Over here (Belgium) we have legalized prostitution, but it's very hard for sex workers to open a bank account. There's some legislation that forces banks to offer them a basic bank account (at a steep fee) if they can prove that they've been rejected by N banks. Which is a start, I suppose.
Banks have basically become an extension of law enforcement, tax collectors, anti-terrorist operations, and morality police. Which is ironic, given how many banks brazenly break laws on the regular, how absolutely depraved parties with bankers are, etc. They're hardly paragons of virtue. Yet they get to gatekeep "virtue".
What with all the attention they have to put into cooperating with the authoritarians they also aren't particularly good at their theoretical purpose, which is pooling people's money and investing it productively. We're watching an ongoing capital crisis in the West where we've been out-invested by nominal communists; it is absurd. The banking system has sticky fingers all over that mess. Then they get political protection through financial crisises where they should be taken out by bankruptcy but the powers that be prioritise having reliable people in what is effectively law enforcement rather then putting good capital managers in charge.
So, y'know. Upside is the banks do a great job of shutting down sex workers and political activism. 10/10 mark for reporting what everyone is doing to law enforcement. Downside is that turns out to be a big distraction from all the wealth creation banking can enable.
Not ironic at all. This is the design.
If legal, then why do banks have a problem offering an account. No risk of a bad actor, because it is legal.
It would be like a small business or contractor.
Well, hopefully.
But if I, as a donator, donate money to someone using your service, and you then don't give that money to its intended recipient, you've effectively defrauded me. Had you said in advance "I can't do that, because you're trying to give me money to $foo which I don't support", then that is your right as a business.
Frankly, it's none of my state's damn business who I exchange money with. Their beef with other states is their problem—why are they dragging us through their bullshit?
If they want to collect taxes on it, at least that has the veneer of doing their job properly, and I'm happy to pay it.
Btw, crypto (like bitcoin) is only an alternative because of convention.
The complete history of bitcoins is globally trackable, and people could all decide that they'll pay more for bitcoins that came from Satoshi's initial hoard, or that they'll refuse to accept bitcoins that were ever seized by the FBI.
(Yes, there are mixers. But you'd just refuse to accept any bitcoin that took part in the mixer transaction, if any FBI coins were in there.)
Not long ago we lived in a world where currency from anywhere other than the nation you were in (or maybe somewhere close by) was impractical to use on a daily basis. Things have changed now and the government's use of money as a tool to keep control of citizens is loosening. For better and worse.
The primary purpose of a bank is to issue debt. That’s why they were created. A bank has to be able to “print” money to issue debt. This isn’t a flaw as some crypto fans like to think, it’s a very important feature. Debt issued by banks replaced the informal promise-based debt people used before we had banks. You didn’t need money on hand, or to borrow some coins from some rich dude, to get help building a barn. You got help from people in the village in exchange for some other goods or service you’d provide them in the future. Bank issued debt with “printed” money is the replacement to that, and it only works if money can be created on demand.
Crypto can’t “print” money on demand, by design. So it can’t replace banks.
If BuyMeACoffee was run like a dark web drug marketplace, it could support every country.
Also, 100% dystopia is still worse than a "most part" one
EU: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
I no longer believe that "sunlight is the best disinfectant", and haven't for a long time now.
This stuff is very common for "second-class" countries. It's happening all the time with all kinds of services. Most of them just don't want to be bothered (spend resources on) with figuring out how to work with those countries. I guess the payment systems provide convenient frameworks for them via which they do money related stuff. If there's no easy way to reproduce something in several unfortunate countries that was super easy to achieve in developed countries, then it's not worth it. The profits there are not gonna meet the expectations in relation to the spendings.
So while these are really shitty situations for people from those countries, these decisions are dictated by the market. And I don't think this is gonna change.
But one of the great points in the article is that services should be very clear, up to date and explicit about their policies.
And is been nearly a year since the events described in the blog : HAS a new company popped up ?
As for the supply, money will always find a way. Crypto, shady banks etc.
I think the established businesses which are common to EU and US people just don't want to deal with the government. It's easier for them to comply in a preventive way. Many immigrants in the EU face issues with banks (virtual and real) blocking or not willing to open accounts. Just to be safe.
I've had YCombinator funded leading Payment Gateways in India asking me to remove links to Hacker News claiming it to be 'redirection' or thinking I'm some kind of "Hacker man" for having the text "Hacker".
I've had trouble enabling subscription payments because I'm a govt. registered self-proprietor and these Payment Gateways decided they will support subscription payments only for Companies.
