What if you woke up tomorrow and completely lost access to your bank account, credit cards, PayPal, and Venmo, all because of something you posted online?

Remember that there exist alternatives to the big three US payment processors.

China's UnionPay is pretty much global now, one can open a bank account remotely in Hong Kong or Singapore and go through UnionPay.

Russia's Mir is the answer to the current geopolitical situation and the country being cut off from SWIFT, they are backed by UnionPay and are accepted all over Asia, Africa and increasingly in Latin America, many local banks in these parts will give you a card with Mir if you request it.

India's UPI is also gaining traction in the subcontinent, in Europe Wero is rolling out as an answer to US dependency.

You don't have to be a prisoner to the three American processors, even in the US and Canada, UnionPay is gaining traction as a result of the demand from the Chinese diaspora and business owners.

Competition is good for business.

Edit : typo car -> card

Asia has a very unique financial system in this sense. They are not reliant on 3rd party payment processors that can be counted on one hand, and they usually support P2P payment between banks. They also usually prefer to use QR than NFC (like on wechat, line, and kakao). This is one example standard that I found from Indonesia called QRIS, and they are expanding it wherever they can. Of course Visa is upset about those lol (see the section about US Government response)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QRIS

Yeah UPI is great too in India.

Visa is already censoring the world's porn. As if we needed more reason to hate them.

not just porn they are inserting themselves into every entertainment industry. all based on being control freaks. If you look at who visa vocally supports its a crazy rabbit hole.

For the USA and the rest of the world, Brazil has its own payment system as far as I know, and Europe is making one already, so jokes on you. Correct me if I'm wrong.

We have several, but are mostly country level. We are working on interconnecting them so payments and money can flow along the EU without any USA dependency.

And there is also the digital Euro for small payments, that is being also being developed right now.

International bank transfers and direct debit are already in place via the SEPA instruments.

You're Rose. It says so right before the @

Class action lawsuit. Their terms and conditions when I opened my accounts did not mention this and further, updating those terms and conditions and then closing my accounts is not justifiable. Since I'm likely not the only one they will do this to, it sounds to me like they need to learn a lesson.

My online campaign to point out every time one of their executives has said anything sus would be legendary.

If things were shut down to prevent access to anything, I don't think legal action is possible, or even the path to take. Probably why it would never be done that quickly or drastically. The art of oppression is knowing the limit of what people will put up with and not crossing the line, but moving the line slowly. Go too fast, the commons get upset and find their torches.

Time for more monero

I know this is off topic but the cc companies are going crazy from a state law that passed saying how oh it will be so bad because they just won't be able to handle it at all and will have to pull out or something. eff em.

Pretty sure having a bank account is like an EU right, so banks can't just close your account willy-nilly over some online post.

Yes, but VISA would hold the keys to the infrastructure that let's you use it in in a modern world.

Except for maybe international online payments, there are already alternatives, so I don't quite see how.

WERO might be the EU alternative.

WERO...xD It sounds like a duck, it looks like a duck, oh, it's a duck!

Stay informed about changes to the law, planned surveillance, and so on. The European "wero" system has to comply with European law... so everything will soon be under complete surveillance... It'll be really great once eID and EUDI are in place... If you live in Germany and post something online that Spain, for example, doesn't like, your accounts will be frozen and so on, because they'll be able to bypass the banks.

So again: It sounds like a duck, it looks like a duck, oh, it's a duck!

Not the banks, but the countries. The EU is getting the EU Wallet, and it must be linked to at least one bank account. This will allow other EU countries to enforce penalties and freeze accounts, seize funds, or whatever. Cool, right? 🤮

Most likely it is an EU right, but violations would require a lot of effort to straighten, so I wouldn't be surrised if they do sometimes close accounts willy-nilly

This is why I liked the idea of Bitcoin in the beginning. (Before it became what it is now).

I still like Monero. It would make shit like this impossible to touch by authoritarian idiots.

That point has been completely missed by all the speculators and the characters who hate the speculators, especially the institutional gamblers but think they hate btc.

Without having watched the video, but having an idea of what it's about given seeing a few places and creators I follow being sanctioned because the payment processors getting butthurt, I think it's worth mentioning crypto and direct competitors to the Visa and Mastercard mono(duo?)poly.

On crypto, if issue is that it burns too much energy, afaik generally new technologies are like that, improvements to consumption happening over time.

And about direct competitors, Russia made one from what I read, Brazil has Elo, and I think the EU was introducing their own recently. All 3 countries/country-like territories with their own problems, but I think it's a worth idea to copy and improve upon.

Also fomenting use of physical cash is a good idea too, me thinks.

Fwiw, there are already some cryptos which use proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work which overcomes the entire electricity consumption thing.

I do wish that places started accepting cryptos which were meant to be used for transactions (e.g. NANO) rather than ones like bitcoin that just happen to have existed for a while, but is technically inferior to most everything else.

Unfortunately, crypto in general challenges not just payment processors but the entire banking industry, and that's probably too much to ever succeed.

Interesting!

About challenging the industry, I remember reading some years ago that Visa/MC enforced higher taxes on the companies that also accepted crypto. If that is/still is a thing, might give a hint of why it isn't more widely accepted.

Yeah, it's probably part of it! Banks are even more obvious about it. E.g. in the UK where crypto is a taxed and somewhat regulated thing, most of the banks have taken the stance of rejecting any payments to and from(!) exchanges, even if they're approved by the government. All because it's "high risk so they want to protect users". No such issue with gambling though, obviously.

I think you're confusing Elo (just a local company) with Pix, a government created interbank payment system. And from what I know of Pix, yes, we should all definitely copy that.

Elo the "bandeira" (forgot the name), similar to Visa and Mastercard. But about Pix, now that you mention it, I think PayPal does too? Although not in some countries.

Pix has no taxing whatsoever in direct transactions. The only reason people still use cards is due to habit.

Banks also offer parceling payment, but each one does that on it's own way afaik. I never used it. Not leaving payments for the future is a load of my mind tbh.

That’s why we Germans love cash. By the way, all it takes is for the government to face a crisis... Just look at China and its real estate crisis. Many people don’t use cash anymore, and they ran into problems when they couldn’t make digital payments or withdraw money, etc.

The vocal fry made that video unwatchable, jfk. I think the video is about financial censorship. They have been warning about this for more than a decade now, but most recently Trump issued an executive order to force payment providers to keep customers despite religious or political beliefs (article by yahoo finance).

Conversely, there are people whose accounts have been frozen either by the US or the EU for political motivations

Has*

What if you woke up tomorrow...

Yes if you "woke" up too much you will be censured

Edit: seems misunderstood , it is a bad thing that anything considered too woke is being censored

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