I've been reading Joshua Moon's (owner of KiwiFarms) old articles, and in one of them he linked this piece which doesn't seem to have been covered anywhere else. This Dick Masterson guy tried making a Patreon alternative as Patreon has proven in the past that they're more than willing to censor those that they disagree with, on top of providing a clear view of how digital deplatforming works.
What ended up happening is that his business was put on a global card processing blacklist known as MATCH, which is maintained by Mastercard. His blacklisting resulted in him not being able to process cards, collect subscriptions and run his business. Not even offshore banks were willing to deal with him, since they used MATCH code 10 "violation of standards" which is the harshest one.
It is clear that it's not just woke-infected companies that censor, censorship flows downstream from Big Finance. Elon Musk can take over Twitter and fire all the people in the trust & safety board, but what does that matter if Big Finance can just stop people from paying your business?
People have spoken about how the WEF and Klaus Schwab want to institute a digital currency to enact even more censorship, even more authoritarianism, but the truth is that we're already living in this future.
If you're using a bank account and a card, your money is numbers in a database. Whether you have US dollars, Euros or Pounds, this doesn't change. The only money that you truly own is cold, hard cash but you can't pay an online business with cash, so you're forced to use cards.
So you have to submit to Big Finance. If you don't do what they want, they shut you down, and they're a requirement for functioning in today's highly digital world.
There's plenty of examples of this happening now. This is one of them, there's others including cases where people's actual bank accounts were shut down, which is even worse than payment processors shutting you down.
However, things might have reached a turning point. PayPal went full mask off with their 2500 dollar "misinformation fine" and now they're getting absolutely obliterated by the backlash. Especially since they had the gall to lie about it. They backpedalled, then tried to sneak it back in a few weeks later, thinking we all had the memory and attention span of Joe Biden, but we did not.
Let's hope the momentum keeps up and we fight back against Big Finance. Western governments thought they could get around pesky little things like constitutional rights by delegating their authoritarianism to companies, which was pretty clever, but it must stop.
Nool may be an unstable, depressed alcoholic, but he's usually dead on about this kind of thing because it's basically his job to fight globalist tyranny.
Almost everything wrong with the internet can be traced back to the fact that our money is controlled by a small handful of cowardly sociopaths who would gladly kill their own mothers if it meant their next billion dollar paycheck arrives a day sooner.
They backpedalled, then tried to sneak it back in a few weeks later
This didn't actually happen. The clauses people thought had been snuck back in had been there for ages. I guess it's good that those clauses finally got some attention but its bad that it came at the cost of credibility. Next time Paypal will actually put it back in and can point to this event and say "look! they were wrong about us putting it back in last time, why believe them this time?"
Still uses the banking system, which is part of Big Finance. Banks can close your accounts if they don't want to give you service for arbitrary reasons.
I think you underestimate the sheer amount of licenses and regulations you have to meet, and how expensive it is.
But let's suppose you're right. You make your own startup bank, you commit to free speech and not fucking over customers. You slowly grow over time until you become successful. Now pray tell, how do you stop the government or Big Finance from using every dirty trick in the book to obliterate you?
I think you underestimate the sheer amount of licenses and regulations you have to meet, and how expensive it is.
No, you just don't have the professional experience in the subject matter that I do.
Now pray tell, how do you stop the government
Because, the Treasury Dept is the rule making body. They administrate the system, not NACHA.
Which means they're subject to the fucking constitution. People have a right to conduct commerce freely. A participant in the ACH system doesn't have the right to refuse to conduct transactions with another participant, they have to go to the Treasury Dept and argue that the other participant is acting criminally and needs to be kicked off the network. They can only refuse transactions on the basis that they were unauthorized by the account holders.
There is an ungodly amount of paperwork to do in order to establish a bank or credit union. Paying someone else to do it, that's going to run into the hundreds of thousands or low millions.
Your typical short lifespan credit union is generally founded by the village idiot with a law degree, who has pretentions of being a big balls businessman.
The key step is to obtain a State Charter. This sounds hard, it's not. The hurdle is basically "do you have a business plan". If your business plan is "We're starting a online payment processor that will also offer traditional banking services like checking", and you sound like you can actually deliver it, then you'll get your charter. Hell, you might even get some business startup grants cuz that's the sort of new world tech business states are fighting each other for.
With a charter in hand, you open an account with the Federal Reserve (which functions much like any other bank account, you just need a bank charter to do it), and apply for FDIC insurance.
Then you're in business.
Now, there are requirements. You have to maintain certain levels (reserve requirements). But if you're not issuing any loans, just holding all deposits, paying no interest, and paying operating costs on fees... then maintaining reserves and thus solvency is not a problem. You can't be bank-runned if you have all the money in reserves. Now, why someone would WANT to bank with you under such terms is a mystery (to the fed) but it's not illegal.
What I described above is how paypal works anyway (no loans, everything paid for by fees).
Now, to actually do what we're proposing (replace paypal) you're gonna need some heavy hardware and a bunch of bespoke software. That's all separate from the cost of building a bank, and frankly the bigger problem.
