Even if OF could accept crypto, they'd still need an off-ramp back into fiat. They can't operate only on crypto, even just stablecoins, which is itself the indictment of crypto.
I assume because as soon as you become the "place where people get crypto for adult content" then the same issues that OF is running into now become your issues as well.
Unless people are getting paid directly in crypto, they are purchasing it from somewhere, and wherever that entry point is will have this problem.
Yes, already now buying cryptos is ridiculously difficult. Any reputable operator requires KYC, which is a similar process to opening a bank account including submitting a photo ID. That's a pretty good deterrent for the random Joe against signing up on a porn site even if it's all legal.
While cryptos in of themselves are decentralized and inherently unregulatable, people forget that the interface with the real financial world is very much vulnerable.
True, but there are services like Purse.io which let you order on Amazon and pay with crypto. So theoretically, you could have your fans pay you in crypto, and you could convert that to whatever goods you want. It might not work as your only income, but could be a valuable way to supplement it.
This is a massive exaggeration. I've spent a fair amount of crypto without trying to hide it, please tell me what on.
Maybe the state can find my addresses with a bit more effort than they can find my CC purchases but random people or friends and family not so much unless I want them to.
> random people or friends and family not so much unless I want them to
What I mean is if you ever send F&F money they'll see all your previous purchases too, and if OF is a well known wallet its easy for them to see that detail.
Presumably OF would use a ton of auto generated wallets which a random family member wouldn't easily connect to them and remotely savvy users will send money from their exchange to a separate wallet for either family or OF.
There is no limit to the number of addresses you can have in Bitcoin. Best practice is to NEVER reuse an address. So this is all a lot harder than you're making it out to be. If I sent you some BTC right now, you wouldn't know what else I'd been up to with it, how much I have, which addresses are mine, etc.
The issue is likely that if there are hacks and leaks of wallet addresses tied to personas from a exchange for example then someone can build a tree pretty easily off of that
Arguably scepticism towards the Euro as a currency and Britain wanting nothing to do with it after the crisis was a key pillar of Brexit, so I wouldn’t say it went down amazingly. I remember during the campaign there was a fairly widespread notion that an overly Europhile government like Tony Blair’s might irreversibly commit the UK to the Eurozone, which was always an act that polled terribly.
Since the Obama administration the government has been using threats of increased regulatory scrutiny against banks that do not block transactions dealing with certain undesirable industries including guns, cannabis, and porn -- whether such transactions are legal or not.
No. I'm in the US and my bank even blocked sign in bonuses "just to be sure everyone is ok with it because it's a lot of money". Using plain old inter banking transfers for something like OnlyFans subscriptions is suicide and the new APIs like Zelle or Venmo are subject to even more internal regulations than credit cards regarding percentage of fraud transactions/porn.
Seems like it's the cost of fraud protection then. The European SEPA has virtually no fraud protection, unless it was a technical error (duplicate payments etc). The upside is that no-one cares who you transact with. All payments are final.
> The European SEPA has virtually no fraud protection, unless it was a technical error (duplicate payments etc). The upside is that no-one cares who you transact with. All payments are final.
Yeah, I'm used to using that domestically and rarely for business. We usually use Giros[1] for business and now Swish for more personal stuff. I think most areas now have Klarna (even the US according to Wikipedia). I wonder how much they would interfere in things like this.
Yes, they will even support drug cartels and actually even terrorists -- at least until they get caught. Nobody goes to prison anyway and the resulting fines are just price of business. See HSBC, for example.
I had a friend who ran a “sexually explicit” site you’ve heard of. He was paying north of 25% to payment processors (compare to less than .2% restaurants pay…though his margins were much bigger).
The payment processors take this attitude because that way they can tell congress they are “doing something about vice”, and in exchange not be subject to undesired regulations.
I suspect this kind of soft pressure is being applied to Apple in the background. Everyone remembers what happened to Joe Nacchio, and resisting such pressure is harder now than it was over the last four years.
