> But what are they doing to actually prevent censorship?
Payment processing.
edit: I have to say that I'm finding the replies unintelligible. The largest payment processors are banning organizations from receiving payments. This organization claims that they will not do that. Would that destroy censorship in the world, or keep Visa and Mastercard from banning people (or banning Parallel Economy themselves?) No. Does it stop censorship at your local high school paper? Also no.
Yes, that's what the site says. But they're presumably not running a settlement network from top to bottom, so it's perfectly reasonable to ask what they're doing different from every single other payment processor (or middleman, or reseller, or...).
In other words: is the "censorship resistance" here just the pinky promise of someone who unironically writes a page like this[1]?
Isn't Parallel Economy basically positioning itself as an alternative to Paypal? Not a "full stack" solution, at least not yet, but nonetheless a workaround if Paypal locks you out.
It can be grift and censorship resistant at the same time. The free market embraces not only JIT, but many other distressing tactics that only just work.
I suspect, if they can stay ahead of the regulators, we'll be looking back at services like this in 20 years and note:
1. Riddled with scams and fraud.
2. Better overall results than the well regulated banks. The banks tend to rely on regular bailouts to maintain the illusion of competence, and don't fund a lot of ideas that would be good.
Pretty much any assurance you have anywhere: the people doing the work. Theoretically, that is. I'd have to know the actual people before making a realistic determination as to whether they're not part of the same ilk as those whom they claim to oppose.
As we see in any of the social media platforms with things like selective enforcement of rules: people are policy.
We are starting with payment processing. And keep building. We took on big tech and it was us who made Parler the most downloaded app in the world. Unfortunately we did not control Parler. We took on big tech and the success we had was unprecedented. We are back and we continue to take on all entities that want to abridge your freedoms.
It is pretty easy to assume that the "freedoms" they want to protect here is freedom to be a right-wing racist Q-nut.
The difference is that radical left-wingers usually want better wages, free, universal health care, free education, a solution to climate change, gun control, equal chances. Some of them also advocate for a societal transition to veganism, banning cars, and universal basic income. Radical left-wingers tend to reject political and business elites. They tend to reject religion.
The radical right-wingers are white supremacists frequently committing acts of domestic terrorism. They are hostile toward education and science. They support a free market with trickle-down economics and no regulations. They worship oligarchs, hoping to become like them. They regularly call for normalcy and the sanctity of the family unit, but they also think that women don't deserve rights, because they are thin-skinned and can't stand to lose any of their privilege. They call everyone snowflakes, sheeps and cucks, which is exactly who they are. They love watching oligarchs living it up on their dime. Most of their idols are scam artists preying on their fears.
To be fair most of us feels that way. Take a peek at Fox News, or Truth Social and Parler, or just look up what Trump, DeSantis or Abbott is doing these days. You tell me if it's a parody or not.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be snarky - much of your comment read to me like a mockery of the hateful things CNN and MSNBC say all day, combined with many of the very things conservatives are posting about the left, with a mix of manic Fox News in between. It felt like it was intentionally hyperbolic in a sort of highbrow parody sort of way.
If you do believe all of that in your comment, then I wonder if you’re victim to hateful disinformation intentionally meant to make it ok to censor, excommunicate, and violently attack a group of people with whom you would otherwise have minor policy disagreements.
Ironically, proving the need for “the other side” to have a parallel economy in the first place.
It’s mostly too bad because, if you believe all the things you said about desiring better education, better healthcare, higher wages being good; and that sexism, racism, and acceptance of business and political elites is bad, then you have a lot more in common with people on the right than you think, and are likely not seeing some aspects of the extremism on the left. (But not your fault - a function of the disinformation).
It’s too bad, because the extremists on both sides are also far more alike than they are different, and they are empowered when we’re against each other.
Not to say there aren’t elements of truth in your comment, too.
The funny thing about having a huge industry of hyper partisan right and left wing cable news and publications pumping out hateful caricatures all day, is that at some point it becomes somewhat self-fulfilling. A feature, not a bug, to be sure.
There is such a thing as facts and truth. Yes, the partisanship is unfortunate, but it happens. It happened back in 1939 too, and there was a right side back then too. It wasn't flawless by any measure, it was just better than the other side.