In fact I've become so versed in hopping between different payment gateways that I'm now building a self-hosted FOSS payment host[1] with support for all major payment gateways so people can have better control over their payments.
In regards to the fact they pulled out of countries that are hard to operate in, yeah it’s annoying but you know, can you blame them?
They were told that the US payments company couldn't send the money to their primary email address as (for vanity reasons) they have a .by domain from Belorussia. (They are a UK citizen living in the UK)
Off-topic, but I believe that might be interesting to some readers: FYI Belorussia is a non-state. That’s how Russians call Belarus.
Belarus is the official and correct name, the origins are from Rus. The medieval country, that was on the territories of modern day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus. Russia stole that name (Rus’ or Ruthenia), just recently — in the historical terms — a couple of hundred years ago. Their country was named Muscovy. About that time they invented their artificial language, which is mostly stolen from Belarus and Ukraine. During the occupation (1918—1991) period, they did their best to eliminate their (Belarus, Ukraine, but also all the other nations they enslaved) culture, language, most prominent people. The word to search for is genocide, if you feel like willing to explore this topic more. Belarus is still de-facto occupied by Russia, never recovering from Russia‘s barbarity of XX century, that’s why it’s a pathetic pro-Russian country now.
Ukraine too was under huge Russian influence since 1991, and technically only since 2014 (the revolution of dignity, Russia seized Crimea) they do fight for their independence. In fact, current war is the independence war for Ukraine. If they won, they’re just another thriving European (EU) democratic state. If they to lose, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland are the next in line. And Ukrainian people would be forced to fight for Russia.
Modern Russia in its current form cannot exist without Ukraine. Without Ukraine, there’s no Russian empire, there’s no USSR. That’s why Russia tries so badly to occupy Ukraine and name it Russia. Without them, Russia is just two cities, Moscow and St Petersburg. That’s why they desperately call them brotherly nations, Ukraine and Belarus. (And some other neighbouring states too.)
During the XX century, Russia invented derogatory names for all the countries they enslaved. That makes Belorussia or Byelorussia (notice Russia, not Rus, which is completely different country, despite Russia trying to claim the name). Also, the names are ‘on the Ukraine’ (Ukraine has no ‘the’ article, and is ‘in Ukraine’), that way they try to mock the name into the name Periphery (this word sounds very similar to Ukraine in Russian language), that way they present Ukraine as some distant and rural periphery, while Russia itself is a periphery. (Basically everything Russia claims of others, is actually about them and about what they do to others. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror for that)
Also, derogatory term for Baltic states is Pribaltics (in the same fashion to Ukraine, making it rather a territory), and also I know of Moldova, they call it Moldavia. And Turkmenistan, they call it Turkmenia (in the same fashion). Maybe there are other countries, but I’m unaware of them, since I haven’t been there. Russians claim that innocently, that that’s _just_ their language, that’s how they _always_ named these countries. So yeah, technically, we cannot tell other nations how they should name our countries. Except when we actually can. Recently (after 2020) some countries (I’m aware of Germany) renamed Belarus from being literally White Russia, to Belarus. Which historically can be translated as White Rusyns, but not White Russians, because Russia never existed by that point in history. Also see Turkey becoming Türkiye. It’s very similar thing, as far as I’m aware, and I believe calling them after the bird is disrespectful. Especially when they explicitly asked how they want their country to be called.
Hope that’ll help someone who is unaware why some people call these countries wrong names. I’m not giving links, because everything I wrote is very easily searchable and makes sense only for those who are far from Europe and the context to understand and/or care.
Apologies if I got the name wrong. Belarus/Belorussia/Byelorussia - I wasn't aware there was a difference. Thanks for the info.
I regard all FinTech-type companies as unreliable, after incredible (in the literal sense of the word) experiences with Revolut (seven years to get an account closed and the money in it returned, and that actually happened only after I made a GDPR request, and they got it done - seems its less work for them to close than meet the request) and Transferwise (who shortly after the UA war started, blocked donations to the UA State bank military support account - yes, really, if you didn't know).
By all means have an account with them, but never, ever, ever, rely on it, and plan on the basis that the next morning you wake up to find the account, and everything in it, has gone, and that customer support is a defensive shield the company uses to keep customers at arms length.
If you want almost no-cost currency conversion (2 USD minimum, but you have to convert like 100k USD I think it is to go above that), use Interactive Brokers LLC. They won't let you have an account purely for currency conversion, but as long as you do a few trades now and then, it seems fine.
