this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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how do we create a system for digital payments without introducing centralized control (and therefore censorship)?
watches as lemmy tries their best to say anything except crypto
Yeah, because crypto is not that. The problems with it as a payment system are numerous and make it unusable. It's barely better than lugging suitcases full of twenties as a payment system for doing crimes, but only barely. The only thing it's really good for is scamming people and gambling
BS, Monero is the best currency for making untraceable payments full stop. People buy drugs with it but buying drugs shouldn't be a crime. We need private currency's that governments don't control like that. It may not be great in every way but it's the beat that exists and is certainly used for more than gambling and scamming people.
I was gonna say, you can tell who's just a cryptobro vs who actually cares about fiscal freedom based on that. If anyone suggests you use bitcoin, they probablyyyyy aren't someone to listen to. Zcash and Monero are the only two I'd ever trust as of now.
Honestly, its a massive shame that a technology as good as crypto was completely usurped by groups just looking to profit. They chant "This is true freedom of finance!" while only caring how much USD it's worth. Like dawg, that's why nobody takes crypto seriously.
Dunno why zcash has taken off so much, I believe it's not private by default, but you have to manually enable that feature.
Monero is 100% opaque always
In Europe we now slowly get wero.
This will replace hopefully PayPal, visa and mastercard
As someone who has lives in the Netherlands, were iDeal (the less international predecessor of wero) has been available for years - yes it replaces it, so much.
And it feels easier and safer at the same time, when my banking app on the phone can just scan the QR code on the website and deal with that.
Every time I DO use paypal now, usually a foreign webshop, I get a little nervous if my account still works, because it's been a year or so again.
We could lobby our governments to regulate the payment processors. Their job is to facilitate transactions, not dictate what they are. Governments could easily regulate them such that they may not do that.
Governments are centralized control. Just take a look at the current US administration, and the economic sanctions they pushed left and right. You trust them to keep their hands off transactions happening within their own country?
This is so naive it hurts, though. As if there weren’t literally thousands of years’ worth of tales of corruption and failed regulation to learn from.
I, too, desperately want to believe that democracy can still work despite capitalists having captured it. But I dunno…
Nobody has yet solved the "who watches the watchers?" problem. Because of that, I believe every system of government is doomed to fall to corruption and capture given time.
I know that there are a lot of mechanisms that can be put in place to mitigate that problem, such as adversarial branches and divisions of authority, but I haven't seen one yet that does anything more than prolong things and delay what seems to be the inevitable. Until something big changes, the pendulum seems destined to keep swinging back and forth.
In the meantime, I haven't seen any way to prevent companies from unethically exerting their will over the public that works any better than involving multiple parties in it that are not necessarily aligned and do your best to prevent collusion, like making the government a party to the transaction by way of regulating the process, though that's admittedly far from fool-proof, either.
I'm just trying to lay out the available options at our disposal now as I understand them.
This is just decentralization. This is literally what I alluded to in my root comment. Crypto solves these problems
So it's all Political Entropy, huh?