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Comment by throw101010 | Hacker News Reader

I know it is not a popular topic here, but this kind of lack of control over (allegedly) your assets is one of the premises for the existence of Bitcoin.

Self-sovereignty and self-custody prevent third-parties from making decisions for you like this, and the removal of intermediaries (like payment processors) also prevent anyone from restricting you ability to transact with your desired counterparties.

The kind of freedom this enables also has disadvantages of course, but I strongly believe the few real "bad" transactions that gets blocked by the current system are a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of people deprived of access to the system and the millions of others who are included but seriously limited in what they are "allowed" to do on it.

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Totally agree, and than you for posting this. You'll probably get a lot of negative comments from haters, but this is the kind of payment censorship that crypto can solve. The worst thing to happen to cryptocurrency in my opinion was fiat exchanges. It created the ability for the legacy banking world and government to have too much of a voice in something that was designed to be the people's exchange of value. We started losing when actual traditional money was exchanged en masse in a way that was tracked. How is that different than any other trackable digital transaction?

There's no difference between someone like visa shutting down processing for porn sites and your bitcoin exchange of choice refusing to pay out cash to porn stars. Porn models gotta eat, and last time I checked Costco doesn't accept bitcoin. Bitcoin can never be "truly free" from US control until it has it's own parallel economy, and that turned out to be a non-starter. And no, "local-bitcoins" is not a solution to that, because the last thing an online personality wants to do is meet up with a stranger who could plausibly discover who they are.

The difference is the step at which that shutdown takes place. When visa shuts down processing for your business, they're taking away your ability to conduct transactions at all. When a bitcoin exchange refuses to do business with you, they're only taking away your ability to convert your BTC to USD (at that particular exchange). You can still conduct transactions directly in BTC (or ETH or what have you). The "cash out to USD" step is much less frequent, and usually less ingrained into the way you conduct business.

A closer comparison would be to a bank that doesn't let a you deposit the cash your business earned at the end of the week. It would be an annoyance, but it doesn't actually prevent you from conducting your business.

> The kind of freedom this enables also has disadvantages of course, but I strongly believe the few real "bad" transactions that gets blocked by the current system are a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of people deprived of access to the system and the millions of others who are included but seriously limited in what they are "allowed" to do on it.

Except that, as we have seen, Bitcoin rarely is used for "we need financial freedom" activities and mostly for "buy into my Ponzi scheme" activities.

Someone could have constructed the crypto equivalent of PayPal. Someone still could and maybe right now is even better since the Ponzibros are getting hammered.

Unfortunately, nobody seems to be doing it. That speaks volumes.

You realize this article is about crypto payment processor SpankPay, right?

Which is not a third-party *required* to do this kind of transactions.

It is just a convenient way to convert the crypto to fiat that these processor handle for their customers. There are ways to handle this step without a third party (P2P exchanges are one).

Less convenient for sure, but ultimately if you care about your economical freedom you will adopt them... or you will live in a walled garden, at least as long as your activity fits the current agenda/policies of these intermediaries (and your government). As soon as you don't, you get kicked out/cut from the system, even if your activity is not illegal.

He's making a point about actual cryptocurrency and smart contracts, and you're trying to refute it by pointing out that the good qualities of crypto do not apply to a random private firm that happened to slap the word "crypto" on its elevator pitch. Many such cases! Someone explains that it's healthy to eat vegetables sometimes, and you respond, "Actually, yesterday I ate a pound of deep-fried broccoli covered in pure corn syrup, and I got diarrhea afterward."

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