value of its own, reducing the need to use exchanges.
right now, because it's not widely used. If it ever gets mainstream, people will give governments whatever power they need to censor and try to stop things like child pornography. And once they can censor that, they can censor other stuff as well.
And I am sure you can come up with technical reasons why monero can't be censored. But i remember when China started their big firewall of china, people where laughing how trivially easy it was to bypass. And that their strategy will never work. Now 15-20 years later, nobody is laughing anymore. In fact a lot of countries seem to be moving into same direction.
See also: https://geneva.cs.umd.edu/
If you want privacy there are also Zcash shielded transactions. Or if all you want to do is eliminate central parties then why not just Bitcoin?
My understanding with Monero is if you don't run your own node there's not that much privacy guarantee anyway (otherwise you have to trust the third party node you point to). Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken about that.
The issue with Zcash shielded transactions is that something like 14% of transactions are shielded, but only 1% are truly private. Optionally shielded transactions make chain analysis much easier and immediately make said transaction suspect. So you cannot comfortably use Zcash for private transactions. See the report by Chainalysis [1]:
> 14% of the ZCash transactions use a so-called "shielded pool", but in only 6% of all cases both the sender, recipient and the number of transactions are fully encrypted. The report states: “So even if the concealment on Zcash is stronger due to the zk-SNARK encryption, Chainalysis can still provide the transaction value and at least one address for over 99% of the ZEC activities.”
Clearly, optional privacy is not privacy at all. It needs to be on by default, which is the philosophy behind Monero.
Re. Monero nodes - if you’re using a remote node you can just use Tor, which I believe is soon to be baked in by default. Otherwise, Monero is still quite private. Your transaction history, transaction amounts etc are not revealed to nodes. Some metadata like restore height is, but that’s not a big deal.
[1]: https://www.kryptokumpel.de/en/kryptowaehrungen/chainalysis-...
Also, the ZKSnark method that provides the privacy requires that the devs threw away their initial PKs. If you trust they did, then it's a great option.
I'm not saying privacy isn't great, just that even without it, crypto is still useful. Privacy is absolutely an amazing force for freedom.
This is a marketing term without actual meaning. There's a system with some anonymity. Then there's the external world. There's no 'optional' anonymity. The error lies in incorrectly comparing monero to zcash as a whole, instead of shielded transactions themselves. Names themselves are irrelevant. Depositing xmr to an exchange is equivalent to withdrawing from the anonymity pool.
From the design perspective, the mixin model is vulnerable to an active adversary that has spent output data from exchanges and spams the chain to generate recent known outputs when the target makes transactions. Full zk-snark anonymity is fully resistant to this.
A problem of both xmr and zcash is that they have no other use than anonymity, making it easier to ban and impractical for larger amounts and forcing commerce to hedge price risk, generating deanonymizing metadata. For actual commerce anonymous dollar is the ideal, for as long as dollar remains the main unit of account in the world.
https://zk.money supports dai, although it's still in alpha with a limit of $1000 per external deposit.
Most people already acknowledge that the little guy doesn't have the funds to hire the lawyers for a protracted court case.
How do you reverse fraudulent transactions? What happens if your wallet is stolen? Who do you speak to when you need help setting up an account? On a macroeconomic level, it prevents the government from setting certain types of monetary policy that benefit the economy as a whole (although I may be biased there, as the Australian government bailed out the economy as a whole through economic stimulus in 2008 and prevented the spread of the GFC to here).
This is all assuming it's pegged to a stable asset like the USD. Bitcoin's average annual inflation over the past 5 years is around 3,000%. For comparison, Zimbabwe's inflation rate in the early 00's was around 500%.
How do you reverse paying someone with cash? You don't. You can ask for a refund and hope they give it to you. If you're transacting with a trusted business, you can expect them to adhere to the law and reverse the payment.
In this sense, crypto transactions are no different than how humans have transacted for thousands of years. Chargebacks and reversals are a convenience - they are not necessary.
> What happens if your wallet is stolen?
What happens when your wallet is stolen in real life? You lose the cash inside. So you keep most money secure in a cold wallet, airgapped and password-protected, and some money secure in a hot wallet, PIN-protected. Usually losing a hardware wallet isn't a big deal anyways, since they wipe themselves after a few PIN tries.
