I hope the EU will come up with a central bank backed alternative soon.
PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”
61–70 of 216 posts
Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”
#62Based on my experience as a developer and user I can't understand how PayPal got so big and ubiquitous. I had the worst experience ever in trying to set up our recurring billing system with them, wasting several days of work, to the point that I simply gave up, switched to Stripe, and got everything up and running, in production, in hours. Even as a consumer I had a terrible experience when trying to send money abroa…
Perhaps part of the reason was the ease of access for minors. I'm now over 18, but when PayPal got popular, my friends and I were under 18 so we weren't allowed to purchase stuff (like video games) online since we didn't have our own credit/debit cards. PayPal used to not verify your age so it was perfect for this type of stuff.
PayPal was the first free electronic way to send and receive money to people in the US, to my knowledge. Which is a sad indictment of the US’s infrastructure.
Even today, so many people use Venmo, which is still PayPal. Apple Cash seems to work well, but still involves an unnecessary middleman like PayPal.
Zelle is the only half decent solution, that doesn’t involves third parties.
Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another example for keyword matching: I work on a German/Polish team. We sent money for a birthday present from Germany to Poland. Someone used the colleagues' nickname "Kuba" in the subject line. The Paypal account of the Polish colleague was blocked afterwards. But he could resolve the issue via support afaik.
I'm guessing it's because of Cuba. I'd wonder why the US is still embargoing Cuba after all these years. What's the endgame? What's the goal? The Cuban regime is still there and the Soviets are long gone. It seems petty and spiteful.
Florida is an important swing state, and it’s also the home to a lot of anti-Castro Cubans in exile, and their descendants. Politics.
Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another example for keyword matching: I work on a German/Polish team. We sent money for a birthday present from Germany to Poland. Someone used the colleagues' nickname "Kuba" in the subject line. The Paypal account of the Polish colleague was blocked afterwards. But he could resolve the issue via support afaik.
I'm guessing it's because of Cuba. I'd wonder why the US is still embargoing Cuba after all these years. What's the endgame? What's the goal? The Cuban regime is still there and the Soviets are long gone. It seems petty and spiteful.
Like most things in America it comes down to political pandering thanks to the two party system. You may have noticed a lot of progress or corruption on the Cuba front in recent memory based on your political affiliation. There is a large “Cuban” American population that primarily hates the regime in control of Cuba and will support the political opponent that is speaking tough on Cuba. Whether you care about Soviet’s or Communism or revenge is irrelevant because what you do care about is south Florida and South Florida still cares deeply.
Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the kind of thinking that lead to the TSA putting infants, and even a US Senator, on the US no-fly list because their names matched those of "known terrorists." The Washington concept of NATIONAL SECURITY is a brain-eating parasite that seemingly renders compliance managers unable to tell the difference between categorically different things, such as US Senators and IRA terrorists, or Serbian companies named…
> seemingly renders compliance managers unable to tell the difference between categorically different things Because it renders them liable. The whole system will turn against you if you give it an opportunity to nail you for using discretion. And this happens everywhere in society after a certain size is reached due to the need to hold people accountable without actually being able to fully evaluate who or what is t…
Only if there was some sort of cohort of people who would be able to judge actions to see if they are liable.
Perhaps we aren't scaling the judiciary system propley & allowed it to become overly complex so that only a certain subsect of the population can navigate it efficiently and an even smaller portion of that can litigate for others.
Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”
#66Per [0], a possible answer to this seems to be that an arms dealer had connections to a company called Tardigrade Ltd. and all transactions with firms like these are prohibited which is why the word "Tardigrade" made it into PayPal's filter. As long as companies like PayPal have issues like that, or with moderation in case of Youtube, Twitter or Facebook, I'd claim neither of these companies have actually solved scal…
Next time somebody here creates a shell company for very bad things, please try naming it YPal!
Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the kind of thinking that lead to the TSA putting infants, and even a US Senator, on the US no-fly list because their names matched those of "known terrorists." The Washington concept of NATIONAL SECURITY is a brain-eating parasite that seemingly renders compliance managers unable to tell the difference between categorically different things, such as US Senators and IRA terrorists, or Serbian companies named…
> seemingly renders compliance managers unable to tell the difference between categorically different things Because it renders them liable. The whole system will turn against you if you give it an opportunity to nail you for using discretion. And this happens everywhere in society after a certain size is reached due to the need to hold people accountable without actually being able to fully evaluate who or what is t…
Or because a false positive doesn't render them liable, or if it does, the punishment isn't harsh enough.
Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
PayPal compliance is a very different problem to social media moderation. Financial regulations require any transaction that is "suspicious" in any way of having links to terrorism financing or money laundering be reviewed, and there are large and personal penalties for not doing so. And a review is expected to be more like auditing your customers entire financial history than just asking what they meant by a word, s…
Well completing Know Your Customer checks and audits is sort of their job, isn’t it? They provide a service, saying that they will process payments unless the payment is prohibited by government sanctions. But instead of carrying out actual due diligence, they just block anything remotely related and put the onus and cost of doing their own job on their customers. At least they should have a better process to start p…
You're right but I think you'd perhaps be surprised how international sanctions monitoring works.
Example, I know one of the largest banks in Europe used to have payments they sent to one of their South American branch offices blocked from time to time because their address in Brazil or Argentina or something was on a street called "Avenue de Cuba".
Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”
#69Per [0], a possible answer to this seems to be that an arms dealer had connections to a company called Tardigrade Ltd. and all transactions with firms like these are prohibited which is why the word "Tardigrade" made it into PayPal's filter. As long as companies like PayPal have issues like that, or with moderation in case of Youtube, Twitter or Facebook, I'd claim neither of these companies have actually solved scal…
Are you telling me I can start website called "ebay ltd" and get donations from paypal for hosting wikileaks and snowden leaks and paypay might block ebay transactions along with my ebay ltd?
No because Ebay is well known, but pick a name of a small to medium start up and yes you can probably kill their paypal account
Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> seemingly renders compliance managers unable to tell the difference between categorically different things Because it renders them liable. The whole system will turn against you if you give it an opportunity to nail you for using discretion. And this happens everywhere in society after a certain size is reached due to the need to hold people accountable without actually being able to fully evaluate who or what is t…
Only if there was some sort of cohort of people who would be able to judge actions to see if they are liable. Perhaps we aren't scaling the judiciary system propley & allowed it to become overly complex so that only a certain subsect of the population can navigate it efficiently and an even smaller portion of that can litigate for others.
For some ideas, see http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsCo...