MHS
Your dad
This. This right here. I live in Iran, and crypto currencies have been a life saver for many of us. Our local currency (IRR) is getting more worthless by the second. Many people have started immediately exchanging their earnings in IRR to something, anything else, including of course, cryptocurrencies.
I don’t think most people who live in first-world countries like America can see the use in cryptocurrencies as clearly as people who live in third-wirld countries, where you get paid a dollar an hour on average at local jobs, and that’s IF you have a decent job to begin with.
I have provided my services to people outside my country, and I prefer to do that, exactly because they are going to pay in dollar and not in IRR. And of course, they can’t do that through something like PayPal or UpWork, etc. because those services aren’t available to Iranians in the first place. Crypto currencies have saved and continue to save many, many people who live in these kinds of countries, because they provide a way for them to actually improve their lives by working, and not just hardly survive in whatever situation they are in and just stay alive for a bit longer. You can’t really change your life working 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, for $1 an hour. It’s just not feasible.
Again, I think it’s something that most people who already have ready access to these kinds of services, and who use these services without ever doing anything that makes those centralized services start questioning whether they should ban their account or not, won’t really get to appreciate. Want to use PayPal? Nope! You’re an Iranian, so fuck you. You can starve to death for all these kinds of services care. You might be born as the most gifted person on earth inside Iran, and yet, if services like PayPal were THE ONLY way to work non-local jobs, you would lose so so much of your life just trying to survive, instead of doing something that helps people around the world.
Cryptocurrencies, have quite literally, been a life saver for many, many people in my country. And no, they mostly weren’t scammers either. Some of them, sure, of course, but let’s remember that scamming isn’t something that only happens with cryptocurrencies. Scamming has been a thing way, waaay before cryptocurrencies were a thing.
It’s kind of like proprietary vs Free software. You won’t appreciate the Free, open source alternative until the proprietary one reeeally starts getting on your nerves, and changing in a way that directly affects you. This is the exact reason behind why people who advocate free software usage seem like insane people, because again, it’s not something that you appreciate, until what you’ve been using starts to show you why you should have cared about these kinds of things a long time ago.
You get to appreciate the alternative when the current “go-to” solution starts to show its problems. And regular fiat money, for the most part, works pretty well for most people right now, so there’s no reason to care about the alternatives at this point.
Thank you!
Yes, I hope I can come up with some mitigations for that. I’m a programmer so maybe until we have some more mods, I can create a bot (or use a preexisting bot?) to do some amount of moderation while I’m offline.
The hate is kind of understandable so I’m not mad! xD
If you’re not privacy/freedom focused, then you might only see the use of crypto currencies in scam, especially if the news around you confirms that for you 24/7
I hope not, and I’ll do my best to keep scammers away. The good thing about doing it on the clear-net and on Lemmy, is scammers are a lot more likely to leave traces of themselves that can be traced back to them, so if they’re smart, they’ll leave the sacmming stuff in the TOR network.
Anyways, that aside, I created this community as the post said, because of the restrictions that centralized services like UpWork, Fiverr, PayPal, LinkedIn, etc. impose on their users.
As an example, I have a few online friends who are artists and take commissions. All of them, without exception, have experiences with getting banned or limited because of taking commissions that included heavier/darker themes (suicide, self-harm, drug use, gore [scenes from a war for example], severe depression, etc.). They not only have gotten their accounts banned, but the funnier thing is, their account has been banned with all of their credits/money inside of it, that they had rightfully earned from their customers. Thousands of dollars of rightfully earned money, lost in an instant, just like that…
That is beyond scary and awful to me… It shouldn’t be acceptable at this point, and yet it is, because of the inhumane TOS that these services make you agree with before you get the chance to use them.
That is one of the very important reasons behind why I created this community. Freedom from the greasy hands of such corporations. If you know anything about GNU and FSF, to me, it’s no different than being dependent on proprietary software with very, very limiting and inhumane TOS. Users should be in control, not multimillion dollar corporations.
The second reason, is the restrictions that these services have for the kind of users that they accept into their platform in the first place.
PayPal and LinkedIn for example, require identification before you can sign up for their services, and in the sign up process, they instantly refuse to let you proceed any further, if they find out that you’re from certain countries that they don’t provide their services to. For example, if you live in countries that are included in the list of countries that are sanctioned by the US by the US trade laws.
Needless to say, if you somehow manage to sign up for their services, you will always run the risk of them finding out and seizing all of your income that you depend on for your life, and that’s IF they decide to stop there and don’t follow you further.
Because of these geographical restrictions, so many creative artists, so many smart developers, and so many hard working people that can all benefit the world in a better way, are forced to do something else that they have no passion for, settling for a job that sucks the soul out of them and stifles their creativity, until nothing is left. It’s tragic and inhumane to let this happen to so many bright people around the world who can offer their seevices to society and make it better. It’s an accepted level of racism apparently by many people, to not let the people who happen to be born in these countries by fate, reach their dreams, and instead to stifle their creativity and turn down their solutions, simply because they are from a different part of the world than what is acceptable.
I know that the crypto currency world doesn’t carry a good name, but as it is, it is the only way to solve these problems. As far as I know, it’s the only way to trade services in a decentralized way, that doesn’t give all of this power to these centralized, multi-million dollar corporations that only have money in mind, and not their users.
There are services for that available on the web, such as FairTrade on dread that d/Jobs4Crypto mods recommend. I had experience with this one. Looking for similar ones on the web, there’s also FairDesk on clear-net, but I didn’t have experience with them. The mods on r/Jobs4Bitcoins offer escrow services themselves, which I hope to offer if my users are willing to trust me with their money. I would have more to lose in the long-term by betraying their trust and taking their money for my own, than to just be honest and offer a good escrow service for my users, so that the activity in the community can continue as intended :)
If that’s not convincing enough though, any 3rd party escrow service that both of the end-users agree on can be used. As long as the person or organization that offers the escrow service is trustable, it should be able to do the job.