Seems like a business opportunity for someone to build a Stripe for vice businesses. Question I know nothing about is besides being stigmatized, do these industries have higher fraud rates? Pretty sure credit card companies won't let you "chargeback" stripe clubs as fraud even if it wasn't you.
> Question I know nothing about is besides being stigmatized, do these industries have higher fraud rates?
Very much so. Adult businesses have extremely high rates of friendly fraud, which is worsened by the facts that 1) they don't deliver a physical product, so it's difficult for the merchant to prove that a charge was legit, and 2) some customers will charge back purchases which they regret making, or which a partner disapproves of. ("No, honey, I definitely didn't sign up for that porn site, I'll call the bank right away.")
> Pretty sure credit card companies won't let you "chargeback" stripe clubs as fraud even if it wasn't you.
Sadly the porn industry shot themselves in the foot almost a decade ago trying to scam as much money out of people as possible until VISA and MasterCard stepped in themselves and banned a terrible practice from being accepted.
Remember in 2012 the whole hubbub of "pre-checked cross-sales?"
The act of hiding the checkbox below the fold of the screen and make the visitor think there's nothing more below so they won't uncheck the box that says "Yeah, charge me $1 for this 3 day trial, but also sign me up for all these other programs that will bang my card for $60-120/each"
You'd think you were getting a 3 day trial for a buck but instead you'd be getting a $300-1000 charge on your card.
you are not wrong, but it was not every porn site doing that, yet they are all suffering from that practice.
I think it led the porn processors like ccbill to become more diligent about agreements / checking on customers doing such things and making sure they were not hidden if employed.
Sadly it's crap like that that is cited in making it harder / more expensive for small operators to do business, yet from what I gather it's harder to unsubscribe from the NY times than it is multiple porn sites these days.
I wish the exorbitant fees they charge due to higher chargebacks like that were only charged to people who engage in such things - it sucks that people who do a fair above board business are charged extra - it's just an excuse to soak others at this point.
"Stripe for vice business" wouldn't work because the payment processors are still beholden to VISA and MasterCard. This company would also have to create a whole new credit card in which majority of people are using.
You'd probably need to create a network of people that accepted physical cash and gave you crypto in return, sort of like localbitcoins.
I guess you could buy a chain of Bureau de Change outlets and have them convert cash to bitcoin, monero etc. I'm surprised this isn't already happening to be honest - they have all the infrastructure and licenses already.
I’m sure if you’re a store with a bunch of Karen’s asking if you accept an OF card for payment, you’d probably reach out to OF to figure out how to get that money that just walked out the door…
Isn't that how all payment methods get started? Apple Pay wasn't just randomly accepted, people asked and when the answer was "no," they walked out the door.
Not successfully for several hundred years, no. Bottom-up creation of payment methods isn't a thing. Please take a look at the history of the Diner's Club card, and compare it to Amex.
Apple Pay is widely accepted because of three things, ordered here from least to most important: Apple applying pressure on the processors to accept it, paying them when necessary, and the fact that giant card data breaches like Target and Home Depot meant that the whole market needed to move away from magstripe anyway. People taking grass roots action was not a part of the change in any meaningful way (at least partly because it never happened).
There's this very popular cryptocurrency story that individual people have power in this market. The problem with that narrative is that virtually nobody cares enough this issue because it's just not that important. Sorry.
My roommate is one of the risk analysts on the fraud team for a large subprime credit card company. About 45% of credit card transactions from OnlyFans are CC fraud.
for example, I think a lot of people hear this and assume the fraud is like, caused by an OF model - not delivering what was promised for example..
However seeing your statement, I am thinking it's that much fraud because criminals are getting stolen card / Id details from the darker webs and they are using other people's cards for fun things - and OF is a popular place to blow other people's money.
Maybe it's a mix of both - but I would think it's more the other way.