The UX around securing wallets will get better over time, but if you pick up a Ledger X today it's actually already quite easy to use.
> Who do you speak to when you need help setting up an account?
Just like using a wallet with cash in a secure manner took time to become cultural knowledge, using a hardware wallet with cryptocurrency will to. Obviously, there are places where it could become easier to use, but using a Ledger these days is already pretty damn easy. You just connect it to your phone via Bluetooth and you're ready to go.
> it prevents the government from setting certain types of monetary policy that benefit the economy as a whole
For some, lowering government control over your finances is a pro, not a con, but I can understand that this is up for debate.
> This is all assuming it's pegged to a stable asset like the USD.
I can agree with this, I think currently the price of cryptocurrency is volatile due to rampant speculation. Eventually it will settle into something stable, and if it doesn't, we can just use alogrithmic stablecoins like DAI that track the value of the dollar to within +/-1% and don't need to be backed by a central institution.
Exactly, that's why centralised systems with moneyback guarantees (PayPal, Stripe) exist for online payments where you can't see the goods in person - online fraud is still a concern in 2021.
>So you keep most money secure in a cold wallet, airgapped and password-protected, and some money secure in a hot wallet, PIN-protected.
I'll admit I'm not super familiar with crypto technology, but this cold wallet basically sounds similar to stashing your life savings under your mattress (or, at least, in a safe in your house). Nobody in their right mind would do this.
>Just like using a wallet with cash in a secure manner took time to become cultural knowledge, using a hardware wallet with cryptocurrency will to
Makes sense, honestly. Everyone understands credit cards/WeChat.
Regardless of the individual arguments, though, I think the overall point is whether or not the risk of being screwed over by the machinations of a giant corporation outweighs the risk of being screwed over in the "wild west" world of crypto. For the average person, I think (well-regulated) central institutions are the lesser of the two evils.
Sure, but this is why you transact with trusted people and businesses, just like you would when using cash.
To be honest, I don't know a single person that relies on PayPal's protection when making a purchase online from an individual or business. Every single person I know that uses PayPal does their due diligence on the seller before buying. None of them assume that PayPal disputes will actually work.
The same would be true with crypto. You'd do your due diligence before buying, just like you do today, if you're buying from a random.
> this cold wallet basically sounds similar to stashing your life savings under your mattress (or, at least, in a safe in your house).
You would use a social recovery wallet, in which, say, your trusted family members could secure your life savings as a group. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has a great article [1] on this.
Even if you don't trust a multisig/social-recovery wallet, you can store your money on an insured exchange. It still comes out ahead of banks and PayPal in that your transactions themselves are private and cannot be censored.
> I think the overall point is whether or not the risk of being screwed over by the machinations of a giant corporation outweighs the risk of being screwed over in the "wild west" world of crypto.
Just like online payments and credit cards had their "wild west" period, crypto has its own. I don't see a big deal here. This is a field in its infancy with staggeringly rapid development. Over time the UX will get better. I'm not expecting your average Joe to move their savings to Monero tomorrow, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did (to whatever Monero-equivalent exists) 10, 20 years down the road, when social recovery wallets are easy to use and crypto prices have algorithmically stabilized itself (ala DAI) or have naturally fallen into an equilibrium.
What, like paypal and ebay?
The problem is that in reality there are (a) small businesses whose trust is difficult to verify and stability may not be guaranteed and (b) large companies who have a proportion of incidents of very bad customer service. For many services there may only be (b).
> do your due diligence before buying
How much do you do exactly? How long does it take, what does it cost (do you pull company financial reports?) and shouldn't the extra time it takes to do this be counted as a transaction fee?
> Just like online payments and credit cards had their "wild west" period
Not really? It's been the same customer-not-present process since the days of export-restricted SSL. In fact that's kind of the problem, it's the same insecure process designed for paper and card transactions. There was certainly never anything comparable to "exchange absconds with customer funds" that happens every few years in crypto.
The "large company payment database was compromised and now all their customers are being defrauded" problem does seem to have improved recently.
With BTC you don't have to worry about someone siphoning value from your currency. It's not just coincidence that BTC increases in value YOY. Bitcoiners call this 'number go up' technology.
When all central banks are tripping over themselves to devalue their currencies, BTC's value rises.
I think you meant deflation?
If you held Zimbabwe's currency then you became poor.
