Fix broken link.

Author: WesleyAC

entries/1644737362-on-cryptocurrency.md

@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ As I've [discussed previously](/bitcoin-and-gold/), Bitcoin came from a fundamen
 
 Just as the fundamental libertarian philosophy of Bitcoin has been passed on to Ethereum and NFTs and "web3," so too has its unique brand of propaganda. This is especially effective in the United States, where the acceleration of income inequality since the 1980s has resulted in huge numbers of people rightfully feeling that the economic system has failed them. Structural critique is slow and difficult, though, so cryptocurrency sells a easier solution: we're smashing the system and rebuilding it, and if you get in *right now*, you'll be on top this time around. Cryptocurrency does nothing to address the fundamental problems that led to the stunning wealth inequality in the United States today, but advertises itself as a solution anyways.
 
-Part of this propaganda is pointing out problems with the current payment processing industry, which are abundant: the payment processing industry in the United States is a duopoly, with Visa and Mastercard — two extremely conservative companies — holding 60% and 30% of the market respectively. This is most immediately apparent to [sex workers](https://www.protocol.com/policy/onlyfans-visa-mastercard), porn websites, and other things that are [deemed "immoral"](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/payment-processors-are-still-policing-your-sex-life), but it casts a long shadow over the entire internet — websites and social networks live in fear of being shut out of the payment ecosystem if they allow content that's sexual or otherwise "immoral," which results in heavy handed banning of, for instance, all sorts of queer material, which is incorrectly seen as inherently sexual.
+Part of this propaganda is pointing out problems with the current payment processing industry, which are abundant: the payment processing industry in the United States is a duopoly, with Visa and Mastercard — two extremely conservative companies — holding 60% and 30% of the market respectively. This is most immediately apparent to [sex workers](https://web.archive.org/web/20230928071109/https://www.protocol.com/policy/onlyfans-visa-mastercard), porn websites, and other things that are [deemed "immoral"](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/payment-processors-are-still-policing-your-sex-life), but it casts a long shadow over the entire internet — websites and social networks live in fear of being shut out of the payment ecosystem if they allow content that's sexual or otherwise "immoral," which results in heavy handed banning of, for instance, all sorts of queer material, which is incorrectly seen as inherently sexual.
 
 It's a mistake to think that this policing of what material is allowed to exist on the internet is driven entirely by payment processors — advertisers and companies like [Apple](https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3mjxg/apple-tumblr-porn-nsfw-adult-content-banned) drive a fair amount of this is well. However, payment processors have recently been gaining power due to a shift in the economic model of creation on the internet: with the rise of Patreon, the default model for creating things on the internet has increasingly moved towards people directly paying for what they enjoy.
 @sidenote: Things are slightly more complex than this — there's also been a rise in corporate sponsorships, which are just more deceptive ads with extra steps, but the important shift is that creating things that are funded entirely by people who like those things paying for them is possible on the internet now in a way it wasn't five or ten years ago. In general, media geared towards younger people will always skew more towards ads, while media for older consumers is much more likely to be funded directly by people who enjoy it, for obvious reasons.