I remember when there were big numbers of fraud pointed at adult sites back in the day - but the core reason was so many offered $1 trials, and it was a popular way to test if a card number you got was valid / not reported stolen yet - use a cheap porn site.
I saw a (possibly npr?) story a while back saying that many criminals are now using dominoe's pizza to test if (stolen ) cards are good, because it's cheap and they get a bonus free pizza for a friend.
So it's not the pizza place or the porn site that is really encouraging the fraud or creating it.. unless you get into the weeds of they accepted a card without the exact right address and so they are a target for card testers.. that's a different discussion and such.
Yes. High value virtual content is the best way to launder money, especially if it is private content like shows.
However unless there exist payment rails outside Mastercard or Visa, no one is going to build ”Stripe.” The only way would be Stripe running on crypto, but then how people get crypto in the first place if not by a card?
EDIT: Crypto also lacks chargebacks (so called hard money).
The Sablier protocol (https://sablier.finance/) trustlessly streams crypto/stablecoins on a second/hourly/daily/monthly basis which covers use cases such as subscriptions.
No, that doesn't address the use case for subscriptions. (In fact, I'm struggling to understand why anyone would use it in its current state.) The sender of a Sablier "stream" has to set a fixed start and end time for the stream, and deposit the entire value of the stream up front. None of this makes any sense for a subscription application, where the merchant wants the subscription to recur until cancelled, and the subscriber doesn't want to make a large payment up front.
> Pretty sure credit card companies won't let you "chargeback" stripe clubs as fraud even if it wasn't you.
Of course you can. If your wallet was stolen and the perp went to the champagne room at a strip club, you would not be liable for it. The strip club knows that as well so the onus is on them to actually check that the ID matches the person and the card.
Yes, in Vegas many are checking ID for use of credit card exactly with this reason in mind. It is so common for pickpocket that otherwise they have too many such issues.
> Seems like a business opportunity for someone to build a Stripe for vice businesses.
Well, not really. The whole point is that if you do that, the government will apply soft pressure on you, until you go out of businesses.
Its an end run around of the 1st amendment, basically. A senator doesn't have to make a law, targeting you specifically. They just have to threaten your bank, that they will be punished, sometime down the line, in an unrelated law, and then the bank will, shut you down.
> Seems like a business opportunity for someone to build a Stripe for vice businesses.
It seems that was a big part of WireCard's business. Didn't turn out that well. (Though their vice business might've been one of the few parts that actually made some money...)
Everyone paying attention. Most people have never heard of him, and don't know that the USG regularly exercises huge power against private enterprise in this way.
The payment processors told him that? Which ones? I've worked for several and the reason we charged porn vendors so much was because of fraud and a staggeringly high chargeback rate.
Which congresspeople were told that payment processors were "doing something about vice"? How long ago was this?
Also Onlyfans willfully supported a scammy business model by allowing people to sell content without any preview whatsoever and cash out quickly. What would then happen was that famous women would open an Onlyfans, lie about having nudes on there, tell their fans to unlock the "nudes" for a price, fan unlocks only to discover that the woman was indeed nude but strategically covering all the good stuff. By the time complaints were being lodged the creator had already cashed out. Onlyfans tried to slow down the cashouts but the creators still had a leg to stand on since they technically didn't lie about what they were selling
Interesting. Yeah I would love to know what percentage of charge backs are a result of that vs stolen cards. It seems like adult entertainment has two significant sources of fraud then. A couple of years ago Visa clamped down pretty hard on "high risk verticals" and the threshold of charge backs they need to maintain. See:
They still have to deal with it. For example, a previous company I worked at valued every customer service call at ~$13. If it was a <$10 problem we would simply offer to refund the customer in full online, no questions asked.
Wouldn't that only affect the issuing bank, rather than the card processor? The card processor would just process a chargeback like any other CC transaction.
So I could see why issuing banks may not want to support adult content, but then there could be a porn friendly issuing bank that may charge higher fees or something.