The worst example of left-wing extremism you can find is the BLM protests, and as unfortunately as they unfolded the griveances there were not unfounded. The American police is largely unaccountable, corrupt and infiltrated with white supremacists. Antifa itself is often discredited, but it's a response to the rise of far-right extremism. The difference is that antifa is not a major domestic terrorism risk.
Do I have to cite the worst examples of right-wing extremism? Between Trump's criminal conduct and messages and the Capitol attack there is an entire culture and media of political violence, culminating in several mass shootings, cults like QAnon and several militias. Right-wingers live in a bubble of paranoia and victim mentality. They contested the result of the last election violently. They've built a cult of personality around their leader, who must never be questioned.
Most scholars don't think there is an equivalence here, and I don't either. I'm not even a left-winger or whatever, I have my own thing, but they are not equivalent, and when I have to choose the choice is obvious.
I’m sure being extremely condescending and dismissive works wonders for turning people towards your politics. That’s basically the left winger stereotype response to everything (that plus “just trust the science”).
Another stereotype of left-wingers is conveniently ignoring facts and truth as soon as it becomes uncomfortable and challenges their narratives.
Your tolerance for ‘facts’ is more see-through than a pane glass window, and this cognitive dissonance is exactly what drives people to the right. Just look at Sweden
Thanks for the respectful and concise response, please excuse the wall of text below. Brevity isn't my strong suit. :)
> Antifa itself is often discredited, but it's a response to the rise of far-right extremism.
And the right wing extremism is a response to the rise of left wing extremism. I could rebut the right wing extremism with reasons why it is a response to grievances that are not unfounded. I could cite the worst examples of racism, bigotry and violence on the left, and use that to justify measures that would silence anyone with left wing ideas.
Then, ultimately, you'd reply with why the bad things on the right are worse or less justified and the bad things on the left are more justified, and before you know it, both of us are in deep justifying extremists that (presumably) neither of us agree with, really.
> I'm not even a left-winger or whatever, I have my own thing
I don't identify as a left- or right- winger either, I have my own things that don't fit any mold. So, the real question for me isn't which side is more justified or more of a threat to the other, but rather - how is it that you and I find ourselves arguing on behalf of not just political parties, but the extremists in them. How is it each of us is relatively blind to the extremism on one side, but hyper aware of the other's?
George Floyd was a defining moment for me. For the first time in a long time, both left and right saw the same video, the same way. Some on the right would qualify their anger with "maybe there's an explanation", but few disagreed that the scene was unjust, and deeply disturbing. For the first time, we had a semblance of unity. Even some Fox News hosts condemned it. The right started to see the police problem for what it is.
So what happened? People wanted to help. They wanted to donate, and march in solidarity.
Cancel culture came for anyone who wanted to donate but questioned whether the official face of the protests, BLM (the organization) was the best place for corporations to be sending money in lieu of other efforts (and rightfully so).
Then riots happened. Groups of (often very white, very male, non-local) people started burning things down, destroying and looting buildings.
So where did that come from? From the peaceful protesters on the right who joined the left in solidarity? No.
Did it come from the peaceful protesters on the left? No.
People were angry, but they did not march down city blocks to burn down the very communities they were supposedly supporting.
But very quickly, the solidarity turned into Fox News saying "this is who the left is" and CNN saying "show me where protests are supposed to be peaceful". Before you know it, extremists successfully hijacked a positive movement and turned it against the very thing the movement was for. And the best part - those extremists are now defended by a population that doesn't even agree with their violence.
So where's the outrage from the peaceful protesters, against the extremists like Antifa who hijacked a peaceful movement? Well, it's there. In plain sight. MANY people who marched in those protests feel hurt and betrayed, but not just by Antifa - by the media and politicians, who STILL haven't even asked them what happened, or how they feel about it. The only way you would know they even exist is if you know them and speak to them personally (as I have).
Now, those peaceful protesters get to be pawns used in Fox News montages lumping them in with Antifa, and they get to be entirely ignored by CNN and MSNBC that spend more time covering up or justifying the violence than they do talking to anyone who was betrayed by it.
And that's the pattern. It repeated on the other side with the 2020 election protests, and it will repeat again, with one side or the other, sometime soon I'm sure.
