Credit is Trust?

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Linode won’t accept debit cards. Whatever Network Chuck says, linode setup doesn’t take up ‘a cup of coffee’ long worth of time, if any of the following holds true for you:

• you aren’t willing to buy a credit card
• your credit card application takes longer than it takes for your cup of coffee takes to become colder or hotter than you prefer

Why would this be a thing?

Digital Ocean doesn’t make it mandatory to use a credit card. They’ll only remember the debit card number you used to sign up for your free trial.

For linode, however, it seems important that no one be able to test out (pseudo) self-hosted services unless they are the sort of a person (or are forced into a situation where they become the sort of a person) who’s so unworthy of trust that a bank’s power to summon up a State’s legitimate coercive powers in case of credit card overcharges¹ is the only acceptable degree of verification.

It’s not like commercial banks are going to issue (or will be allowed to issue²) a MasterCard or Visa debit card to anyone without their own background verification.

I hope I’m able to figure this out with some combination of Graeber–Hudson³ & Bichler-Nitzan.

Footnotes:

1. Basis my rudimentary understanding of how credit cards work,
   – A credit card is like a bank saying they trust you spend the money at some time in the future or that they’re reasonably certain that they’ll be able to recover the money from you, in case you don’t.
   – A debit card is like the service provider trusting that you’ll have the required amount in your account and the bank will readily transfer that amount to the service provider if you setup payments like that (hey bank, this fellow is going to ask my money every month, it’s going to be a thing going ahead, okay?)
   ↩︎
2. Is it a big concern in other parts of the world that scammy banks prop up and are able to hoodwink companies like MasterCard or PayPal? ↩︎
3. How does one file ‘issues / pull requests’ with wikipedia? The Graeber page doesn’t have any hit for Hudson, while the Hudson page has one hit for Graeber. ↩︎