Elon Musk-controlled satellite internet provider Starlink has told Brazil’s telecom regulator Anatel it will not comply with a court order to block social media platform X in the country until its local accounts are unfrozen.
Anatel confirmed the information to Reuters on Monday after its head Carlos Baigorri told Globo TV it had received a note from Starlink, which has more than 200,000 customers in Brazil, and passed it onto Brazil’s top court.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes last week ordered all telecom providers in the country to shut down X, which is also owned by billionaire Musk, for lacking a legal representative in Brazil.
The move also led to the freezing of Starlink’s bank accounts in Brazil. Starlink is a unit of Musk-led rocket company SpaceX. The billionaire responded to the account block by calling Moraes a “dictator.”
That’s a really good point. Starlink can ignore this order, but the courts can order banks to stop processing payments to them. Pretty sure Starlink isn’t going to “protest” this at the cost of profits.
Of rourse Starlink could then go be further shady by taking payments in Bitcoin to get around it. It’s an interesting arms race to follow.
Brazil is well within its rights to sanction Starlink and prosecute people for evading said sanctions, and have people pay fines and go to prison for buying Starlink with Bitcoin.
Just like the US does with Iran and Cuba.
How would they know it’s been paid by Bitcoin?
Because it’s very easy to track bitcoin?, that argument about bitcoin being untraceable is so funny, like it’s literally in bitcoin protocol to log every single transaction, and people need to convert money to bitcoin, easy to track there too
So tell me, where does the government link the person to the coin? I do a cash trade to buy Bitcoin, who logs it’s me and puts my name on the wallet for the government to track me down?
The exchange where you traded BTC for USD, which had to comply with AML and KYC laws in order to have access to the US banking system in the first place.
Like, it’s theoretically possible to work with perfect operational security and never ever link your Bitcoin address to the real world, but doing so basically precludes you from doing anything in the real world with it, including buying crypto in the first place.
Google anonymous Bitcoin… I’ll wait.
Yeah, mate. This is the most credible source I can find and it’s literally about how impossible it is to actually use crypto without tying yourself to the wallet somehow.
https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/guide-how-to-buy-bitcoin-anonymously/
There are at least half a dozen ways well within the reach of just about anyone.
You need to pay a bank or something to trade your money to bitcoin, the bank only need to log what bitcoin it send to you or your wallet, the thing is, bitcoin isn’t anonymous it was never made to be, something like monero would be better, but you still need to trade your money for the crypto
Anyone can send anyone with a wallet bitcoin. There are services that do anonymous trades, the feeds don’t look great.
Thing is, it doesn’t have to be bitcoin to be opaque to the banks, there are dozens of payment services that don’t clearly state the end provider. just doing paypal is enough to hide it from an occasional glance.
They need a dish to operate, check for dishes and fine people for breaking trading laws by dealing with a company that has been sanctioned.
Just because the dish exist doesn’t mean it’s still being used. You have to do a blanket ban on having the dish at all. And even then they’re kind of tiny and easy to camouflage. You’d probably have to make the enforcement penalty scary enough to dissuade them. Or pay neighbors to rat each other out