There's a fray in this country that we're all unwittingly part of. Don't know who's doing it or why just yet, but it's there. And it's so hard to see the fray when you're in it, and it's even harder to pull yourself out of it, but pull ourselves out we must.
This sets of my grift alarms: there's no virtually no explanation of what makes it "censorship-resistant," but lots of heavy-handed references to authoritarianism, etc.
There continues to be good money in playing the middleman, I suppose.
> there's no virtually no explanation of what makes it "censorship-resistant,"
As far as I can tell, what is meant to make them censorship-resistant is that they claim they will not drop customers based on pressure from censors. They're selling that resistance to censors as "censorship-resistance."
If removing an organization's ability to accept and send payments due to their entirely legal messaging isn't censorship, I'd like to see what is. If this organization is on the level, it would be a godsend for Palestinian or Yemeni charity organizations, who are constantly getting their payments screwed with and their accounts closed.
Palestinians are cancel culture victim #1, and the only reason anyone has ever heard of Bari Weiss is that she was a college campus cancel culture warrior.
> If removing an organization's ability to accept and send payments due to their entirely legal messaging isn't censorship, I'd like to see what is.
You know what I'm going to say here: if it's a private company, they get to choose (modulo illegal discrimination) who they do business with. That doesn't make it right, but it doesn't make it censorship either.
Palestine deserves international recognition and their natural right to self-determination; they don't deserve a grift-driven cashout operation run by conspiracy theorists. The latter won't help them much, either.
If you really want censorship resistant payment processing you should not use some central custodial service extracting an obscene rent.
By comparison, Ethereum is highly censorship resistant and its fees are relatively low right now, about 30¢ to transfer ETH and have it settle in ~30 seconds[1].
I don't understand what they do to prevent the things they rant about. It's like the drunk uncle payment processor. Sure there are legitimate grievances to address with the current state of freedom of speech etc, but it is clear the owners are into far right conspiracies.
Well if i understand correctly those are the people that got denied service in the first place. So since having a truly neutral payment processor is not an option having an alternative at the opposite side only brings more 'freedom' to the market.
There's a pretty wide range of issues that Stripe/Paypal won't take payments for but Visa/MasterCard will.
It may turn out to be a marketing gimmick but it seems to me like there's a niche for a high risk payment processor that focuses on the perceived risk of being "cancelled" as the risk they help manage. How they'll deal with all the other issues a high-risk processor has to handle is something I'm curious about.
That's a good company name. The broader the cancellations, the broader the emerging parallel economy. Every case of a corporation refusing a customer is an opportunity for another to accept. In a relatively free market you don't extinguish a sector by dividing it; that just generates targetted support.
Media is dividing along partisan lines and apparently payment processing is too. What else? How broad will the parallelism will become?
Companies like PayPal may incubate potential competitors in this way. PayPal is somewhat handicapping itself by accepting a smaller market, as if they had decided to cancel a particular race if that were legal.
These alternatives are not very popular, and once they try to scale they face the same problems their popular brethren does. PayPal sucks, but it's also somewhat works for half a billion people.
we're going to have a red internet and blue internet pretty soon as various service providers begin to take sides. It will be interesting if the owners of fiber/copper in the ground and on poles begin to take sides as well. Same goes for peering providers...
On the flip side, every time I hear about some right wing nut getting deplatformed by paypal, I think to myself, "hey their service isnt as bad as I thought." Virtue signaling might bring them more business then they lose by tossing out a small number of fringe wackos.
From your comments throughout this thread it seems as though you are either confident that your personal convictions will remain within the overton window in perpetuity or you lack the ability to imagine that one day they may not. Not to mention some of your convictions may have been outside the overton window in recent history. In a world where cash can be refused by businesses and governments can ban physical interaction, the ability to conduct digital commerce (and speech) must not be frustrated regardless of its general unsavoriness. The fact that we as a society have allowed a small cabal of payment processors to collude on who is allowed to conduct online commerce is a tragedy.
This is an extremely self-serving and deceptive quote from Niemöller, and its life is due to the fact that it works as poetry. The fact is that he cheered them on when they came for the socialists and the trades unionists. He only tacitly supported the rounding up of German Jews because, and I have to paraphrase here, he thought the Jews were "too smart" to "force" Hitler to kill them, and would just leave.