In US you can go to many store and get such a card, pay with cash. Downsides are that some merchant (mostly internet ones) will check and refuse to accept such pre-paid options.
I think they fail at places that depend on recurring subscriptions.. so places like showtime mobile, or any place that says get a trial at X dollars, then pay Y dollars per month.. the processors gets some code returned to them telling them that the card is not able to take on recurring payments - and so many places won't work with them..
but they do work for most non-recurring type things akaik.
I have seen people have them fail - because they quickly try to use them, not knowing that many places require at a zip code to be entered that matches the card.. and if you have not logged into the pre-paid-card's portal and set a zip code.. well fail it will.
I wouldn’t know, I’m just saying the exist too in Europe. Also many of the multi-chain gift cards are also prepaid payment cards they go through the same payment system it’s much easier to leverage it than to build another one.
Some years ago I interviewed with a company that served as a payment risk processor for high-risk businesses (in short, porn).
The chargeback rate on online porn is huge. As a result, where a traditional payment processor may be 1.3–3.5% depending on the business and the assessed risk, for a high-risk business, the rate can be much much higher. While Onlyfans keeps 20%, I'm guessing that they'd be badly hurt if they had to give half that to their payment processor. I'm sure they've looked at their numbers and they find the non-porn providers are more profitable to them, especially if it means they can lower their processing fees. Booting the porn providers will likely also make it easier to recruit more non-porn providers.
Another thing that feels uniquely-US to me is chargebacks. I don't even know what's the process for initiating one in Russia. I once wanted to do that (forgot to disable auto-payment for internet in the apartment I rented and since moved from), called my bank, they told me that there's nothing they could do and I have to talk to the merchant to get a refund.
But many comments here imply that chargeback is almost as easy as clicking a button or asking nicely. How's that?
You hop on the phone with the bank and initiate a dispute. They give the merchant a chance to prove that you specifically did indeed make the purchase and/or receive a hard product. If they can't, the money is refunded to your account.
Of course, if you keep on charging back, eventually your bank will give you a polite call to let you know that they're closing out your account. This provides the incentive to be relatively honest about charge backs in addition to the fact that a false charge back is a criminal offense (fraud).
The overall theme here is difference between bank, and visa/Mastercard.
If I have a legitimate charge on my debit/chequing account, I too don't know how to reverse it directly through bank.
But if I pay with visa or Mastercard (actual credit cards), I call the toll free number or go to website and start process and go through it.
Partially it's that highbibterest rates pay for policies and systems and options and insurance. Partially that credit card fraud is common so systems must be easy for consumer. E.g. I had my credit card used by somebody else probably 5 to 6 times over 15 years. They'd call me when they detect fraud,we'd go through list of transactions, and based on quick word over phone they'd cancel all transactions that weren't mine. It's a very different process than banking.
In the US, you can't click a button to make a chargeback happen. People are eliding some of the steps or being a bit sloppy with the terminology. A chargeback is something that the bank (or rather, the credit card issuer) does to merchants.
You can log in to your credit card account, click on a transaction, and open a dispute. You have to choose a reason for the dispute. The reason has to be something like, "I was charged for a product, but never received the product."
This just starts the process. The end result may be a chargeback to the merchant.
>But many comments here imply that chargeback is almost as easy as clicking a button or asking nicely. How's that?
I can log into my banks website and, selecting any payment transaction within the chargeback period, initiate a chargeback claim by just clicking a few buttons.
Yeah I kept reading about chargebacks in USA so I tried to initiate one on a Visa card in New Zealand and it was a 6-week arduous process requiring a shitload of documentation. It didn't seem worth it for my purposes.
> I'm sure they've looked at their numbers and they find the non-porn providers are more profitable to them, especially if it means they can lower their processing fees.
I highly doubt this. There’s like no way a site that’s known for porn makes more money on what Patreon does. 99.999% impossible.
> Booting the porn providers will likely also make it easier to recruit more non-porn providers.
