We have normalized the treatment of the financial and payments systems as things that exist primarily to perform law enforcement surveillance functions. It's the same dynamic that leads to debanking of small accounts - payments firms exist on thin margins and the potential fines for inadvertently servicing a bad actor are stratospheric, so it's entirely logical to play it safe by refusing to service anyone whose profile looks even the slightest bit risky.
Debanking small accounts isn't something that I'd heard of before. But debanking "undesirables" is certainly a problem.
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".
These companies aren't public utilities, no one would complain about a US bank not doing money exchange business with entities in the Ukraine or Belarus, why would that be different for US companies offering donations over the Internet? The fact is that all platforms that facilitate cross-border money transfers between two parties without clear services or good being exchanged are used for all kinds of money laundering, and governments try to contain that for good reasons. In the end they probably don't care much about the revenue they make in these countries as it's probably negligible. Again, their good right to do so, I don't see any issue with this at all.
I think at this point it would be preferable for the government to take over the payment infrastructure directly. This is often seen as dystopian, but it's a dystopia that has already come to pass for the most part. If we made it official, at least the rules for what can be blocked or refused or frozen would be out in the open.
I suspect people wouldn’t actually like the alternative. An alternative world where it’s relatively easy to get an MTL, or consequences for AML aren’t huge, looks a lot like crypto. Imagine banks and money processors doing rugpulls or going bust.
Well, I'm glad that this kind of thing got in the spotlight.
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.
Isn't there quite a demand in "the West" to send money to Ukraine, meaning that they will be quickly replaced (and by a company that might later become their direct competitor).
And is been nearly a year since the events described in the blog : HAS a new company popped up ?
I’ve been working many years in the banking and Fintech industry. These companies are driven by compliance before profit. Sometimes, compliance will order a country to be blocked because of the risk to service bad actors, and they can get this done bypassing every other department. This is also why it takes forever to get an account opened, the know you customer and know your business processes are long and tedious, use manual and semi automated process to establish a risk score and make a decision wether to service a customer or not. Most of the time, these processes are about ticking boxes and filing required documents to cover the institution.
In the case of the article, servicing a zone at war, with a lot of parties under sanctions is a risk that either BuyMeACoffee and / or a few of their providers were not willing to take.
The payment gateways are subject to the whims of govt. and the payment hosts are subject to the whims of the payment gateways and due to which they're often overzealous and come up arbitrary rules.
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.
So they’re disabling Wise/Payoneer because they can’t implement some optional features on top of it? Why not just gate the features based on the payout platform instead?
I signed up for BuyMeACoffee recently. I did some work for free that’s important for the industry I work in and a few people donated money to me. That was almost 2 weeks ago and I’m still waiting for them to review my account. The only support seems to be just an email address?
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?
A friend did some online usability/survey thing with a web development company just to get £20 or so.
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)
Why would they buy a by domain? Solely for the name?
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.
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.
>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.
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).
> 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).
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.
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'.
Up to 100k per bank account is secured by the European central bank though, so for most Europeans, the money cannot just simply disappear and you never get it back. And if you have over 100k per bank account, you probably should look for banks with better insurances anyway.
All my bank accounts only have money for daily expenses and maybe a little more just in case of emergency. If it's gone, I'll be upset, but not the end of the world. Most of my actual savings are in DeGiro, which AFAIK is okay for EU customers. Correct me if I'm wrong though.
“20% and subject to changes” yikes what a way to say “you’re losing territory and you’re not in the news enough for us to bother”. That’s probably one country that needs the help from a place like that.
The way i support content creators is by signing up for services through their sponsor/referral links.
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
> The money is still “there”, so probably no lawyer can say BMaC has “stolen them”—you just can’t neither receive “your” money nor, at least, give them back to those who sent them.
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)
Speaking of Stripe, when will they support 3d secure or however it's called this year?
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.
3DSecure is ... weird. It doesn't always trigger. It depends on some measure of "risk" (however the hell that's determined). E.g. my payments to pizza place never invoke 3D Secure because I order from them so damned often.
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.
Think Stripe already support this out of the box https://docs.stripe.com/payments/3d-secure. I think this is also a legal (maybe not legal but financial regulator or whatever there called) requirement in the UK so most if not all payments use it?
Am I the only one who thinks BuyMeACoffee's defense always mentions keep paying to "Ukrainians", but not "Ukraine", potentially meaning the Ukrainians outside Ukraine, not in?