If you held BTC over the past 5 years you became rich.
These are two _very_ different scenarios.
How was this bailout done? In the US, the bailout was done primarily by giving funds to over leveraged banks that had every right to collapse. CEOs took home record bonuses, and everyday citizen's lost their homes.
They tried to spin the story in the US as saving the economy too, but most people didn't fall for the obvious wealthy get wealthier, poor get poorer trick.
This actually birthed the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Our economy had one quarter of negative growth but we recovered almost immediately.
The banks didn't get bailed out at all - they didn't need to be because the financial sector had strict regulations that prevented them from engaging in the systemic risk that ruined Europe and the US.
The reason PayPal holds funds is that a consumer is allowed to reverse a bank and credit card transaction for a few months after the transaction happened. This ability exists to protect consumers from fraudsters, scammers and bad businesses (ones that don’t provide service etc.) which is much more common than people realize.
With crypto, the ability to reverse a transaction disappears and with that the ability to protect consumers. Now who do you think will thrive in a world where a consumer has no protection? Scammers, bad businesses and criminals..
For thousands of years humans have transacted with physical currency, in which transactions cannot be "reversed" once the payment is made. Even today, many people pay and transact with cash. Second-layer financial institutions provide holds, reversals, and chargebacks but they are by no means necessary for a robust financial system.
Too many times "protecting consumers" turns into "censoring transactions we don't like" and "restricting your financial freedom to maintain our brand image." (Case in point - sex work payments, even in countries where it is legal, can not be processed by any of the major payment processors. Brand image and all.)
Not to mention the privacy concerns that come with a central authority knowing all of your transactions - no thanks, I think I and many others would prefer an electronic cash-equivalent over PayPal.
That is simply not the case. Even in old ancient civilizations and feudal systems you usually had a way to reverse a transaction by going to court (in the old times literal court of the king, nowadays judge). This was and is possible because when you pay in cash you know who you pay to, and authorities (king and/or police) can lay hand on them. So even if you pay cash in brick and mortar shop you can get refunds (usually :) ).
One of the reasons why a lot of people are comfortable buying online is easy refunds. And if crypto can't provide that, I don't ever see it catching on in mainstream.
And if you want refunds and you are marketplace like eBay , the easiest way to offer refunds is to keep money in escrow which is what is happening here.(Except that their home brew escrow algos seem to not be that great, but crypto won't change that either. )
Bottom line is, crypto either won't go mainstream or will be co-opted by mainstream and will have all of the same problems/features as current currencies.
And it's not because governments. It's because people want and expect their government to be able to protect them.
And government don't censor things because they don't have nothing better to do. At least in democracy's they start censoring, when enough people cry to them to start censoring. Don't expect that to ever change with or without crypto.
Whenever a solution pops up that has a negative impact on the finances of the richest 5%, like cryptocurrency, politics/laws will come up with a new method/law to suppress it.
Edit: found the text in the TOS:
"Holds based on PayPal's risk decisions
We may place a hold on payments sent to your PayPal account if, in our sole discretion, we believe that there may be a high level of risk associated with you, your PayPal account, or your transactions or that placing such a hold is necessary to comply with state or federal regulatory requirements...
Risk-based holds generally remain in place for up to 21 days from the date the payment was received into your PayPal account. We may release the hold earlier under certain circumstances ..., but any earlier release is at our sole discretion. The hold may last longer than 21 days if the payment is challenged as a payment that should be invalidated and reversed based on a disputed transaction as discussed in the following paragraph below. In this case, we'll hold the payment in your PayPal account until the matter is resolved (but no longer than 180 days)."
This is 101 stuff. Credit card companies do this routinely as well. I'm hearing fyre festivals will be harder to get immediate payout on.
Travel does this when businesses are near bust - credit card companies will hold funds.
So they sit on the money for 180 days, it doesn't cost them anything and saves them a big pain in trying to claw money back from any of these folks who may not look at them that fondly after being cutoff for what may have a been a silly reason.
They can trace where the money came from, if I put money into the account so I could pay someone they find objectionable and then shut me down they should not be able to hold that money because it is not a fraud issue, i did not receive from a 3rd party, it is 100% my money
yet they also hold these funds for the 180 days
This is a reasonable argument in general, but it falls apart here because there was a human in the loop who knows why the account was disabled, and knows that it wasn’t for suspicion of scammy behavior, nor for suspicion of insufficient funds.
