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1. Embed this notice
   Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@retro.social)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 04:23:47 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

   Who knows a good way to send and receive money online* that doesn't give any money to Peter Thiel?

   * in such a way that a PHP script can be triggered based on transaction data
   * that normal people who want to give me money can use, e.g. they don't have to learn anything or install an app
   * that isn't a scam or use a lot of energy

   EDIT:
   * needs to be available and usable in the US, UK, EU and Australia
   * liberapay isn't a payment processor, it's like patreon, it's just an abstraction layer over an existing payment processor (paypal and stripe, both thiel again), I need a payment processor
   * monero is cryptocurrency, I need real money
   * GNU Taler isn't real and was never real and will never be real

   I'm gonna end up working with SOME kind of bastard, obviously, but there's bastards and there's bastards y'know

   • Embed this notice
     Michael Westergaard (michael@westergaard.social)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 18:11:21 JST Michael Westergaard

     in reply to

     • Rocketman
     The banking problem crypto (initially, before it just became a synonym for scams) tried to solve was only ever a US banking problem.
   • Embed this notice
     Rocketman (slothrop@chaos.social)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 18:11:23 JST Rocketman

     in reply to

     @ifixcoinops IHMO 99.8% of the legal use cases for cryptocurrency could simply be addressed by banks upgrading their services to the technical standards of, say, the early 2000s.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Rocketman (slothrop@chaos.social)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 18:11:24 JST Rocketman

     in reply to

     @ifixcoinops Not a full solution, but: In the EU, from October 2025*, banks are required to process transactions between current accounts within 10 seconds, at no extra charge.

     I can't wait to see the back of Thiel and the the shady services he runs.

     *) banks already have to accept such "real-time" transactions since January. From October, they must also allow customers to initiate those transactions, as some already do.

   • Embed this notice
     Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@retro.social)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 18:11:25 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Make me a system where folk can sign up in two clicks and put five or ten bucks into an account and then send tiny nickel-and-dime penny-ante spare-change transactions between stripesocked ramen-eating indie game devs and webcomic artists without any per-transaction fees, and you could take like a third of the cut and these folk'd still make more money than they would do with paypal.

     Peter Thiel sucks half a buck plus four percent up his proboscis with every transaction. If the ten bucks I put into your chop-it-up-into-pennies machine instantly turns into five bucks just by virtue of you having chopped it into pennies, if you take LITERALLY HALF MY MONEY, then the church mice STILL get more money than they would with paypal or cryptocurrencies

   • Embed this notice
     Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@retro.social)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 18:11:26 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     Putting a quarter in a slot, hearing the familiar sequence of tinny mechanical clicks and swoops as it traverses the mech, swings the cradle, bounces past the magnet, flicks the microswitch, but where's the little *tish* at the end? Why don't I hear it landing in the cash bucket with all the rest of the money?

     I call the tech over to open the coin door and clear the jam and who the hell do we find squatting in there just curling his fingers closed around the coin, but Peter Bloody Thiel again. He blinks in the light and hisses and scurries off into the depths of the machine. He'll have made his nest around the ballast for the marquee I bet, they always do, they like to nest where it's warm

   • Embed this notice
     Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@retro.social)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 18:11:27 JST Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

     in reply to

     I really wish cryptocurrency was real. Like, I wish it wasn't a world-boiling pyramid scheme, but just a thing that let me send a penny to the author of whatever silly gay webcomic I'm reading whenever they post a new page, and have that penny actually arrive to them

     If someone wants to send me a quarter, I don't get that quarter, Peter Thiel gets the quarter, it just disappears. Someone sends me a dollar, I get 47 cents.

     Someone puts a quarter in the slot of one of my games, that quarter's mine now. I should be able to earn a living by asking thousands of people for a quarter every now and then