One of the main issues with the margin business model (Profit of 5% of a payment for example) is that fraud is leveraged. This means that when you lose 100% of a transaction due to a chargeback or fraud loss, it takes you 20 non-fraud loss transactions to make up for it. The fraud leverage is a huge issue for platforms like this, and in certain countries half the transactions can be fraudsters.
"The money is still “there”, so probably no lawyer can say BMaC has “stolen them”—you just can’t neither receive “your” money nor, at least, give them back to those who sent them."
This reminds me of something. Russian foreign reserves, perhaps? The irony.
The did it silently because they know what they are doing and wanted to get by without the natural consequences of their actions. I’m now going to silently never tip another “cup of coffee” through their services, hopefully others will follow.
Someone will use your service to "donate" to a drug dealer, or to buy shady sexual material, or to sponsor some religious nutter somewhere or other. And you'll be held liable.
There is a reason why the system is as shit as it is.
> Do what buymeacoffee won't do and forget about regulations (that's what Uber does yeah?)
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.
Dumb question but I don't expect any service to support all countries, so what makes BuyMeACoffee different? My service (which also involves money) only supports one country in the world.
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.
It's fascinating that neither the article nor the comments here include a single mention of "stablecoins" which seems like the obvious solution to this problem.
If BuyMeACoffee is actually just trying to comply with sanctions, that still applies even if they're facilitating payments via cryptocurrency. If the reason why they're sticking to just Stripe really is in part fraud prevention, well, I... Do I really need to comment more? I badly wish cryptocurrency was the savior for a deeply broken ecosystem of payment processors but it simply isn't, it's not easy to use, it's very easy to lose money, transactions can be slow and expensive. It could be/could have been great for the sadly growing segment of payments involving legal, consensual transactions between parties that are pushed away by traditional payment processors, but so far it isn't/hasn't been and I don't think it will be. Maybe some day.
(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.)
They are in theory but in practice they have risks. Tether is probably unbacked and could be relying on BTC for collateral. You could get BTC downside with zero upside.
not everyone knows how to send stablecoins and many creators get their donations from older people and other less crypto aware groups. Many people don't know how to send money internetionally
What I find fascinating is that crypto bros keep coming back with "technically its solved by crypto" and never looking at the non-technical sides of why a business/solution exists.
Every three months I have to fill in a bunch of bs busywork paperwork for the bank due to having an independent contractor in the Ukraine so I can pay him.
until someone runs their funds through TornadoCash and dusts your wallet, thus putting it on many sanctioned lists and making it impossible to offloads funds into fiat by legal means.
It’s a reminder that financial inclusion isn’t just about tech – it’s about creating systems that can handle the messy reality of real-world transactions. It’s disappointing that a platform like BuyMeACoffee, which is supposed to empower creators globally, is now cutting off entire regions.
Potentially unpopular opinion but ultimately it's a private service and they decided to disable payout methods which negatively affects Ukrainian users for the sake of integrating new changes/avoiding legal risk. They don't have to support all countries. I feel sorry for the users though, especially I imagine by asking supporters to move to another platform will result in some of them dropping which is the result of platform lock in..
Sure, it's a private service and they can do whatever they want, but why block Ukraine? I spent an inordinate amount of time and resources over years blocking Americans from the casino I ran, so I can somewhat sympathize with the point of view that one wants to avoid legal issues. But the only reason I spent the energy to do that was that I needed to be on the right side of the law, personally, if I ever found myself physically back in the US. The only reason I blocked certain other countries (like Myanmar and Iran) was on moral principle because I didn't want to potentially help launder money to revolting dictatorships. I did not, for instance, research or give two fucks about online gambling laws in Malaysia, or a dozen other countries I'd never step foot in where I had players from. I certainly wouldn't have cut off a country that was under siege and partially eaten by a nasty dictatorship. If I were running it now, I'd have probably set up filters to block anyone conceivably in Russian territory, and that would be that. If one guy can do it against an onslaught of thousands of Americans trying to fake their IP addresses daily, I'm sure a good sized company can handle blocking Russian money laundering through a tip jar.
No. I closed down a commercial service I ran and took 6 months to do it in order to give people a reasonable chance to move elsewhere. I didn't have to, but I felt it was the moral thing to do. Maybe morals are out of fashion.