But if an entity like subscribestar had established themselves as a bank first BEFORE going live, it would be almost impossible to prevent money from reaching them, at least by check/ach.
You set up a bank, a proper bank, FDIC insured, everything, and then you direct market it as a free speech harbor.
At that point it's MUCH harder for other companies to say they won't work with you. If the customer with the money says to transfer the money, they have to transfer it as a legitimate, authorized transaction.
Refusing at that point means going to federal court and convicting the BFS to say you're not a legitimate bank. That's a much, MUCH higher hurdle, one these leftists won't be able to clear.
During the era of checks, every federal reserve bank hosted a "clearinghouse".
This was a location where all the banks under that Reserve Bank would meet and swap checks that had been given to them. Balances would be paid out.
ACH replaced that system electronically. Instead of a paper check, an ETF record is handed around and then money changes hands.
The system is still fundamentally controlled by the government. The only ways a transaction can be refused is either because it was unauthorized/fraudulent, or because the account doesn't have the funds.
To actually kick a participant out of the ACH system would require the participating entity to be recognized as a habitual source of fraudulent or overdrafting transactions, and that determination is made by the government, and can be fought in federal court.
SubscribeStar is mostly used by...people who produce erotic content.
Interesting. I've only heard about it from people who are political dissidents - it first popped up on my radar after Patreon banned Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon, from their platform.
SubscribeStar, Hatreon, Utreon, and a couple of others I'm sure I've forgotten about all began appearing in place of or alongside various people's Patreon accounts around that time.
I was not aware of that. Is this like OnlyFans where the platform was started for one purpose and then taken over by people wanting to use it for another purpose?
I've been reading Joshua Moon's (owner of KiwiFarms) old articles, and in one of them he linked this piece which doesn't seem to have been covered anywhere else. This Dick Masterson guy tried making a Patreon alternative as Patreon has proven in the past that they're more than willing to censor those that they disagree with, on top of providing a clear view of how digital deplatforming works.
What ended up happening is that his business was put on a global card processing blacklist known as MATCH, which is maintained by Mastercard. His blacklisting resulted in him not being able to process cards, collect subscriptions and run his business. Not even offshore banks were willing to deal with him, since they used MATCH code 10 "violation of standards" which is the harshest one.
It is clear that it's not just woke-infected companies that censor, censorship flows downstream from Big Finance. Elon Musk can take over Twitter and fire all the people in the trust & safety board, but what does that matter if Big Finance can just stop people from paying your business?
People have spoken about how the WEF and Klaus Schwab want to institute a digital currency to enact even more censorship, even more authoritarianism, but the truth is that we're already living in this future.
If you're using a bank account and a card, your money is numbers in a database. Whether you have US dollars, Euros or Pounds, this doesn't change. The only money that you truly own is cold, hard cash but you can't pay an online business with cash, so you're forced to use cards.
So you have to submit to Big Finance. If you don't do what they want, they shut you down, and they're a requirement for functioning in today's highly digital world.
There's plenty of examples of this happening now. This is one of them, there's others including cases where people's actual bank accounts were shut down, which is even worse than payment processors shutting you down.
However, things might have reached a turning point. PayPal went full mask off with their 2500 dollar "misinformation fine" and now they're getting absolutely obliterated by the backlash. Especially since they had the gall to lie about it. They backpedalled, then tried to sneak it back in a few weeks later, thinking we all had the memory and attention span of Joe Biden, but we did not.
Let's hope the momentum keeps up and we fight back against Big Finance. Western governments thought they could get around pesky little things like constitutional rights by delegating their authoritarianism to companies, which was pretty clever, but it must stop.
I honestly forgot about this. It's a vile escalation of financial warfare and sets a terrible precedent.
Nool may be an unstable, depressed alcoholic, but he's usually dead on about this kind of thing because it's basically his job to fight globalist tyranny.
Almost everything wrong with the internet can be traced back to the fact that our money is controlled by a small handful of cowardly sociopaths who would gladly kill their own mothers if it meant their next billion dollar paycheck arrives a day sooner.
This didn't actually happen. The clauses people thought had been snuck back in had been there for ages. I guess it's good that those clauses finally got some attention but its bad that it came at the cost of credibility. Next time Paypal will actually put it back in and can point to this event and say "look! they were wrong about us putting it back in last time, why believe them this time?"
the moneychangers are getting uppity again.
So don't use card processing.
Build a system on ACH clearing.
Still uses the banking system, which is part of Big Finance. Banks can close your accounts if they don't want to give you service for arbitrary reasons.
Yeah, that's why you start a bank, dummy.
Unless you're aligned with the rich oligarchs or the government (or both) and you have a big pile of startup money, that's not going to happen.
How much money do you think it takes to start up po-dunk neighborhood credit union managed by "that guy who was good in high school football".
Think about it real hard.
I think you underestimate the sheer amount of licenses and regulations you have to meet, and how expensive it is.