His mistake was his belief that the Nazis were good Lutherans rather than Jungian Hindu UFO mystics.
The words are powerful and iconic. From the linked page:
"Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a prominent Lutheran pastor in Germany. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he sympathized with many Nazi ideas and supported radically right-wing political movements. But after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Niemöller became an outspoken critic of Hitler’s interference in the Protestant Church. He spent the last eight years of Nazi rule, from 1937 to 1945, in Nazi prisons and concentration camps."
People here asking for disclosure: There’s no cryptographic assurance here, and you’re asking them to publicize their threat matrix. The threat matrix to individuals in typical corporate payment processor is guerilla and political. 1) groups like “Sleeping Giants” raising an unknowable mix of outrage pitchforks and bots, corporates foreclose and deplatform, 2) rules like “Op Chokepoint” wherein payment processors cut based on regulatory suasion from behind administrative veils. This group says they’re aware of these threats and will abide by the laws while at least not admitting guerrilla attacks.
No information on who the founders are and what their history is. I will never trust any institution that hides behind a business name when it comes to improving society. People behind the scenes need to be known and be held accountable to their creations.
Great work! If you could implement a payment flow where payouts could be made in Crypto, that would be awesome. It is very difficult getting paid for my software, and I’m just a little software developer in Canada.
I don’t understand how you manage to maintain merchant accounts with the credit card vendors. It seems likely that they’ll shut you down, as soon as someone tries to fund a peaceful protest that goes against the elite’s allowed belief matrix (like the Canadian Trucker’s Convoy)?
The Canada convoy protest was peaceful, except for the bribery, threats, assault, dangerous driving and setting a building on fire. That and the $6 billion economic loss, or the fact that nobody wanted them there, or that the protesters were protesting the COVID-19 vaccination mandate. And if that's not enough the whole thing was funded from the United States by Donald Trump donors and an American billionaire called Thomas Sieber.
>was peaceful, except for the bribery, threats, assault, dangerous driving and setting a building on fire. That and the $6 billion economic loss, or the fact that nobody wanted them there
Many of these points applies to BLM protests. Should those organizers be booted from the financial system as well?
>or the fact that nobody wanted them there, or that the protesters were protesting the COVID-19 vaccination mandate
should this be a factor in determining the acceptability of a protest? Can you do it in a principled way that doesn't simply boil down to "if it's for a Just Cause then you can do whatever you want"? Finally, what does this mean for past movements which were also super unpopular? LGBT rights protests come to mind.
Yes. However much I support the ideals behind any given movement, I strongly believe that after you cross a critical threshold, let us call it the "setting things on fire line" you should stop being able to get paid through the banking system.
This is hard to believe since there were conflicts between the protesters and the residents, who didn't feel safe. There was a heightened lack of security, a sense of lawlessness during this time. The Ottawa Police Service was unprepared and couldn't respond. It's questionable if someone would have lighted the fire under other circumstances, plus one of the resident Matias Muñoz said that another resident came into the hallway and asked the men what they were doing and they admitted to being part of the trucker protest. The police obviously had an interest in calling the event unaffiliated, obviously the arsonists themselves weren't interested in telling otherwise, although one of them later went back to put out the fire. The residents think that they only did it because they were dumb and looked dumb.
It’s difficult to respond to such a deeply distorted perception of reality, but I’ll try.
The millions of people who supported this strong and effective display of resolve value their liberty so deeply that those subject to the “totalitarian impulse” are unable to comprehend it.
The unprecedented measures of “group punishment” deployed to stop it were stunning in their overreach, and have re-set the assumptions of compliance with government and police for millions of citizens.
You have absolutely NO comprehension of the beast you’ve unleashed.
What about the tens of millions of people who actively fucking hated it for being the cesspool of anti-rational, ethno-nationalist, nazi-enabling degeneracy it truly was?
Seems to me the folks in the fringe minority (as the convoy types are) are the ones with a "Distorted" perception of reality.
anti-rational? There is no risk in forced medical intervention on a global scale?
ethno-nationalist? Do you know who drives trucks here?
nazi-enabling? Wut?
fringe minority? Hundreds of thousands of families directly supporting with presence, materiel and finances in the face of threats from the highest levels of government, law-enforcement and (unified) media?