> Potentially unpopular opinion but ultimately it's a private service and they decided to disable payout methods which negatively affects Ukrainian users for the sake of integrating new changes/avoiding legal risk.
"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.
Honestly, I feel the need to address the elephant in the room for this issue.
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.
It's unclear how you believe the label attached to something to be useful.
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.
Cynicism aside, I'd rather not receive compensation in a currency that's mainly used for speculation. And to exchange it back into a "meaningful" currency somewhat securely requires me to go through an exchange, which is usually again a company that can make up their own policies? Seems to me this is just making it more complicated and more resource intensive.
rwarfield|9 months ago
elric|9 months ago
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".
ThePhysicist|9 months ago
ngruhn|9 months ago
mppm|9 months ago
idiotsecant|9 months ago
rprend|9 months ago
lazide|9 months ago
internet_points|9 months ago
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rckt|9 months ago
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.
BlueTemplar|9 months ago
And is been nearly a year since the events described in the blog : HAS a new company popped up ?
gosub100|9 months ago
znanz|9 months ago
simultsop|9 months ago
Abishek_Muthian|9 months ago
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.
[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host
notpushkin|9 months ago
noeltock|9 months ago
bayindirh|9 months ago
nathell|9 months ago
https://x.com/zverok/status/1823757570240340466
croisillon|9 months ago
jimjambw|9 months ago
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?
gadders|9 months ago
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)
wltr|9 months ago
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.
casenmgreen|9 months ago
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.
whstl|9 months ago
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.
TMWNN|9 months ago
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).
notpushkin|9 months ago
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.
HenryBemis|9 months ago
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'.
kmlx|9 months ago
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/
askonomm|9 months ago
anal_reactor|9 months ago
unknown|9 months ago
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at0mic22|9 months ago
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.
unknown|9 months ago
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rdtsc|9 months ago
gsky|9 months ago
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
KronisLV|9 months ago
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:
stevage|9 months ago
nottorp|9 months ago
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...
ezfe|9 months ago
https://docs.stripe.com/payments/3d-secure
elric|9 months ago
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.
aranw|9 months ago
f4c39012|9 months ago
workfromspace|9 months ago
ascorbic|9 months ago
ZoomZoomZoom|9 months ago
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.
epa|9 months ago
mvdtnz|9 months ago
drysine|9 months ago
This reminds me of something. Russian foreign reserves, perhaps? The irony.
florbnit|9 months ago
johnisgood|9 months ago
winterbloom|9 months ago
If you are interested in building this, I have product and engineering experience
elric|9 months ago
There is a reason why the system is as shit as it is.
itake|9 months ago
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.
casenmgreen|9 months ago
notpushkin|9 months ago
simultsop|9 months ago
They get fixed instead!
Unfortunately, "things" begin nicely until it gains major attention. Then it loses most of the nice things.
unknown|9 months ago
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Kiro|9 months ago
makeitdouble|9 months ago
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.
Nebbit123|9 months ago
jchw|9 months ago
(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.)
BoredPositron|9 months ago
arbll|9 months ago
- 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
coolcase|9 months ago
Just use BTC if anything.
defraudbah|9 months ago
codegladiator|9 months ago
ionwake|9 months ago
alex1138|9 months ago
coolcase|9 months ago
christkv|9 months ago
tzal3x|9 months ago
Shatnerz|9 months ago
ulrikrasmussen|9 months ago
Koshima|9 months ago
EZ-E|9 months ago
noduerme|9 months ago
cryptonym|9 months ago
Customers should also be allowed to expose shady stuff done by such private services, warning other people.
beardyw|9 months ago
jjani|9 months ago
Beretta_Vexee|9 months ago
AnthonyMouse|9 months ago
"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.
Havoc|9 months ago
I get the impression that those buttons don't exactly get many clicks anyway
AStonesThrow|9 months ago
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.
AnthonyMouse|9 months ago
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.
unknown|9 months ago
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mwilcox|9 months ago
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olalonde|9 months ago
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pbhjpbhj|9 months ago
frontfor|9 months ago
dax_|9 months ago
Cynicism aside, I'd rather not receive compensation in a currency that's mainly used for speculation. And to exchange it back into a "meaningful" currency somewhat securely requires me to go through an exchange, which is usually again a company that can make up their own policies? Seems to me this is just making it more complicated and more resource intensive.
unknown|9 months ago
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