Yes. But some countries includes the United States, and US states, and others. There is an established relation between the US government and payment processors to shut down activity the government doesn’t like but either can’t or hasn’t make illegal.

https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship

Cash. Buy things in person. Use bitcoin. Use AMEX. Save money.

So many options besides using Visa or Mastercard.

Remember when Paypal said they would straight up steal your money if they found social media posts they don’t like. Even if it’s on a platform they have nothing to do with?

This proof that the world needs more crypto.

I’ll tell you why. Government uses soft threats to encourage private business to censor things. I know some of you guys don’t like this side of this parallel story, but do you remember when the FBI was marking posts for twitter to take down as “misinformation,” and accounts to ban, that then was shown to not be misinformation, but rather just inconvenient for the current presidency in charge. Whether you like it or not, that happened, and it was wrong.

The legal code in the US is so large and companies engage in so much activity that it is impossible to run a 100% legal business. Companies instead run by an “ask forgiveness later” model. It’s the only one that can actually work in the US. But to be able to run that model you need the good graces of the government. The government can always decide to prosecute on an otherwise small matter instead of advise correction. So when it says jump companies do it.

There was a time when you could be banned off of twitter for saying factual things the FBI didn’t like. And it’s not like the FBI didn’t know better. We didn’t need independent verification of the Hunter Biden emails because we had confirmed cryptographic signatures on all of the emails. Journalists get a pass because they are technologically illiterate, but the FBI and Twitter sure didn’t. The FBI said “It looks like something Russia would hoax.” Sure. It does. But they didn’t because we have cryptographic signitures. Always did.

What’s crazy about this is that the supreme court ruled against this use of third parties. But the practice wasn’t new when it hit social media because it’s been a long practice with payment processors. So my question when that ruling came out was “what about the existing similar practice in payment processors.” Apparently the government and processors are still in cahoots in violation of that ruling. That relationship was actually started in an effort to crack down on bestiality porn, which is never the less legal in the US.

So the question is do you like to government directing third parties to censor?

https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship

Don’t you know you need self value from being a slave. Chase fake paper money like a good gerbil. Our slave morality tells us you are not a good person like us unless you do what we do.

It’s really a more general problem with Western culture around engineering. Restriction maximizing engineering makes the world shitty. Engineers think they have an obligation to make any product do the absolute minimum that stat still meet spec. That is not to reduce cost or design difficulty by coming in just at spec, but to actively try to make things as shitty as possible using significant effort to do so just so the thing can do only the minimum thing that can be said to do the thing at all. It actually takes effort to make this happen.

The end result really sucks. Because this is so costly and everything is layered maximal minimalism this means that if you want to scale anything up at all the cost to do so is insane if western engineers are involved. This is a significant reason why China gets the manufacturing work and western engineers don’t. They are yes men. Yes we can build that. And they have a network of yes men behind them that can help them execute on anything. And because they don’t waste time engineering restriction every product and sub-product is adaptable.

But the western engineer only knows one mode of thinking. “We need to isolate the regimes that this product may operate in.” Sometimes that’s true but it shouldn’t be everything we think about.