Perhaps someone can kindly check if this is a quiet reincarnation of Operation Choke Point?
After few sales of an un-marketed old product for most of the pandemic, someone tracked me down and wanted to purchase. Agreed on options and I said I'd have an invoice out in minutes.
Should be easy, right? Login to PayPal, fill out invoice info, hit [Send] . . . . Nope, something wrong, contact support. Phone w/half-hour+ wait times, support ppl 'cant hear' and line drops, repeat, send email, both put me off, took a bit of info and said a specialist would get back to me quickly. Yeah, right.
While I was waiting, I apologized to my customer and checked out alternatives. I'd worked with Stripe on a previous project, and they now have manual invoices (i.e., not only code-generated from website=>API).
Signed up, got authenticated, setup invoicing, sent invoice, got paid, and the money is in my account, and the product packaged and on the loading dock -- all within an hour or so.
More importantly, Stripe did a setup and execution from scratch in less time than I squandered even getting to initial PayPal help, and more than an order of magnitude faster than PayPal even began to send a useful answer my issue.
Done with PayPal - strongly recommend not using them -- and never store money there.
I always say "I have plenty of time and will wait until you can hear me, and I won't hang up" or something along those lines. The connections always seem to magical improve after saying that.
Anyone who has ever had anything to do with PayPal as a Seller will tell you the same thing, as a buyer, always order with PayPal, and you'll always win.
Yet I was still forced to use PayPal for another retailer because the retailer's credit card processing was broken, so I had to create a new account. It's frustrating when you have to go through a middleman or external company that treats you like garbage instead of being able to use an established payment system that works.
Thankfully I didn't have any funds stored there, but it was inconvenient and ruined any trust I previously had in them.
Overall a terrible experience.
> Provide meaningful notice to users. If PayPal is choosing to shut down someone’s account, they should provide detailed guidance about what aspect of PayPal’s terms were violated or why the account was shut down, unless forbidden from doing so by a legal prohibition or in cases of suspected account takeover. This is a powerful mechanism for holding companies back from over-reliance on automated account suspensions.
> Adopt a meaningful appeal process. If a user’s PayPal account is shut down, they should have an opportunity to appeal to a person that was not involved in the initial decision to shut down the account.
> This section ensures that national banks file a Suspicious Activity Report when they detect a known or suspected violation of Federal law or a suspicious transaction related to a money laundering activity or a violation of the Bank Secrecy Act.
Note also this part [1]:
> No national bank, and no director, officer, employee, or agent of a national bank, shall disclose a SAR or any information that would reveal the existence of a SAR. Any national bank, and any director, officer, employee, or agent of any national bank that is subpoenaed or otherwise requested to disclose a SAR, or any information that would reveal the existence of a SAR, shall decline to produce the SAR or such information, citing this section and 31 U.S.C. 5318(g)(2)(A)(i), and shall notify the following of any such request and the response thereto: [...]
I don't know to what extent this applies to PayPal, but it seems to be happening more and more frequently that people are just essentially barred from having any kind of bank account because of some opaque reporting trigger ("could be money laundering"), during/after which no bank will probably want to do business with you. [2]
Let me also leave you with something whose sheer existence should be horrifying given the above. [3]
[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/12/21.11
[2]: https://sperrinlaw.net/suspicious-activity-reports-would-you...
[3]: https://verafin.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/suspicious-ac...
It's a nice conspiracy, although I'm not going to believe it unless there's more evidence corroborating it (ie. mass reports of people getting their paypal banned or increased churn in tor relay nodes).
There actually was something kinda close to that recently: https://nusenu.medium.com/tracking-one-year-of-malicious-tor...
But that's an increase in known-malicious relays and exits and doesn't speak to churn in existing, non-malicious nodes. The attribution efforts made in that article also suggest a different motive, though if I was a three-letterer attacking Tor I'd probably also try to look as if I was a Russian criminal bad at hiding my tracks.
My thinking was, if a friend confide in me about their use of PayPal for online payments, then it's a moral obligation to inform them of the risks their taking and treatments available such as alternative providers.
I sell only small-time. I don't want to do Creditcard, no Stripe either (I don't have a registered company) and iDEAL is only working in the Netherlands. So what is the internet alternative for international selling. And, please, no crypto-currencies :)
I am off to sleep, see you tomorrow.
