[anonym29]

Sounds like a great idea on the surface. The question is who's deciding what counts as discriminatory, intolerant, or misinformation.

Obvious examples like unabashed white supremacists aside... what happens in less clear cases, like when a Palestinian rights organization starts posting BDS stuff, and Israelis respond by calling them a terror group?

One more justification for uncensorable, provably non-inflationary digital currencies.

[theow7384iri]

It is horrible idea, PayPal is payment provider, not some sort of morality police!

[anonym29]

I agree with your view of PayPal's proper role, but as a private business, if they want to choose not to do business with neo-nazis and ilk, that's entirely within their legal rights, and many would say it's morally justifiable too.

What I take issue with more than anything else is the idea of a private business expropriating money from people based on the contents of their speech, as a change of contractual policy, buried deep in the terms of service, that many laypeople cannot be reasonably expected to read and comprehensively understand.

I'm also concerned about this policy being weaponized by bad actors. Say someone impersonates a PayPal user online and posts genuine hate speech, complete with calls to violence. Or someone sends a payment to an innocent PayPal user with a memo that implies the PayPal user was engaged in hateful or malicious conduct. What happens when someone is having a mental health crisis and says some awful things on Twitter due to genuine mental health issues? What happens if a PayPal user's online account on another platform is hacked and used to post hateful content? What safeguards are in place to ensure that only those who are actually guilty are financially penalized?

[Bud]

Digital currencies solve exactly zero parts of this issue. Nor are they magically "non-inflationary"; that's just hilarious.

[bpodgursky]

How does it fail to prevent this? If you are the custodian of your own digital wallet (vs a PayPal account or linked bank account), PayPal cannot just remove money; it's not technically possible. All transactions are user-initiated.

It's fine to dislike crypto, there are valid reasons, but let's be factual here.

[somenameforme]

He is referring to the finite supply. In 1960 the entire US monetary supply (M2) was $300 billion. Today it's $22 trillion. When there's so much more money out there inflation is inevitable. Monetary velocity is the true driver, but greater supply tends to drive greater velocity.

By contrast sometime around 2140 the final Bitcoin will be mined, and we're already reducing the number mined per block. Inflation can still happen for reasons besides supply, but it's generally much less probable.

[anonym29]

My post was not stating that digital currencies are inherently, "magically" non-inflationary.

To me, it sounds like someone is either ignorant or arguing in bad faith for them to suggest that there are no digital currencies which are non-inflationary. BTC will never exceed 21 million bitcoins in circulation.

To address your other concern - the "problem" being addressed is a private company seizing your money over the contents of your speech. With self-custody of digital currencies like Bitcoin, it is not possible for third parties to expropriate your funds, provided you have protected your private key.

[jagraff]

Non-inflationary currencies are a bad idea. Without inflation, hoarding is incentivized, and investment discouraged (or at least, decreased). Currency is most useful when people spend it - money in bank accounts is useless for society.

[anonym29]

The decision to weigh the needs of society over the rights of an individual to retain the value derived from the productive output of their own labor is not a given.

You own your body. Your labor is just you consciously deciding to operate your body in a manner that fulfills the needs of someone else in exchange for something of value. The value of your money being diluted is, for the worker, no different from wage theft by an employer - the rightful compensation from your productive labor being taken from you without your consent.

[hbrn]

> rights of an individual to retain the value

Those rights are not a given either. In fact this is a first time I hear those are "rights".

If I pick an apple from a tree using my productive labor, somehow apple doesn't seem to care about my rights and starts to rot.

Are you sure you're not confusing rights with desires?

[anonym29]

Your apple analogy is not applicable here, because inflationary monetary policy is optional and instated by deliberate human choice, the decay of fruit is a non-optional natural process, not the result of deliberate human choice.

Inflation is a tax, albeit an indirect one. It decreases purchasing power of the citizens (with the greatest harm incurred by the most vulnerable), it decreases the value of the nominal debt held by the government, and it's produced outside of a democratic process (federal reserve is, in theory, independent - not subject to the demands of politicians, who, in theory, represent the interests of the people).

A tax that nobody voted for, that harms the poor and helps the government is nothing like the natural decay of an apple. It's value being taken from you without your consent, not unlike a mugger taking value from your wallet in the form of the currency itself.

Many people engage in labor in exchange for value, denominated in currency. Theft of the value of the currency, ultimately, boils down to theft of labor.

[hbrn]

Nothing you said explains why retaining value of past work is a human right.

Most results of the productive output decay same way as apple does.

If you trade iPhone for a car, both car and iPhone will lose value over time. But in your world if you trade iPhone for $1000, only iPhone will lose value. That doesn't seem fair.

Furthermore, you're saying it harms most vulnerable, but I don't believe it is generally true.

If both a billionaire and a salaried working class person lose 10% of their wealth, gap between the two shrinks. Of course, laws of nature are such that rich are getting richer, but that's a different story.

[anonym29]

Clearly, the working class person who loses 10% of their purchasing power has to forgo more essentials than the billionaire who loses 10% of theirs. Maybe that means the working class person can't keep the lights on, maybe they eat 400 calories a day to ensure their children have adequate nutrition.

Plus, flatly rejecting the notion that people have a right to not have the value of their wages stripped by deliberate, human intervention in the first place - with a rationalization for wage theft of "some of the things you would buy with your wages lose value over time anyway"?

Forgive me for having a hard time taking you seriously - you're starting to sound a bit like Tucker Carlson. Have you ever actually been part of the working class?

[tmn]

This is an often held view. Just for fun. Let me play devils advocate. Yes, currency hoarding (saving) is incentivized. This raises the bar for investing to investing that is needed / has clear value. Similarly, with an inflationary currency, it is real things that are incentivized to be hoarded. Is it not better to save currency and let real things circulate more freely to those who actually need them, as opposed to speculators.