They're just like traditional companies, but with much less oversight, attention to regulation and transparency.
At the beginning there is plenty of support channels, but that's because of marketing and because there's investor money. But as soon as the money gets tight, people start suggesting dark patterns and everything becomes "you must contact us to do X".
Not only that but there is way less auditing, as technical auditors that deal with fintechs aren't really ready to deal with anything made after 1990. That's you, Deloitte.
Also regarding security, what I saw in practice was that everyone has access to absolutely everything and could do anything. Everyone but the lowest support people can transfer money from anywhere to everywhere, change passwords, view and edit personal information, collect private data. Customer personal data is sent around in Excel files in email like it's candy. There was SO MUCH logging that seeing suspicious employee activity was basically impossible without having a complaint from the customer itself and a thorough investigation (which rarely happened).
Also: AI and Data Science are mostly people running one or two queries per week in the production DB, exporting to CSV and calling it a day.
And I don't want to dox myself but: a popular German FinTech with "AI" in its name has way less automation than a 5 person startup. Every single operation is triggered manually and is super error prone. And such operations involve 20, 30 records, when there are 10 million in the database.
Recently there was allegedly a kerfuffle with a german Fintech bank banning hundreds of users because of suspicion that they had gang relations. Well guess why.
Maybe their Cobol programmers are too busy writing an all caps function for a month, instead of providing forms to their employees or customers with default values already configured to shorten each process's cycle.
I wish I'd known this four years ago. I had US$2000 to send from US to Canada and the cheapest method (~$50) I found was, to my surprise, to send BTC within Coinbase (the recipient was another Coinbase user).
Oh wow. Well, at least donations to NGOs / individuals seem to work.
Agreed, IBKR are a nice bunch. I wouldn’t rely on them either, but it’s always better to have more options, in case everything else fails. And of course, when banks can block your accounts at any moment just because they don’t like your passport, crypto is king.
In the end poor peasants shouting "crypto is king" are the ones owned from both sides. They are used for profit by their local oppressors/gangs and by western cryptobros. The peasants transactions are the rounding error but they are the ones who allow to pretend it's "freedom"
Please allow me to disagree (not really but yes). In the same spirit that some (fin-tech) companies prefer to _not_ do business with certain industries (e.g. porn) or countries (e.g. North Korea) for a wide variety of reason, doesn't make them unreliable. Makes them exactly what they are.
I am not trying to equate "access to my money" with "my favourite soft-drink is discontinued" because they have a very different impact to one's life (paying rent/mortgage/bills money vs sugar). I do understand though (I was working in a dairy company many-many years ago), that "we pulled this product because it costs X and makes 2x while product Z makes 5x, so bye-bye". In the same spirit many companies have profit margin requirements and they won't keep 'a service offering' that makes 'just a little'.
The web-pages to upload identity documents did not work; the process would get so far, then just stop working.
I contacted Support, Support were unable to grasp the situation, let alone help.
I had 30 days before the account would be terminated for not uploading documents.
A couple of days before that happened, I tried again, and now upload worked.
what was the “incredible experience” with Transferwise?
> the next morning you wake up to find the account, and everything in it, has gone
they’re all protected by the FCA via the FSCS scheme: https://www.fscs.org.uk/what-we-cover/
Which would help if Revolut went insolvent, which is not the case here.
Something like the underlying account(s) used by the FinTech are secured in this way, but your account with the FinTech is not.
This is why Revolut for example have accounts which are something like "vaults", which are in fact accounts which are covered, because they are actual accounts, one per person, with a normal bank.
That sounds incredible, it needs to be checked, about to leave the house so can't right now.
As long as UA authorities keep ignoring this problem, the situation will get worse.
Baltic states report a horrendous amount of phone scam coming from UA, no surprise Wise just does not want to deal with claims.
Tip for content creators: Please use services like https://UseCode.net to host all your sponsor/referral codes in one place, as this will be very helpful for users.
Remember all could not afford to pay a zillion content creators out there
Lawyering aside, really now? If someone holds money that should be mine with no way for me to get it out and me never getting a way to get it out, it’s not different to me no longer having that money. If the entire purpose of them having that money was for me to be able to get it out, it really feels a lot like theft.
It’s no different than you having money on your PayPal account, it getting suspended for some dumb reason and them just taking your money.
I have used Wise in the past to send money to some gaming friends abroad with weird banks, I really hope that it or some other option that supports as many countries as possible remains available.
