Why does it bottom out in these credit card companies? Is it just prohibitively hard to set up a competitor because you need some critical mass of banks to sign on? Or because people want to pay with credit card and cc companies will prohibit transactions to a fledgling competitor?

Ultimately the ones who issue the credit are the banks. Banks have a lot of rules to follow set by the government. They are the ones who created visa and mc. PayPal, stripe all these other services ultimately rely on them. You can do BTC, but there is risk there to with trasaction costs and changing exchange rate.

These banks want to reduce thier risks as much as possible. CC laws in America provide a lot of protection for the consumer.

It's not about 'rules' and not even so much mitigating risk - it's just basic cartel/oligarchy practices.

They do it because they think it's good for them, and/or they can.

It sometimes only takes one person, doing what they think is right, for whatever reason, for a lot of this stuff to happen.

Edit: we like to think that large systems are intelligent. Sometimes they are, if there are thoughtful rules and processes. More often than not - there aren't. CEOs lean on M&A teams to buy companies for a lot of money on a hunch. Because they 'liked' someone, or something, even when the research shows otherwise. When situations are politicized especially outside the scope of clear operational guidelines ... it can just be 'one person'.

Example: the CEO or someone else could send a half-sentence email 'do this' (i.e. shut down a customer) and it will get done. Maybe there was process, maybe not. Maybe it's politics, risk aversion. Maybe it's not corporate risk aversion but individual risk aversion, i.e. a VP not wanting to create a fuss. Maybe there's an outside body putting pressure on Visa/MC and someone inside doesn't want to put up a fuss. Maybe it's favours for favours. Maybe it's avoiding the ire of the Feds. Maybe there's a specious court order that Visa/MC thinks is spurious, but they don't want to bother arguing it. Maybe a a key customer or two are complaining. Maybe the PR lead is putting up a scare, indicating that there's going to be some major press about it soon and they need to get ahead of this. Maybe the VP Legal is protecting themselves. Or is being risk averse.

Even when it's complicated, it's often not complicated in a nice, rational way.

In my experience with large organization, it's really the reduction of personalities, self-interest, risk avoidance, sycophantism, 'following orders' etc.. There's rarely an overall coherent, thoughtful dynamic to these kinds of things.

But maybe there is a clear story here ...

"you’re not recording, I’m not recording"

Funny how it ended up in a transcript

There's a whole lot of conspiracy speculation in there, especially the idea of "SPLC's anti-conservative purge".

Simply put, being associated with hard-right political figures is seen as problematic by Mastercard, Patreon, Paypal etc., and they are trying to minimize their risk, because they don't want to lose business. They have to do this, due to their obligations to shareholders, boards of directors and advertisers, who are all very concerned about public opinion's influence on their bottom line.

If you want to get to the heart of this "voluntary censorship", you have to either improve the public image of hard-right figures, so they're no longer seen as problematic, or break the reputation/bottom line relationship, or outright change the way businesses are run and held accountable, which would probably mean changing some fundamental things about capitalism.

Unless you want to abolish capitalism outright, I would suggest lessening the grip of corporations on payment services, and introduce a federal bank and federal payment service for the people. After all, isn't the ability to make and receive payment a public good on the level of water and electricity? Make it for everyone, equally.

Or... they could just not do anything. They're payment processors and moving legal funds is their purpose. Nobody knows they underpin a lot of these payments and being invisible infrastructure is their advantage.

Getting involved makes everything worse as now a larger population knows what's happening. It's a perfect example of the Streisand effect.

> There's a whole lot of conspiracy speculation in there, especially the idea of "SPLC's anti-conservative purge".

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/maajid-nawaz-splc-apolog...

SPLC Apologizes, Pays Settlement to Islamic Reformer It Wrongly Labeled ‘Anti-Muslim Extremist’

The Southern Poverty Law Center has reached a settlement with liberal Islamic reformer Maajid Nawaz and his organization, the Quilliam Foundation, for wrongly including them on its now-defunct list of “anti-Muslim extremists.”

The SPLC announced Monday that it has agreed to pay Nawaz and Quilliam $3.375 million “to fund their work to fight anti-Muslim bigotry and extremism.” The settlement was the result of a lawsuit Nawaz filed in April over his inclusion on the SPLC’s “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.”

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_6646994?ec_carp=612494826...

Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson has been added to the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s (SPLC) list of anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender extremists.

https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jun/29/guidestar-rem...

Gunmen have twice targeted conservatives specifically cited by the SPLC for hate: Republican Rep. Steve Scalise, who was shot June 14 by a fan of the SPLC Facebook page, and the Family Research Council, whose security guard was wounded in 2012 by a man who said he found the FRC on the SPLC’s list of “anti-gay groups.”

As far as conservative organizations are concerned, being labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center isn’t just annoying — it’s dangerous.

SPLC serves a very important role of shining a light on dangerous extremists, such as this guy:

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/12/20/longtime-anti...

Scary stuff. That's the real reason to use and encourage Crypto: to avoid political censorhip and control. Its a shame it was co-opted by mining and speculation.

Had bitcoin not been sold as a way to get rich, it's likely that most people would have still never heard of it.

It's unfortunate that most people misunderstand what Bitcoin is because they can only think of it in terms of legacy financial instruments (ie, treat it like a stock).

However, there's no doubt that many people who are in it for the technology and liberty got to know about it because someone else made money and started bragging.

This is something I've understood for awhile; I agree with you in all but timing. I think the original idealism behind crypto-currency started to die when the first providers and vendors started accepting bitcoin for services or products.

Those first few folks made a decision, either consciously or subconciously, and it was based on how much 1btc is worth. Ideologically, it's worth 1btc. So either they accept that, or they themselves begin to shape the exchange rate to other currencies.

The beginning of the end was probably well before that; it started with whoever the first person to exchange btc for other currencies was.

It _is_ a pyramid scheme, in which the originators and some early adopters all of the BitCoin. 0.1% of bitcoin owners have over 50% of all BitCoin. 1% of owners have over 90%. That's 2017 data. If adoption grows, the fractions of owners will essentially drop by another factor of 10.

These people's coin cannot be devalued by inflation - only by dumping Bitcoin. So encouraging adoption is encouraging buying into the pyramid scheme and enabling these people to use their ill-gotten gains to take people's stuff.

  co-opted by mining

Mining is a fundamental requirement for crypto..