Pornhub can allow regular content but nobody is going to ditch YouTube, especially PG content creators, because of the name association.
Unsure as to whether booting porn will enable any other recruitment of more other providers. OF is synonymous with young girls (over 18 but still young) selling nude picture for everybody under certain age. That is what everybody is thinking when it is mentioned. If you tell somebody under 30 you have OF subscription and bookmarked site yes, but only for watching gardening video, people will think you are joking.
So, your logic is that because only 2 companies do it, that's a bad thing. Yet when every other company providing a service takes a percentage that makes it okay?
Naw, I think this site has lots of people personally having to pay that 30% cut, but when other people have to pay it they don't care because it's other people.
If you think about what payment processors actually do, dealing with fraud is one of the main costs. There's a lot of fraud associated with porn related transactions, so it can make financial sense to just drop the entire transaction category.
Payment processors and financial institutions like to use the (IMO mostly political) cover of "AML regulations" to decline service to sex workers and sex worker-adjacent businesses. Prior to the internet and OnlyFans there was at least a tenuous connection: sex work was a cash business and all cash businesses are at "higher" risk for money laundering. Pizza shops, nail salons, car washes, etc. Of course the pizza shops and nail salons and car washes still get to open bank accounts even though they're subject to higher scrutiny behind the scenes.
But that pretext for excluding sex workers from banking and payment processing really falls apart with OnlyFans. These are small, repeated, digital payments that are highly traceable because they're coming from and going to known people. And the existence of the underlying work product is easily verifiable: are the accounts actively posting content or not?
Let me remind you that eBay allowed sales of digital products and OTC medication.
For a long time, so they somehow dealt with all the supposed fraud.
Then they grew large enough to tell digital product sellers to fuck off and stepped hard on the medication sellers (pretty sure they banned anything that's more than a supplement).
PayPal did the same, or maybe it was PayPal leading that, they were the same company for a long time.
Yes except there's one major legal difference: selling marijuana is (for now) a federal crime and selling naked photos is not. So AML regulations do actually prohibit banks/payment processors from servicing marijuana businesses but they do not prohibit them from servicing OnlyFans.
Yeah, exactly. Underage performers, revenge porn, nonconsensual stuff. These are common problems for every other site with adult content so why would they be immune.
I don't know much about OnlyFans, but isn't it mostly solo performances, where the performer is the channel owner? And every viewer is paying?
That would mean you just have to confirm performer, photo ID and bank account all match. And the cost of any manual checks can be funded by your margin on the viewers' payments.
I’m sure you’re right. But the same is probably true for Reddit and YouTube and Amazon but for some reason Visa and MasterCard don’t seem so concerned...
Well, all of them have been forced to curtail some kinds of content in response to outside pressure as well. OnlyFans is just unique in being all-in on this one kind.
It's six in one and a half dozen in the other. Banks only care about sex trafficking because sex trafficking is a crime and processing money from criminal activity is... money laundering. But regardless, what's the risk of sex trafficking here? Again, these payments are coming from and going to known parties. In fact, this should be a KYC dream come true. Because of the adult content OnlyFans collects (and in the case of payment recipients, confirms) the name, DOB, and address of everyone buying and selling on the platform.
If human trafficking were the actual risk banks were trying to mitigate here then it would be difficult for any business sector that relies on migrant workers to obtain banking services but I've never heard of an almond grower having trouble opening a bank account.
I don't think I've ever been on onlyfans, but anytime I've heard the name in a news context it is associated with pay-for-porn. I don't think I've ever heard of a non-porn thing on there, whether its in the news or people advertising their fan site. Do they actually have some sort of non-porn reputation that exceeds the porn reputation that I've never heard mentioned before? From what I gather, their reputation is about the same as pornhub, when it comes to "porn." I don't see how they fix that, and stay in business. This is just an opinion of a passer-by who casually hears the name. I don't think I'm much different than most people who have never been on there, which I'm assuming is most people in general.
