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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

Remember this the next time someone asks what the point of politically neutral money could possibly be.

Remember what? That "neutral money" is good for people who want to buy and sell images of rape and sex with minors?

No, that neutral money puts control back where it belongs: politics, not arbitrary infrastructure providers. PornHub is a company. Its principals are known. It's the job of government to regulate them, not payment processors.

OK, so by "neutral money" you mean still USD or EUR currencies but in cash/check/money order form? Are you saying there needs to be a government-run payment processor?

Because to me this term sounds like cryptocurrency, whose boosters constantly talk about how they are beyond governments or any regulation at all.

What I mean includes both a CBDC (or equivalent digital cash issued by federal government, agnostic of how its implemented) and cryptocurrencies. I don't believe private businesses should be able to cut off payments flow like that.

I do also, but separately, not really love the idea of governments being able to block payments either. Obviously there are many cases in which it's good (as there are for private companies blocking them), but I think the bad outweighs the good in the long run for essentially the same reason as speech regulations.

Or a cartoon drawing of a minotaur banging Tinkerbell.

Except it doesn't work. There's no technological fix for a political issue. If the government wants to shut down your business and send you to jail, using a workaround is actually helping them in doing so.

If the government follows due process and the court system than that is completely fine. What were avoiding is them having the ability to do a blanket "we don't like this, blacklist everyone who does it" power, because that can and will be abused.

Nobody is talking about preventing the government from shutting them down. I think the government should be able to shut them down. I think that Visa should not be able to shut them down.

Visa and MC (and PSPs) are just covering their asses, they'd happily take your money otherwise. There's no technological fix for overreaching bills like FOSTA-SESTA.

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