To the moderation: that's a really innacurate change of the title. People only have 8 more days to donate, the sense of urgency is a tad bit higher in that context. Given stories rarely stay on the frontpage across days, changing it to "8 days" would be more accurate, I think.
What kind of society we live in where corporations, whatever their political leaning or agenda is, decide how we can spend our money.. or not.
A few years ago, I've gone completely "plastic" & banished cash from my wallet. In light of developments such as this, I'm starting to reconsider my decision. Today Visa, tomorrow Square..
God forbid square starts blocking payments ... how will we ever get asian fusion tacos from our favorit food trucks?
Square uses Visa, Mastercard, etc. If Visa blocked something, you'd have a hard time buying it with square and if Mastercard + the rest did, Square wouldn't save you.
Visa doesn't get to decide how you spend your money, they get to decide how you use their system. Since no government provides electronic payments, there is no other convenient way to donate to wikileaks (mailing them cash seems risky).
Why do governments not provide electronic currency? I'm not sure, but if they did I suspect we'd be using faxes to send DES encrypted coins places.
Yes, there are problems with the system and there ought to be regulations on it, but in general it makes sense how we got here.
Bitstamp is pretty good. The only problem is that the cost of an international wire is a significant part of the purchase price unless you are converting at least 1000 USD.
Though I have reservations for Assange, I can't think of a better way to fight against Big Brother's secret machine than to donate and ask my friends doing the same.
I kinda wish Jimmy Wales would run one of his intrusive fundraising banners on behalf of WikiLeaks on this last week of open donations. That'd be hard for the US to crack down on Wikipedia in retaliation without digging itself into an even bigger PR hole. Kinda like the setup Snowden arranged by placing himself in Hong Kong.
It is fair to assume that every transactions are logged (specially that one), but I get from 1% to 3% off all my purchases with visa, so I keep using it for now...
The USA has really gone off the deep end about Wikileaks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5920530 Note the author there lives in the USA but is not a citizen. One source says NSA spying is about 2/3 foreigners and 1/3 citizens, so take from that what you will.
However I'd think they can still do far more with direct dollars/euro they receive, especially since they should have hands tied for options of converting Bitcoin to dollars. As more of the services and goods that represent their operational costs accept BitCoin, though, that problem should go away. I wonder what hope we'd have in this context without something like BitCoin becoming strong.
The Wau Holland Stiftung in Germany still accepts donations in Bitcoin and using a bank transfer for Wikileaks: http://wauland.de/de/spenden.html#04
If you use a credit card, a small percentage (processing fee) goes to the corporations that decided to sabotage the Wikileaks efforts, so perhaps you shouldn't do that ...
People are lazy, as you must know, and if WikiLeaks wants to maximize their donations the link above is more straightforward than through a German bank or BitCoins, which takes some learning and setup for those who don't have it (yet) like me.
Further, I sympathize with your idealism, but you should then refrain from using your credit card at all, should you not? In all the other cases, you are not only giving money to the corporations, but also most definitely not giving money to a non-profit! Also don't ever buy anything from big corporations again (I actually wish I could afford to do that.)
Otherwise, surely the processing fee going to the "enemy" (to quote the US of A) is a small price to pay when the chief of it is going to an organization that has the balls to stand up for our rights, as to make your request ludicrous.
Having said that, I upvoted you, thanks for outlining alternatives, which will be especially helpful after the posted donation channel is closed by Visa.