If the party pushing is Visa or Mastercard (of which 'other' processors like Paypal, Venmo, Cashapp are beholden to as well) that would only really leave cryptocurrency, which is a large barrier to taking payments and would likely mean >90% revenue loss anyways.
Reminder that payment processor pressure is what has caused a lot of (legal) art to be pushed off of Patreon[0].
It's not so easy. The obvious candidates all ban adult content, and the ones used by the porn industry are either owned by the same or take cuts that make the AppStore look reasonable.
Taking a 30% cut doesn’t seem that bad compared to the alternative. Why lose 90% of your revenue and all your profit just to not give a 30 or 40% cut to shitty middle man?
Unless Onlyfans actually has some decent traction outside sexual stuff. I find that hard to believe. If photos are still allowed, that’s something. But still.
From what I understand OnlyFans has essentially no other product except for this type of content though. So I would have assumed negotiating with one of these processors for a somewhat more reasonable contract despite higher fees would still be more lucrative than giving up what seems to be their core business and revenue stream.
Not a reputation thing, unless that's changed lately. You can use credit cards for all kinds of porn and various shady things, they don't care.
For decades, the specific issue was with the huge chargeback/fraud rates associated with online porn.
- People paying for porn with stolen cards
- Or, more frequently, people disputing the charges when their wives see the credit card statements and get mad, so they claim the card was stolen etc.
I just ignore all downvotes that don't give some sort of rebuttal. I just assume I pissed someone off by stating fact they didn't like otherwise. In fact, I think that would be an excellent feature - you can't downvote without an honest reply.
Remember this next time people start pushing going cashless.
Doing so means that a third party is involved in every transaction you make, and that someone else will always have veto power over your commercial transactions.
Mass adoption of crypto will come with the same problem - middlemen slipping in under the guise of efficiency and convenience, who will then be compelled to cooperate with big brother.
PayPal and other pseudo currencies already did, for a while. You bought virtual currency (which PayPal was at first, and so was e-gold, webmoney, etc) and traded that for anything you could.
Then PayPal wanted to go big, other virtual currencies were caught in fraud scandals of their own (not their users'), people just lost trust and interest when card processing became more common.
Some are still around but sellers can't be arsed to use them. Maybe they will, once again.
What type of fraud? It seems to me that it would make it basically impossible to defraud a merchant with a stolen payment method (much like cash). Do you mean merchants defrauding their customers?
Right, but that means it will be a lot easier to scam regular people. The ability to clawback money is a vital way of stopping scams over the internet.
1. Freedom of Speech extends to all parties in a relationship
2. Freedom of speech includes choosing who I work with
3. It makes sense to have certain restrictions on freedom of speech, especially as it relates to clearly harmful discrimination (i.e. racial discrimination, gender discrimination)
4. It does not make sense to restrict freedom of speech in the case of pornography, specifically, whether a company can choose to work with pornographers or not
We mandate that some companies participate in the sex trade, at least to the extent that payment processors can be considered to be participating.
The electrical company is mandated to provide power to Onlyfans' datacenters, so long as they are paying for the service.
Also there's basically only four payment processors: Visa, Mastercard, Discover and Amex. None of them specialize in adult business. There are downstream processors along the lines of PayPal and Stripe, and some of them specialize in adult business, but they're entirely beholden to the big four.
I think this is different. If the customer is unhappy with the service provided, their dispute has nothing to do with the electrical company, nor are they going to claw back payments to them.
I highly doubt they are going through CCBill. They are too expensive at volume. Since they are only charging models 20% I suspect they tried to pretend to not be adult, which they probably weren't in the beginning. But not it is almost all adult and CC processors know that and want their higher cut.
There is this from January, where MasterCard wanted sellers of adult content to have more stringent verification of the age and consent of performers in the wake of the PornHub scandal, which I’ve seen people speculating may be related: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-upda...
These aren’t explicitly linked in the story but it would make sense IMO
You know how US Dollars say “This note is legal tender for all debts” on them?
