And that's just a particularly high-profile example; smaller organizations and individuals routinely face this sort of thing from centralized payment processors. Said risk is nonexistent with any competently-developed cryptocurrency (and even most incompetently-developed ones).
Free speech as in speech protected by the 1st amendment? That's very specifically meant to curtail the government's powers, not the powers of merchants who decline to do business with others.
You could make a pretty strong argument that overly stringent regulations that result in sex workers, etc., being unable to process payments are a violation of that, but I'm not aware of why Visa/Mastercard don't support Gab & Parler. If it's that, you have a point. Otherwise, not really.
It's a reasonable assumption to make when someone invokes the term "free speech" in a majority-American forum. (I'm making some assumptions about visitors of HN here, who are probably more international than most places I'm in, but still.)
They didn't, back in the days. I remember diatinctly the only way to send money to Gab / Parler was Bitcoin. Maybe now they do, but that's not very important.
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Those are certainly two ... examples.
I can think of plenty of others, like that time PayPal took $1.3m of Flipper Zero's money and ran because reasons: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/
And that's just a particularly high-profile example; smaller organizations and individuals routinely face this sort of thing from centralized payment processors. Said risk is nonexistent with any competently-developed cryptocurrency (and even most incompetently-developed ones).
"Free speech is for the speech you hate, not for the speech you like"
Free speech as in speech protected by the 1st amendment? That's very specifically meant to curtail the government's powers, not the powers of merchants who decline to do business with others.
You could make a pretty strong argument that overly stringent regulations that result in sex workers, etc., being unable to process payments are a violation of that, but I'm not aware of why Visa/Mastercard don't support Gab & Parler. If it's that, you have a point. Otherwise, not really.
Who said anything about amendments?
It's a reasonable assumption to make when someone invokes the term "free speech" in a majority-American forum. (I'm making some assumptions about visitors of HN here, who are probably more international than most places I'm in, but still.)
They didn't, back in the days. I remember diatinctly the only way to send money to Gab / Parler was Bitcoin. Maybe now they do, but that's not very important.