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Comment by martin_a | Hacker News Reader

You know, you can always do a bank transfer. I don't think anybody would stop you from donating to some FOSS project and it's free to do that.

But yeah, if you want to donate to $shadyorg, somebody might stop you or come after you.

Don't see how Bitcoin is better in this regard.

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>You know, you can always do a bank transfer.

Lol. In my country there is no easy way to do an international bank transfer. Crypto is literally the only solution I can imagine if I want to donate a few bucks to a FOSS project, all other options would be too much effort and too expensive.

> But yeah, if you want to donate to $shadyorg

Because there's obviously a clear and universal agreement on what falls in the $shadyorg bucket.

Like when Visa and their cronies decide to cut off donation to an org they don't like just because.

Must be nice where you live

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASzFs4_4kvk

I personally feel that Visa and other major transaction providers should be treated as critical infrastructure and either nationalized or regulated such that they are required by law to process every legal transaction.

However it does not therefore follow that making your own money that consumes as much power as Poland (60 days of power for the average US household per transaction) or generates as much e-waste as the Netherlands each year is a better solution in any way. Certainly not while miners re-activate shuttered fossil fuel plants and burn Kazakh coal. It's an abject, unmitigated disaster. All while processing the transaction volume of a small Costco.

If anything it distracts from actual solutions.

People have trouble coming to an agreement with their neighbors — and here you are asking for all countries of the world to decide how they are going to legislate multinational entities like Visa in simple, straightforward, and mutually fair way. And United Nations is going to ensure that no country can forbid Visa to operate on its territory.

Each country is surely going to legislate within its borders, but outside it's quickly turning into the international law territory. And the great secret of international law is that there isn't any.

Bitcoin at least provides actually internationally enforceable operation framework. You cannot unilaterally alter the deal.

You've created quite a strawman here. None of that is really necessary. Each individual country can legislate how they want Visa to operate within their borders and Visa can take it or leave it. Most major countries or regions have their own payment rails, and if Visa wants to play, they'll have to play by the rules. It's not nearly as hard as you make it out to be. No UN needed.

For each individual country in isolation – relatively easy, yes. What’s hard is universal consensus.

If organization X is considered shady by country A, but totally legit in country B, then Visa operating in both countries A and B cannot allow transfers from B to A. Regardless of what country B and its residents think, Visa would get into trouble with country A. Country B cannot legislate Visa to ignore the laws of A, and there is no recourse for residents of B.

Universal consensus isn't required. It's up to individual countries to decide how they choose to run their payment networks and if that means you cannot transfer between countries, that's a choice they make. They can just achieve this with local or regional subsidiaries, as they already do. Multinationals already handle this exact situation all the time.

Marijuana is a federal crime in the US and basically everywhere else on Earth, but you can buy pot at Canada's government-run pot dispensaries online with your Visa, Mastercard and American Express cards. Like at http://ocs.ca

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