It seems to absurd to allow companies with an oligopoly on most of the transfer of those notes to pick and choose what sectors are appropriate for citizens to interact with financially.
> companies with an oligopoly on most of the transfer of those notes
This is an important distinction. Credit card payments are not notes. They are not cash. So these companies have very little to do with the transfer of cash.
The point of "legal tender" is that if you try to pay off a debt in cash, they can't claim you haven't paid it and take you to court. If you try to pay for your meal in a restaurant with cash and they refuse, you can just walk out and they wouldn't have a legal case (probably. in theory. not legal advice).
What's tricky is this has to be a debt, as in past tense. If you try to buy groceries with cash and they refuse, you can walk out but you can't the groceries with you.
Participation in the cash market is mandatory on anyone who is owed money. Everything else on top (credit cards, checks) is essentially voluntary. Merchants can take it or leave it, the processors can come or go.
If you want to make an argument about the outsized effect that Visa has on the US monetary system, that's totally legitimate. It just has little to do with the concept of "legal tender".
If you try to pay for your meal in a restaurant with cash and they refuse, you can just walk out and they wouldn't have a legal case (probably. in theory. not legal advice).
I think they would have a case, because you still owe them a debt. But then after you lose the case you can pay in cash. Just how I understand it, could be wrong. Doesn't change your point though.
The pertinent portion of law that applies to your question is the Coinage Act of 1965, specifically Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," which states: "United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues."
This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services.
~
The important distinction is payment for goods or services vs payment for a debt. Dine-in restaurants work on debt (you eat the food then pay for it), but grocery stores work on payment for goods (you get the food and pay for it in one transaction).
I don't think it's accurate to say restaurants are extending credit to their customers. If you walk out without paying, it's theft, not defaulting on a loan.
Let's say you had a business that only accepted pokemon cards as payment. One of your customers does not pay their bill, so you take them to small claims court. The judge is going to rule that they pay you the value of the card, because debts are settled with money.
The way to avoid this if you want to really pay in cash is to order the cash from your bank and have an armored car service transport it for you. There is just little point since that's more expensive than a check or ACH transfer.
And yes Civil Asset Forfeiture is pure evil, I agree.
There is no financial neutrality requirement, but perhaps there should be.
Also, that quote on the dollar has nothing to do with your argument. You seem to be projecting a layperson’s interpretation of those words instead of the relevant jurisprudence.
morality is relative.... next stop it is strip clubs, then hooters being banned?
Payment processors provide a utility. They should have the right not to process illegal transactions and illegal activities.
But as long as the activity is legal, it shouldn't be up to them to police morality.
They should be treated like utilities.
If we go down this path, the city's water and electric utilities can decide to shut down the new hooters, because it is obscene and against god (according to conservaties), or it uses women and is an oppressor (according to some liberals).
Utilities shouldn't be involved in morality policing.
There are a couple practical reasons why they wouldn't want to: high risk of fraud or chargebacks and difficulty keeping on top of content that veers into illegality spring to mind immediately.
Like paying for abortions or gay weddings in certain states? Buying cannabis from somebody on the street instead of somebody in a store 6 months later? Promoting unions depending on the decade? Letting “trespassing” black people buy coffee in shops that banned them in the 60s? Making breaking the law impossible is dangerous
This is a very legitimate concern -- payment processors could start enforcing that kind of thing based on morality.
However, unless something has changed lately, for decades the issue with adult content + online payment processors is not morality related. It's because of the high fraud/chargeback rates associated with online porn transactions.
Unless it's SESTA/FOSTA related, but I don't think anything's changed on that front for a while.
They can simply charge more based on a mathematically provable risk of fraud/chargebacks. We can regulate that to make it fair/transparent, and also regulate that payment processors must not discriminate against any activity that is legal.
Yeah, this is a fair point. I think it would make sense to require them to offer services, but let them charge a rate that allows them to make similar margins as on other business.
