Financial Deplatforming: How Gab and Others Must Beat the Bank Card Assocations with Bitcoin

DISCLAIMER: None of the following is intended to be investment advice. Also, full disclosure, my links to Coinbase, Binance, KuCoin etc., include referrals. It actually benefits you to use them because we will both get an extra $10 worth of BTC for free if you deposit at least $100 to Coinbase. Thanks in advance if you follow the links when you make your accounts - and even if you don’t, I hope you find this article interesting!

Right now we are in a state of war. Every single one of you reading this right now is caught on the battlefield of that war, even if you don’t realize it. The bombs and the bullets are heading for you, me, and everyone else who enjoys a free and open internet.

What I’m talking about here is the end of freedom of expression. The internet has always been a bastion of free expression, and it has empowered average human beings in a way that no other technology has. Your voice can be heard across the globe. Imagine that we live in a world where any man with a keyboard, a microphone, and a camera can effectively compete with global media companies! It’s an amazing concept, but that dream is slowly being eroded.

This should surprise no one. Of course the elites don’t want to share that kind of power. Their latest tool: deplatforming.

“No Platform, sometimes deplatforming, is a form of boycott where a person or organisation is denied a platform to speak.” - Wikipedia

I’ve previously talked about various forms of deplatforming on my YouTube (and BitChute!) channels:

Why Free Speech Matters

I am a free speech maximalist. As long as someone isn’t directly threatening people or directly calling people to violence, I will defend their right to say it. This often leads to some pretty shocking reactions, where people tend to assume I’m their personal political bogeyman:

In less than 24 hours, I was angrily called both a conservative and a liberal. I am Schrodinger’s political enemy.

I know what you’re thinking: I should argue less on the internet. You’re probably right. But that’s beside the point. Setting aside political views, most reasonable, forward-thinking people should see the dangers in any kind of censorship. Where your enemies are getting censored today, you are getting censored tomorrow. The machinery of censorship doesn’t stop threshing just because you ended up in its maw. It chews you up. This is a problem for all of us, and we need to start figuring out how to solve it.

Financial Deplatforming

More and more, you’re seeing payment processors like PayPal and Stripe revoking service to people who have unpopular opinions. I call this “financial deplatforming,” and it’s often done under the guise of enforcing terms of service.

Very consistent TOS enforcement from Stripe.

I could rattle off a dozen or more examples of this sort of thing but suffice to say, it is an enormous problem. Here’s the thing: without Bitcoin (or intensive federal government intervention), the problem can only get worse.

Bank Card Associations

If payment processors like Stripe and PayPal are dukes, the bank card associations are kings. You’ve heard of these even if you don’t know them by this name. These are the big names on the cards you use to pay for almost everything in your life: Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Discover. Combined they enjoy a market capitalization of around 670 billion dollars (for reference, Bitcoin’s market cap at the time of this writing is about 113 billion).

If the bank card associations collectively get together and decide they don’t like you, you’re not processing credit card transactions. Period. All merchant accounts, payment processors, and so on must bow to these masters. I talk a lot about the terrible and horrifying power of Silicon Valley companies to control speech, but the bank card associations have the power to put people out of business. This is a very useful tool if you want to silence someone who makes a living from spreading their ideas.

There are rabid people out there with very little respect for freedom of expression, and if you say anything remotely unpopular, they will do their best to silence you. Getting the actual bank card associations (or even banks themselves) to put people out of business is the next logical step, and I believe we will see that soon. The people at Gab (a social media platform dedicated to freedom of speech) seem to agree with me:

It’s become obvious that any and every open avenue will be used to shut people up if they espouse unpopular opinions. Maybe there’s some way to fight this sort of thing within the system, but as a tech guy I am more interested in forward-thinking solutions that bypass the problem entirely.

Bitcoin is that solution.

A decentralized network cannot be harassed into dropping one of its users. It cannot be politically pressured into silencing someone. It cannot be bought off. It cannot shadowban you. It is open to everyone, and it is unstoppable.

My message to Gab and anyone else running afoul of pedantic, small-minded censors: get serious about promoting the use of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Your livelihood may depend on it.