I don’t get why it’s hard for people to hold both “all existing forms of crypto bullshit are terminally flawed and corrupt” and also “we need some fucking alternative to credit card companies getting to tell websites what they can post” as ideas at the same time.
Like YES all crypto stuff is dumb and bad. And yet if it was not dumb and bad that would probably be a good thing and help combat the chilling of speech if everybody didn’t have to ask Visa for permission to post their esoteric furry porn and nudes.
Like, it’s bad for the reasons it’s bad, but also, I don’t understand why it’s taboo to consider “what if it wasn’t bad, what could that accomplish” and honestly watching people have to run from website to website because visa is having a hissy fit about vore or hypnosis porn does kinda make me think it would be cool if it wasn’t bad!
And that said, other sweeping changes to the structure of society would go a long way towards negating the need for anything like this too, like i dunno, paying everybody enough to live on so they don’t need survival work at all, but “trying to make it work for sex workers who happen to be living under capitalism” does kinda seem like a reasonable and noble goal to me right ?
I know that this is often used as a red herring by conmen who want to convince you that what they have built already solves this problem. But some critics of crypto take that to mean it isn’t a real problem and that.. seems provably untrue to me?
Addendum: I feel like I should say that probably a non trivial amount of content -on cohost today- could be challenged by a payment processor and decimate cohost’s ability to sustain itself even further if payment processors they work with decide to push the issue. They can just do that! And cohost likely does not have a great chance of being able to push back effectively if that occurs!
— and yes, there are some alternatives, which sites that are dedicated to adult content do use, which often have higher fees and worse service. And there’s no guarantee these options will exist forever either; they are i would imagine under threat today as well.