Why should it require specialization at all besides that laws pushed by religious conservatives to advance puritan ideals demand it? Don't be a doctor if you aren't willing to help your patient exercise their right to choose and don't be a payment processor if you're not willing to process payments in a neutral fashion. It's rediculous that at a time when equity and #metoo is all the rage that no one is talking about inequity in the law in the form of legal sandbags.
That is called democracy and yes there are a lot of things that are not sold.
General public agrees that explicit material is bad.
Right now we have in Poland shops closed each Sunday - it is annoying for me. Selling alcohol in Norway is heavily restricted and I see more and more restrictions on alcohol sales in Poland.
Explicit material is tied a lot to money laundering, there is also a lot of scams tied to it and lots of stolen cards are used to pay for explicit material. It is huge cost for payment providers, all the laws for anti-laundering trump any "payment neutrality".
If you want to see naked ladies go to "a place" and risk on your own, pay with cash.
Payment networks should operate according to laws and regulations, not reputation and public opinion. Would you want your electricity turned off because someone did not like who you were or what you believe? That is a road to tyranny.
I agree, but the law does have to consider the very different risk profile some customers present. As has been pointed out, adult businesses have to deal with shame and a lot of fraudulent chargebacks. The reality is that they are much more expensive to service.
Given that payment processors are an oligopoly, and it's incredibly difficult to build another Visa or MasterCard, they should be regulated as utilities (or at the very least, similarly to telecom providers), and be required to be content-neutral.
Just like Comcast can't tell me I can't download porn, Visa shouldn't be able to tell me I can't buy it, either.
I think you and @toomuchtodo are talking about different things.
Laws, democratic or otherwise, can indeed constrain what payment providers will allow themselves to be used for.
Public opinion short of law should not be able to add further constraints.
IMO the question of “what should Visa and MasterCard be allowed to restrict?” is the same category of question as “what category of app should Apple and Google be allowed to restrict?”
> Public opinion short of law should not be able to add further constraints.
Isn't reputational feedback one of the key enablers of the free market? Unless you want to move to a system that is fully centrally planned and noncompetitive, you'll have reputational differences (read: public opinion) affecting the success of a firm. To the extent that reputation affects a firm's success, the firm will make decisions (including "do we carry this unpopular thing") based on its reputation.
Shall we require all firms to do business with all potential partners, regardless of reputational repercussions, or if the partner has an established history of abuse (say, a contractor who repeatedly under-delivers on contracts)?
I see your point, but I was thinking specifically of the case where public opinion influences the behaviour of monopolies and duopolies. If there were e.g. a thousand payment providers each with 0.05-0.15% market shares, I’d agree with the free market and reputation approach; but as the number of important players gets smaller, public opinion becomes more like an plutocracy (because one dollar is one vote) without any of the institutional self-regulation governments develop out of necessity.
You would think that it would be profitable enough for them to become their own bank and processor if no one else would. This right here tells me they knew they couldn't. Why? Who is telling them no? How can we live in a place where LEGAL businesses are purposefully excluded from the market?
I think they should start taking Bitcoin or Monero. Fuck MasterCard and whoever dictates what they do. If you are going to be forced into bankruptcy, at least do it in style.
We really need an alternative to big payment processors like Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Stripe, etc. Moving money around is so fundamental to basic living that it shouldn't be solely possible through duopolies or oligopolies, and it is morally and ethically unacceptable that these companies seek to impost their own morals and politics upon others who are voluntarily transacting with each other. We've known this was a problem for a LONG time now, going back to when the credit card companies colluded to institute a payment blockade against Wikileaks over 10 years ago (https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-m...). I'm disappointed we aren't in a better place yet. We need renewed antitrust legislation to take control of big tech and payment processors. They are as influential as governments, and cannot be allowed to discriminate, just like your water utility cannot discriminate against you based on your personal life or politics.
https://twitter.com/danprimack/status/1428420774449266691?s=...