But let's suppose you're right. You make your own startup bank, you commit to free speech and not fucking over customers. You slowly grow over time until you become successful. Now pray tell, how do you stop the government or Big Finance from using every dirty trick in the book to obliterate you?
No, you just don't have the professional experience in the subject matter that I do.
Because, the Treasury Dept is the rule making body. They administrate the system, not NACHA.
Which means they're subject to the fucking constitution. People have a right to conduct commerce freely. A participant in the ACH system doesn't have the right to refuse to conduct transactions with another participant, they have to go to the Treasury Dept and argue that the other participant is acting criminally and needs to be kicked off the network. They can only refuse transactions on the basis that they were unauthorized by the account holders.
That's a much higher hurdle.
Cool story, bro. If it was so easy and you have the skills, why haven't you done it already?
And remember, the rule of law does not apply equally in today's world.
The biggest expense is legal.
There is an ungodly amount of paperwork to do in order to establish a bank or credit union. Paying someone else to do it, that's going to run into the hundreds of thousands or low millions.
Your typical short lifespan credit union is generally founded by the village idiot with a law degree, who has pretentions of being a big balls businessman.
The key step is to obtain a State Charter. This sounds hard, it's not. The hurdle is basically "do you have a business plan". If your business plan is "We're starting a online payment processor that will also offer traditional banking services like checking", and you sound like you can actually deliver it, then you'll get your charter. Hell, you might even get some business startup grants cuz that's the sort of new world tech business states are fighting each other for.
With a charter in hand, you open an account with the Federal Reserve (which functions much like any other bank account, you just need a bank charter to do it), and apply for FDIC insurance.
Then you're in business.
Now, there are requirements. You have to maintain certain levels (reserve requirements). But if you're not issuing any loans, just holding all deposits, paying no interest, and paying operating costs on fees... then maintaining reserves and thus solvency is not a problem. You can't be bank-runned if you have all the money in reserves. Now, why someone would WANT to bank with you under such terms is a mystery (to the fed) but it's not illegal.
What I described above is how paypal works anyway (no loans, everything paid for by fees).
Now, to actually do what we're proposing (replace paypal) you're gonna need some heavy hardware and a bunch of bespoke software. That's all separate from the cost of building a bank, and frankly the bigger problem.
But if an entity like subscribestar had established themselves as a bank first BEFORE going live, it would be almost impossible to prevent money from reaching them, at least by check/ach.
Around $10 million dollars.
Yes, that.
You set up a bank, a proper bank, FDIC insured, everything, and then you direct market it as a free speech harbor.
At that point it's MUCH harder for other companies to say they won't work with you. If the customer with the money says to transfer the money, they have to transfer it as a legitimate, authorized transaction.
Refusing at that point means going to federal court and convicting the BFS to say you're not a legitimate bank. That's a much, MUCH higher hurdle, one these leftists won't be able to clear.
You are thinking the numbers are a couple orders of magnitude larger than the numbers really are.
How do you think local credit unions keep poping up and then going under?
Yes, and?
NACHA IS ONLY AN INDUSTRY GROUP, THE RULE MAKING BODY IS THE DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY.
I am aware of all of that, yes.
Consider the Keiretsu.
The keiretsu are vertically and horizontally integrated business groups in Japan, each built around their own... private... bank.
As in, it's theirs. They control it.
Suppose the free speech wing of the internet decided to get its ass together and form a keiretsu. With a real bank, that clears real transactions.
I don't think it's impossible. It's just a lot of work from people who are as lazy as Ian Fucking "Free the Code" Crossland.
Graphene is the future of money my man.
Bank runs are only possible if you write loans.
It's entirely possible to run a bank that doesn't operate on loan income. It'd just have to charge fees...
Like PayPal does.
The second you could have a positive balance at PayPal, it became a bank. Albeit a crummy one with no depositor's insurance.
NACHA is an industry group, they don't make the rules.
The Bureau of Fiscal Service makes the rules. That's the Treasury Department.
Means that to shut you down, they have to get the FEDS to shut you down, they can't just blacklist you out of spite.
During the era of checks, every federal reserve bank hosted a "clearinghouse".
This was a location where all the banks under that Reserve Bank would meet and swap checks that had been given to them. Balances would be paid out.
ACH replaced that system electronically. Instead of a paper check, an ETF record is handed around and then money changes hands.
The system is still fundamentally controlled by the government. The only ways a transaction can be refused is either because it was unauthorized/fraudulent, or because the account doesn't have the funds.
To actually kick a participant out of the ACH system would require the participating entity to be recognized as a habitual source of fraudulent or overdrafting transactions, and that determination is made by the government, and can be fought in federal court.
Interesting. I've only heard about it from people who are political dissidents - it first popped up on my radar after Patreon banned Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon, from their platform.
SubscribeStar, Hatreon, Utreon, and a couple of others I'm sure I've forgotten about all began appearing in place of or alongside various people's Patreon accounts around that time.
I was not aware of that. Is this like OnlyFans where the platform was started for one purpose and then taken over by people wanting to use it for another purpose?