It seems like the bottleneck for any organization that wants freedom, comes down to accepting donations or payments from members. When a law is broken, there is supposed to be due process. Presumably, with the way the law is supposed to work, laws should be enforced through a lawsuit or criminal proceeding, in an actual courtroom. But what happens when the laws aren't actually broken, but someone wants to shut you down anyway? They will just tell the credit card companies and the banks to stop accepting payments for that vendor. So we have a situation where due process is sidestepped. But it's likely that the government isn't even the problem here, but the banks themselves (more later). While I don't condone breaking any laws, the fact remains that power is being abused in this way in a perversion of justice. There is a concrete example of this here, where Fetlife.com got screwed by a payment processor, who claims there were illegal images (the images in question were actually a simpsons cartoon, and a picture of a dog): http://ft.trillian.im/30a23cd835c1a6834bcb6c7b2740649b0f2aaf28/6egJy16qp1Fh6... http://ft.trillian.im/30a23cd835c1a6834bcb6c7b2740649b0f2aaf28/6egJWdWX2OcB6... We have some Bitcoin experts here. Bitcoin, as we know, cannot be regulated by the banks. But because our financial system is largely dependent on these banks and credit cards, there needs to be a way to connect these two systems together in such a way where to get that money into the Bitcoin system. The currency itself is relatively viable, but the financial system just isn't there. Any attempt to set up an anonymous payment processor will likely result in some sort of termination by any mainstream bank that is used. And for what reason? Even without any proof of wrongdoing, or any due process, the banks will do what they can to shut down any financial processor that operates outside their realm of influence. So how do we overthrow this cartel? We would need a smoothly operating financial system that would need to reach enough critical mass where it could be completely outside the influence of the banking elite. Credit card payments would still be necessary. We would need some sort of abstraction layer between the point where a user enters in their payment information, and where a payment is made to its destination. Assume that the banks will close it off, but think about this, it's easy to turn off one valve, but how easy is it to turn off 10,000 valves at once? A swarm of financial channels could be used, and only one of them would actually have to be operational for the system to succeed. And the money that could be made from such a system would be astounding. This would be a great Zero State project to have, definitely worthy of having the need for secrecy, while still not breaking any actual laws. We have the technological smarts to get something like this in the works. Has it really been tried before? Here is a "Bitcoin Bank" but they don't even accept anything other than Bitcoins, which doesn't solve the problem at all: http://www.flexcoin.com/ -- -- Zero State mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/DoctrineZero --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Doctrine Zero" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to DoctrineZero+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE