[ZS] Money transfers, due process, and freedom

[Mark Nuzzolilo II]

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/30a23cd835c1a6834bcb6c7b2740649b0f2aaf28/6egJy16qp1Fh6Jt16xCPYwWekRJCu.jpg

http://ft.trillian.im/30a23cd835c1a6834bcb6c7b2740649b0f2aaf28/6egJWdWX2OcB6exeDE4u2Byt8aDE3.jpg

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/

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