I feel like everyone is ignoring this part. Paypal says it isn't about Tor. Are they believable?
I thought there were regulations in the US that would prohibit a financial institution to hold money that long. Looks like there aren’t.
I do not believe this to be legal in the E.U., but from how I understand it, In the U.S.A., a store can refuse any customer service on arbitrary grounds without having to say what the reason was.
This is even more troublesome because the U.S.A. is a country of low population density where in some rural areas many people will have only one grocery store available to them, that could actually refuse them service simply because it's manager did not like the looks on their faces.
Whenever people snub cryptocurrency I always bring up examples like these.
Nebulous ToSes are not laws.
It may be a problem, but it’s a hell of a lot better than situations like this. Cryptocurrency was created precisely for this reason - giving financial freedom back to the individual in a censorship-resistant manner, because it was obvious as day to the cypherpunks that created it, that governments and corporations would abuse our financial freedom where possible.
I'll never understand this community.
I don’t understand why there are so many posts here saying ‘just use crypto’, like - PayPal is a scam and needs a replacement but the problem is until sites start accepting crypto as simply as PayPal works then things will stay the same.
What you’re saying to do in your comment - on most major online retailers - is not yet possible, and it will probably take a long time even if it can find critical mass.
Crypto is another currency - it’s not another payment processor and while those are starting to exist we are nowhere close.
I believe the laments here are more so related to PayPal’s dominance - for most websites it’s that or your credit card.
Honest question: would you express the same level of outrage, if the service in question was primarily a purveyor of political content that you disagreed with, or "hate speech"?
I see a lot of libertarian-minded comments whenever the service in question is some form of file sharing/hacker related service, but I don't really see much outrage when the same culprits use their weight to censor political content, and / or wrong think. PayPal, Visa, YouTube, Amazon, all of these big companies have been engaging in censorship.
Too many seem to be OK with others' rights being taken away, as long as they disagree with those who are losing their rights. How is that any different than what happened to this Tor supporter?
So in the end do I want to get into arguments with either malicious people or people who already have their mind set, get called names, have people deliberately portray what I am saying as something else and call it stupid when that was not what I said at all. Most of the time I really don't want to deal with that BS. Most of the people want to post about this are reluctant to do so and in many times don't, this is not just extrapolating from my experience, but what I have observed from other sources as well (such as asking whether they agreed with something shown, seeing no hands go up, then asking whether the didn't put there hands up because they were afraid and seeing almost all the hands go up).
You're right, 100%, but it's easy to lose sight of the fact that bullies, especially in this modern era, are the weak ones, and when you stand up for yourself you'll be surprised at how many of them cower in fear.
You'll also be surprised to see how many more you inspire to stand up next to you. Everybody is waiting for somebody else to stand up. Be that person and you'll soon be addicted to the results. One example, and of course this is controversial these days and itself, is that once we reached the point in the "pandemic" where it was obvious that the virus wasn't the real threat, I decided to go grocery shopping with no mask. I expected to be screamed at, but not one person said anything in a gigantic store filled with dozens of people. Not only that, but by the time I got to the front of the store there were two other people whom I encountered in the isles, who also had no mask on, but who did have a mask on while in the isles. I know this sounds made up. It's the honest to God truth. So I did it again in Home Depot, and it had the exact same affect. For those who disagree with my mindset about masks (which have been clinically proven to be ineffective), this sounds like an asshole move, but regardless of whether or not you agree with the principle behind the move, the methodology was effective. It's the same thing that triggers riots; people see others doing what they want to do and they are inspired to do it themselves. Why not use the same principle to inspire things that are not distractive?
It's human tribalism in a nutshell. They'll argue until they are blue in the face for their team to not be persecuted but the moment it's "the others" they cheer it on.
It’s no surprise that people are looking towards crypto, which was created explicitly for the purpose of taking power back from these institutes. People finally have another option.
But they don't know that. Paypal refuses to give details. He describes a second recipent, the hosting company, and there could be more. Paypal's fraud and crime detection is pitiful*, and their silence can cover both incompetence and malice.
[*] https://slate.com/technology/2020/02/paypal-venmo-iran-syria...
Isn't that already covered by
> first time we have heard about
But I guess that's too true for HN.