There’s been some craziness happening lately. Recently, PayPal came up with a new policy that they will be fining their users $2,500 for promoting whatever it determines is “misinformation.” This obviously made a lot of their users unhappy and consequently, people have been deleting their accounts to boycott PayPal.
It got so bad that PayPal lost 13% of its value with that single act. To salvage the situation, PayPal claimed that they never intended to fine people for misinformation and offered users a $15 PayPal voucher as a bribe to stop them from canceling their PayPal accounts.
As if that wasn’t enough, PayPal Hong Kong halted services for the League of Social Democrats (LSD). Now, LSD is unable to collect donations for its cause.
The LSD is one of Hong Kong’s remaining pro-democracy groups and PayPal stopped services to LSD’s accounts due to unspecified “excessive risks.” PayPal Hong Kong didn’t specify what amounted to “excessive risks”
This almost appears to be an attempt to silence their efforts to fight for democracy in Hong Kong.
Why bitcoin is important more now than ever
It’s almost as if Satoshi Nakamoto had a premonition that something like this would happen. What PayPal has been doing in the past couple of weeks shows just how controlling a centralized institution can be.
You might be able to have an account with a financial platform like PayPal. However, the company still has the power to close or restrict your account as they please and can even get away with not giving a clear explanation of their criteria for restricting your account as in the case with LSD.
This doesn’t just happen with platforms like PayPal but with banks and government institutions too. Recently, Kanye West’s business account for Yeezy LLC with JP Morgan Chase Bank was closed down. JP Morgan Chase Bank, in their official letter, the American bank severed banking relations with Kanye West without stating an official reason for ending the banking relationship.
Just recently Wise (the former TransferWise) stated that starting from November 1, 2022, they will be suspending USD transfers to Nigeria. This is going to affect a lot of remote workers receiving their salaries from foreign companies as well as remittances coming into the country.
Bitcoin is truly decentralized in nature. This means that it can’t be controlled by any institution, central bank, or government. Since bitcoin can’t be controlled by anybody, that means no one can come in to close your bitcoin account/wallet. So long as you hold your own keys, your bitcoin is safe.
What PayPal and JP Morgan Chase Bank did would be literally impossible if the users had their money in bitcoin. Remote workers in Nigeria wouldn’t have to worry about payments being cut off because of companies like Wise stopped their services.
If this doesn’t give you a strong reason to be confident about bitcoin, we don’t know what will.