Gab is not a major social media platform

We need to find the source of there not being a good alternative payment processor. Without identifing the roadblocks, you are not solving the problem.

Tor's capacity has also improved a lot over the past few years

Partly due to Snowden, likely

Meaning any regulation would be a bandaid

And that is very bad

The only solution I can see is some kind of cryptocurrency

Or at lest, something with most of the same properties

There's still likely a cash-out endpoint (for the near to medium future)

But at that point you're worried about e.g. banks stopping transfers because of your opinions

I can't say there's 0% chance of that, but they seem to be used to being hated

So probably are less susceptible to the sway of popular opinion

Corporations control our money (banks) and the government indirectly controls the banks. Without something decentralized, one of the two will always shut us down

If you go with regulation, you are giving a tool to the democrats when they get back into power

I don't think the banks are quite so helpless

They were able to get themselves those bailouts, after all

It's a highly regulated industries. Only take a law or two to basically nationalize them.

But like I said, one of the two will always be able to shut you down. Corporation or government

some sort of legislation preventing financial institutions from taking ideological stances might do the trick

I agree there's always a possibility

something such that they can't refrain from doing business with you just because they don't like your politics

There always was, is, and will be

It's more about making it relatively more difficult

In the limit, you could imagine crypto being outlawed

E.g. the ISP being required to report crypto traffic, or this being sufficient cause for a search

But at this point I think you're talking about a US that's far more totalitarian that it has ever been

So there might be more...pressing issues in such a world anyway

My selfish motivation here is that I'd like to see a more decentralized/anonymized web, and if people think legislation has solved the problem it'll never come about, and many associated problems will persist as well as creating new ones

Crypto won't work. you have to be able to turn crypto into physical objects and they'll just go after the people who do that.

Plus, you'd need people to actually agree on a single form of crypto.

And BitCoin won't reach scale as currently implemented.

Do you mean that you need to be able to exchange them for physical goods?

Yes.

Because that's already doable

There's nothing preventing that

It's just not commonplace, at least not right now

I'm not saying it doesn't.

I disagree there'd need to be a single one--they'd just have to have stable exchange rates relative to each other

Over time a likely "money" would emerge

I'm saying they'll go after the people who do that as soon as it becomes "the next part of Gab"

You're correct that the current implementation can't scale