Add new comment

Is using refrigerators being supportive to the animal exploitation industry just because fridges are used for meat and dairy? No, a fridge can be damn useful for plenty of more ethical purposes.

Hawala is a system of transferring funds by removing traceability and possibility for the freezing of funds, through using compartmentalization of transfers across several instances that are unrelated on the surface. Think of it as a Tor for money transfer, in some way. For an example of how this can work:

- You wanna send 200 USD to some anarchist in Indonesia, and you wanna insure they'll receive the equivalent of 200 USD.

- You buy the equivalent of 200 USD in some crypto currency (ideally one that ain't too volatile), then give this amount of crypto to a support group based in Indonesia.

- Support group has a reserve of money to cover for potential losses and exchange fees for money transfers (in the case of crypto, likely losses in value due to volatility)

- Support group buys money in the local currency, for the same amount in crypto equating to 200 USD, to give it to the recipients or their peers authorized to give it to them. They can add extra paranoid security if they want, by transferring to another crypto currency in-between, or dividing the payment in several parts.

- Recipient gets of 200 USD worth of local tomatoes at some point. Control freak government is puzzled as to where all these fresh, local, organically-grown tomatoes come from. They think it may have come from some local farm that's supplying all the grocery stores in the region, so they don't bother going after the farmer...

So it seems, anarchist funding, at least in US and Canada, has shown some absurd retardation in adopting such a system, rather depending on awful funding intermediaries like Paypal (???) or just bank transfers. Like every time I tried to push anarchist support groups to adopt more confidential means of transferring I was answered with a smug reply, when there was a reply at all.

It's like if you're unwilling to look into safer funding schemes that can avoid compromising any party in a payment, what are you doing in anarchist support in the first place? It's groups insisting on organizing actions through Facebook as if there's no other way of getting participants.

I don't get how we got big brain theorists all over this site who can't understand hawala, or how beneficial it can be. Like where's your head at?

...but if you want it easy, there's this online service called TransferWise that is purportedly a kind of hawala, tho not sure it's as confidential as an anarchist funding scheme could be, if you ppl would get your shit together in a century or two, maybe?