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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact.

When I was a 16-year-old, it would have been significantly easier for me to get a $200 home server than a $5 Digital Ocean VPS.

The online shopping service over here (Allegro, basically Amazon and eBay all in one) is perfectly happy to do pay-on-delivery for a small fee. You probably need to be 18 to sign up, but no Polish person ever actually cared about such restrictions and there's no age check.

On the other hand, cloud services require you to have a debit or credit card, which you can't get without an intervention from your parents if at all.

You can say lots of bad things about Bitcoin and crypto in general, but the youth rights angle can't be overemphasized enough.

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> You probably need to be 18 to sign up, but no Polish person ever actually cared about such restrictions and there's no age check.

You need to be 13.

>On the other hand, cloud services require you to have a debit or credit card, which you can't get without an intervention from your parents if at all.

With parental permission, a 13-year-old can open a free bank account with a debit card that works online. It's not a new thing, I had one 15 years ago.

> With parental permission

Back in the 90s I was a minor and doing similar things, I don't think I could have explained what I was doing to my parents. Even if I had the funds, they wouldn't believe it wasn't some scam or an illegitimate thing. I think teenagers who are tinkering don't always have buy-in or understating from their parents, so getting that kind of permission can be tough.

I think I didn't have a debit card until 18. Then I got old Unix boxes on eBay.

> With parental permission

Is the constraint the parent comment is referring to.

> You can say lots of bad things about Bitcoin and crypto in general, but the youth rights angle can't be overemphasized enough.

You're not in favor of parents controlling what their kids own?

I'm in favor of kids being able to do on the internet what they were already able to do in meatspace.

In the 80's, a kid of basically any age could go to see or rent a movie, buy a book, make purchases at a store, play an arcade game with their friends or throw some cash into a payphone and call anybody they liked, all without their parent's knowledge or permission. There were very specific things that have been decided as "age inappropriate" by a democratic process of law (although one that didn't include the kids itself), and those very specific things (like alcohol consumption or X-rated movies) were forbidden, everything else was fair game.

In the modern age, most of those things are done online, and most platforms require you to sign a contract to participate, which requires you to either be 13, 16 or 18, depending on platform and jurisdiction. Even if you get past that by lying about your age, you still need a payment method, which you can't easily get without explicit parental permission. There are exceptions, some platforms support gift cards that you can get over-the-counter, without any form of ID, but the point still stands.

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