This example of a very, very commonly recited trope appears bizarre, when confronted by the reality of what actually happened, as observed by the people who were there, across the nation of Canada. But, since this support was conspicuously unreported in the media, how would people actually know how bizarre, how divorced from reality, it is?
The "Freedumb" Convoy "Protest" had Nazis in it, therefore it was a Nazi "Protest." The second they didn't kick out the dudes waving Nazi flags they lost any credibility they claimed to have.
And for the record the Freedumb Convoy was reviled by VAST majority of Canadians who saw it as the Nazi-enabling, grift-funded, reality-denying, anti-rational cesspool it truly was.
I look forward to this "economy" stabilizing in the same way that Truth Social or Parler did - at about a tenth of the scale of their competition. Happy to let the pill-sellers and woke-fearers spend their money in their own little walled garden, well away from where I every have to hear about it (or be advertised to).
Ya, this is pretty much how I felt about the whole Ivermectin thing. Who am I to tell someone not to take horse de-wormer, when I also advocate for the freedom to take psychedelics? If someone _really_ wants to make sure they dont have horse heart worms, I dont see how they're hurting anyone else (besides being a disease vector, but thats not going to get worse).
Same. It's dangerous to tell people that it does stuff that it doesn't do (more dangerous as an audience grows to the point that anecdotal data should be left out entirely, for audiences of an appropriate size), but as long as you're just doing you, have at it. But then, I'm that way about pretty much everything, including rat poison. Do what you're gonna do to yourself, just don't make it other people's problem (note that suicide is almost universally going to be someone else's problem, so that's not an endorsement of taking rat poison).
In addition to veterinary applications in horses, Ivermectin is approved for human use and is a powerful anti-viral that is effective against "wide range of RNA and DNA viruses, for example, dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and others"[1].
There is, to date, no evidence that it is effective as a treatment for the Covid-19 variants. However, it's certainly harmful to post in a public forum that it's just "horse de-wormer", which could lead patients to reject approved treatment for these other diseases.
> at about a tenth of the scale of their competition.
I wish they were all at that scale, instead of being part of oligopolies/monopolies that depend on the silence/support of government to maintain that position.
Competition is great, and you'll never see me use PayPal for personal concerns over their own anti-consumer practices, but I don't see any particular value in introducing side-shows to the event.
Stripe was a real contender for PayPal because it was playing the same game. Now they actually compete. Introducing a "competitor" that is promising to NOT play the same game just means that it's a novelty. There is value in it, but it isn't going to change the monopolistic landscape because the powers that control that sector got that way by survival of the fittest. Disruption has to prove that the fitness test was invalid. And, in money, that's a LOOOOONG history of fitness testing. The financial industry is the "theory of evolution" of the business world. Its machinations are rock-solid, as far as anyone is concerned.
And, to be clear, that's not to say that they don't evolve. It's been a VERY recent trend for financial institutions to deal in social responsiveness as a metric for financial success. The whole "ESG" framework wasn't thought up by controlling parties, it was DEDUCED by analysts and bureaucrats watching market trends as the world changed. And this type of evolution is WHY finances are so rock solid - finances offer the most auditable ledger humans have ever created. We can run data analytics on finances for the rest of eternity and get amazingly predictive results.
So yeah - when other parties show up to the plate, offering to either disrupt the status quo based on solid analytical data, or to throw their own weight around (wherever it came from) within the status quo - I'll be 100% on board. But there's nothing I find substantial about a company that is pretending that eschewing the ESG methodology will make them competitive. Happy to invest some interest if they start making some headway, but until then it's just another tantrum thrown by people who are mad that they can't make money and say they hate people at the same time.
But I will at least commiserate that we deserve better than our monopolistic overlords. I'm hoping there are more people willing to play the game in our favor (rather than for the interests of the money class), even though that isn't immediately and overwhelmingly profitable.
Of course there are. Like I said, Stripe was competition. It wasn't a side-show because it didn't try to change the game without solid analytical data; instead it just played the same game and tried different methods of achieving the same goals. That's competition: We're both trying to get to the same place, and we're doing it differently.
But, again, I don't see the linked site as doing that. Instead, it's trying to say that it can achieve the same goals by playing an entirely different game. And that's fine, if they can back it up. But everything that does that is a side-show until they do.
