> they've allowed for a sort of emergent, leaderless cult based on collective creation of the memes that drive it.

with a high entertainment appeal, might i add!

bc some "schemes" do work, like that friend or relative who got in early on a hot stock. any investment, including those granted the veil of legitimacy, can collapse at any time just as they can continue to skyrocket nonsensically. herd behaviour

crypto has so many of its own problems i can see why people make this mistake

> The hardest thing is making sure you're not falling afoul of the money laundering laws or accidentally financing 'terrorism'.

i.e. complying with compulsory government regulation enacted for those ends, which is a huge barrier to entry.

for example, the platform can't commingle funds in a single bank account and use accounting to keep track of who is owned which beans. they have to set up separate bank accounts for each user!

you dont think someone would, given the opportunity, throw some cash to an author who strongly supports their own biases? dont some people buy books just to that, never intending to even read them?

This already happens, we just call it "payments" or "subscriptions". I see micropayments as being a different species.

.news top level domain is enough to put me off this

Yeah I don’t know why they did that. It makes it look like the network is not a generic social network but a community-fueled news site. But maybe it is? But then it’s not a Twitter alternative. That is a popular but still mere subset of Twitter.

to me its a tell investors are not fully committed. they are throwing an MVP at the wall to see if it sticks

bc we've been conditioned to expect everything online for free: email, news, social sharing, etc. its been subsidized by investors and access to our "data".

its also bad design/marketing. i hate paywalls, too. but i'd gladly throw a bone here or there if given the opportunity, just like hitting an upvote button. so dont call it a payment or implement a payment system; call it something else that conveys gratuity/gift/support/tip/whatever

there is a market for supporting content creators. most people dont want or cant afford to pay. of those who do and can, many would prefer to do so ad-hoc (vs subscription). offer them that power and i think you'd be surprised. just like a waitress who receives a $100 tip.

If I were to guess, I'd say the same way adblockers work on browsers: blacklisting domains. Sendgrid was given as an example. They could also block using image size (1px) or location (end of message body).

That being said, I see your point. It's a game of Whack-a-Mole. What's to stop businesses from setting up a cname record on their domain to Sendgrid, for example?

The next whack-a-mole move, inspect CNAMEs to see if they reference blocklisted domains

Seriously, how did they get around KYC (“Know Your Customer”) and AML ("Anti-Money Laundering") regulations? GoFundMe, as a MSB ("Money Service Business") is required by law to verify their customers' identitues (https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...). If Yelp did not provide this information, they both are violating MSB regulations.

Don’t know if gofundme is subject to those but yelp certainly wouldn’t be.

Any business that takes even 1 cent from someone and gives it to someone else is, by the definition provided on the url I shared above, a MSB. GoFundMe certainly is. Yelp is not, but they are culpable by this business business arrangement.

From your link on MSB "for an amount greater than $1,000 per person, per day, in one or more transactions." - so, no.

From my link "a person who engages as a business in the transfer of funds is an MSB as a money transmitter, regardless of the amount of money transmission activity." (emphasis mine)

So, YES. Did you just stop reading after your bias was confirmed?