I hate to sound like one of those “crypto bros” but I’ve also used BTC in the past for similar use cases and it’s refreshing, you just need to have an exchange available in a given country and also not store too much money in crypto due to the high volatility, unless that’s what you’re going for.
Not to badmouth some need for regulation or whatever is actually going on behind the scenes (assuming a charitable interpretation of whatever it is), but not being able to support a content creator or send pizza money to an acquaintance or whatever for reasons like that seems... dumb. Plus, a "proper" way to handle discontinuing the support for entire regions would be something along the lines of:
1. public announcement and timeline for upcoming changes
2. "Here's how you transfer out all of your money off of the platform before the change: ..." (with regular reminders)
3. "Here's how you migrate your follower base to another platform that supports your region: ..." (maybe a collab of some sort, at least offering each patron the ability to register on the new platform if they want to keep supporting the person)The card I mostly use for online impulses purchases is from a semi paranoid bank that turns down non 3d secure transactions by default. Sometimes they call you for confirmation.
Needless to say, that means no impulse purchases from Stripe using merchants. And no buying coffees for anyone.
Guess it's cheaper for me in the long run...
So someone like BackerKit just didn't bother catering to EU customers.
Plus I saw a chapter about "reducing friction" in the Stripe docs. Via such honest practices as charging automatically after a free trial if the customer has a credit card on file? This has been discussed on HN recently wrt to i-forget-what-service.
I suppose not requiring the extra 3d secure step is also "reducing friction".
I would be happier if this were configurable by the user, because I too would be happier if all my online payments required my second factor.
Yeah, my regular payments invoke 3d secure only ... randomly. I'm talking about new places (new to my card) here.
Maybe it's BackerKit's choice. I don't know.
Does a Stripe implementer have to do extra effort to have 3d secure?
1. Offer multiple choices for payment => people need to sift through to find what works for them and give up after first fail.
2. Use a payment [processor] aggregator => unreliable (as with this case) and takes a cut (sometimes chained).
3. Use crypto only => the only thing that works reliably, but severely cuts your audience to those comfortable with it.
This reminds me of something. Russian foreign reserves, perhaps? The irony.
If you are interested in building this, I have product and engineering experience
There is a reason why the system is as shit as it is.
My guess is buymeacoffee isn't the problem, but their payment provider. They maybe can't justify the resources to switch providers and so its easier/cheaper to just drop those countries.
If you can find a payment provider that will service a "buymeacoffee-like" business in the open countries, then I'd be interested.
Many of Telegram payment-related services use https://smart-glocal.com/, which is registered in Hong Kong (with a UK company handling EEA operations). They don’t say it on the website, but I believe they do work with Ukrainian (and apparently even Russian) citizens and can handle payouts there. (Note, however, that Smart Glocal is owned by a pro-Kremlin guy from Russia: https://en.zona.media/article/2022/08/08/premiumdonate-trl)
They get fixed instead!
Unfortunately, "things" begin nicely until it gains major attention. Then it loses most of the nice things.
It's not "fair", but people get pissed when you can compare before/after. And to a reason, it means some users relying on that support are now left SOL, when they could have made different choices if the service couldn't handle them from the start.
(I do realize you are specifically speaking of stablecoins but as far as I know they struggle from all of the typical problems you'd expect, just with a less volatile value.)
So I'd send crypto to your address, then you'd trade it for cash with your local exchange/dealer etc.
- Stablecoin as input adds a lot of friction on the donor with KYC again
Crypto is just massive overhead for everyone in its current state
Just use BTC if anything.
If $0.0001 in tainted funds can taint a wallet containing a billion dollars then everything will end up tainted immediately, whether a result of trolls or just funds being transferred by ordinary users in jurisdictions that don't enforce the same sanctions. But if nothing is tainted because everything is then the sanctions are meaningless because someone with sanctioned funds would just deposit them at a major exchange in a foreign jurisdiction and then withdraw them again as untainted funds.
Ukraine is on the one hand a fairly small market, on the other hand a very corrupt totalitarian country, where a huge part of the "donations" will be bribery, money laundering, fraud, buying illegal goods.
So, probably, the company simply decided that it was easier to abandon this market rather than to solve the potential problems.
>moral principle because I didn't want to potentially help launder money to revolting dictatorships.
It is quite applicable to Ukraine as well.
People are literally being grabbed off the street and sent to die in storm troop units. Massive corruption, the main method of protection of which is that those who fight against it (or all their male relatives) are simply sent to die.
But I think it's more about the legal problems created by a small, toxic market than about high moral standards.