A grocery store isn't competition to Wal-Mart or Amazon. If they want to be, they have to tackle the scale of supply and demand that those monopolists do. If they say "we're doing exactly what they did, just cheaper", that's competition. If they say "we're doing exactly what they did, but we have this localized scheme for deliveries that will save us a ton of money", THAT'S competition (assuming some evidence it's true).
If they say "we're going to do something entirely different, and here's a bunch of convincing data to say why that would work, or work better", that is, once again, competition.
But if your grocery store says "we're going to do it completely differently, because we are aggrieved!", that is a side-show. There's nothing there to engender confidence. If the store says "we're going to do it completely differently, by doing it backwards because that SHOULD work out better", that is another example of a side-show.
The salient bit being that it MIGHT work. That's what's great about capitalism. But you'll forgive me if I don't get too particularly enthused about yet another right-wing think-tank pivoting into new ways for people to invest a ton of money before they agonizingly drag out their corporate demise, insisting that they are doing "fine", the whole time. It's not myopic or short-sighted to contextualize real patterns that you've observed into actionable investment or divestment of interest.
> invest a ton of money before they agonizingly drag out their corporate demise
What is so challenging about the business that they're going into other than the fact that they will be under constant attack by censors and monopolists? They seem to be safe as houses otherwise, considering that they're requiring TINs and EINs from business customers, and W-9s and SSNs from individuals.
The people who operate the site are who I'm talking about.
And the challenges for the business they're entering in to are scale and compliance. It's pretty wild, to me, to see how many people have to learn this lesson OVER and OVER and OVER again, but it turns out - you can't do ANYTHING alone. No person is an island. If you think you can go it alone, you are simply forgetting the things that got you where you are. And all of that is doubly true in finance where the entire industry is predicated on interoperability. They are trying to do away with all of that and say "I alone can save you". They want you to build an entirely distinct economy, with them, because they can't play well with the existing economy. That's the whole game: "I'll build my own economy. With blackjack! And hookers!"
They're saying they want everyone to be able to freely trade, but they're building a separate economy, cutting out the existing financial institutions that don't sign on to their libertarian ideas of a healthy economy. It's a roundabout way of exclusion, but exclusion is the only play they've ever known.
And you wonder what the challenges are, of building and maintaining your own sub-economy? I mean, it seems pretty obvious, but if you're really curious, just pay attention to this group. You'll see the challenges play out in real time and, most likely, overcome them.
When a company's raison d'etre is mostly political, it makes me wonder if they are substituting a political stance in the place of technical competency. Payment processing seems like a high competency requirement field, from the outside at least.
I believe this is Dan Bongino's company (or he's heavily involved). IIRC he started it when Parler was booted off of Apple/Amazon, removing their income.
In other news, I had trouble finding a crypto payments processor for my small business. Coinbase commerce and OpenNode required so much documentation that it might take me days to assemble to required documents, and BitPay has my account stuck on verification for weeks. Any recommendations? I would love to accept crypto payments but cannot believe how hard it is to onboard a processor.
I literally don't know anything about this topic and the only reason why I know it exists is because I once looked for an example of crypto payment accepting merchants is that I went on serverhunt but, uh, have you tried Coingate?
I don't know if they are trying to grab porn money while pretending to grab right-wing money or something else is going on. But I do know that there is nothing on their site that implies they do anything NEW or DIFFERENT. So not sure how they plan to get around visa/mastercard banning them.
Submitted this, never heard of it before today. My big question is whether they'll accept Trans Communists With Guns Anti-TERF Squad, LLC as customers, or if it's a stunt.
That depends on whether Paypal or other major payment processors are dropping people for their political or social opinions. If they're not, the fear of people who share those political or social opinions of having their payments cut off is not justified. If they are, the fear of people who share those political or social opinions is justified.
Maybe, but my editorializing is not relevant to the point? Whatever you call it, they're selling THAT, rather than technical services. But, to be blunt: that site is not "recognizing" anything. As ameister14 pointed out - they are offering affirmation.
But what are they doing to actually prevent censorship?
This feels like an excuse to capitalize on the politically charged term of “cancel culture”.
My grift alert is blaring.