Customers should also be allowed to expose shady stuff done by such private services, warning other people.
"It's a private service so they can do what they want" is missing the issue. Every private service in the jurisdiction is under the same legal constraints, so if the law is creating the incentive for them to screw their users, that is a problem with the law. Because then they all have the same incentive and converge on the same behavior and the usual defense to customer abuse by private companies -- switching to a competitor -- isn't available as a remedy.
I get the impression that those buttons don't exactly get many clicks anyway
BuyMeACoffee seems to be a service based on an extremely flawed premise: that of exchanging money for nothing tangible in return. That is normally known as a "donation", but this is not charitable giving; this is more like tipping. But even tipping is customarily associated with receiving some kind of service in the first place. This is more like tossing $2 bills at a stripper in a dark room, but 3,000 miles away.
Now most of these buttons were traditionally labeled "Buy Me a Beer" and I found them oftentimes on the web pages of starving F/OSS authors. The hackers would definitely be seeking to monetize their free and open-source software by any means necessary. It certainly stood to reason that they deserved a beer (or a coffee) for fixing bugs or simply providing a nice app to me that does something I want. Fair's fair. [Let's not forget that alcohol and caffeine are drugs, though!]
But essentially, if BuyMeACoffee is a payment platform that's disconnected from any tangible product or service being received, it could be warped to any use at all. Can I buy you a coffee if you show me one boob please? Can I buy you a coffee if you unalive my boss? Oh look, a package of (ammunition|fentanyl|CSAM) has arrived on our doorstep, let me buy you ten kilos of coffee to celebrate this unrelated event?
So I think that typically for capitalism to work, we should be scrupulous about correlating goods and services received to the monetary transactions we make for them. Or we should establish a good way to at least correlate a "creator" of software or content with the in-kind payments of "coffees" that they'll receive for actually doing work. Because if this is not properly regulated, we really do end up supporting a lot of shady stuff.
Who knows if we're buying coffee for terrorist cells or a human trafficking ring. I really feel like coffee money can be better spent on legitimate businesses with aboveboard ways of making transactions for tangible things. Sorry if I am being a real stick-in-the-mud about this, but this seems to be the main issue for regulators and law enforcement, and we need to admit that it's not an ideal way to do business.
Suppose there is an "artist" and you like their "art" and want to commission a piece. You send them money for "art", they email you some doodle or AI-generated image and simultaneously mail you some drugs.
Assigning the label "art" or "code" to the payment doesn't provide any information more than having no label whatsoever, because the label is a lie but the only way to prove the lie is to uncover what the transaction is actually for, which the existence of the fabricated label doesn't help you to do any more than having no label at all.
Establishing what a payment is actually for is not something the payments system is suited to do and attempting to use it for that causes only problems, because the honest users who put down something legitimate that makes the bank skittish are unjustly harmed, whereas the actual illicit users simply lie because there are several easy lies with no viable way to verify the contrary.
"BuyMeACoffee" appears to be a Patreon-like platform for "artists and creators". I would say it is more than a payment platform, because it is a marketplace and a venue for people to do business.
Now we have plenty of marketplaces, such as eBay, or Etsy or Amazon. These marketplaces have strict requirements on what vendors and customers can do and how they can transact business. If you went on Amazon and purchased art+drugs, that would quickly be shut down. It's also Amazon's responsibility. Now they are brokering those payments from customer to vendor but they are more than a payment platform, because they are hosting both parties.
BMAC is not merely, blindly transacting payments like Visa or Mastercard. They're providing a venue for stuff to be put out there. If they are collecting payments from fans and disbursing it to creators and artists, then I say that they have a responsibility to ensure no illicit activity goes on and people are getting what they paid for.
"Getting what you paid for" is obviously an extremely subjective thing when we're talking about electronic art or media, and especially when customers can buy "memberships" or send "tips" because now we're just funnelling money to a personality influencer who is into crowd-pleasing. And the opportunities are vast for organized crime and nation-state threat actor sort of activities when you scale that up and go crossing international borders with your service, wouldn't you agree?
In meatspace, you're going to have a comedy club or a concert venue, an art gallery, you know, someplace that showcases artists and may sell their work, or enable them to work for money. And any such venue will necessarily have controls that protect the customers, and protect the artists, and if there is money changing hands for illicit purposes, the venue is on the hook for this. Because they're doing the matchmaking.
And there are mainstream marketplaces that are doing this, but to do it large-scale and internationally is going to run up against legal and regulatory hurdles and it's not as simple as turning a blind eye.