i believe at this point, access to a bank account is also included in this. as things progress, more things will be added to the list. soon (if not already) internet access will be included.
I've made this argument before and made Americans (obviously) mad, but this cop out of protected classes allows you to actually discriminate against said classes, you just have to prove there is no malice in your heart, more or less. That is, you did not because they are black or not men, but because of the sanctioned reasons, then it's okay.
That is how protected classes are defined. Everyone is in multiple protected classes.
The problem is the effectiveness of the rules, not that they don't cover everyone.
What they can't do is deny you a contract in the first place. (Kontrahierungszwang – obligation to contract, concerns the local water company, the biggest local electricity provider and Deutsche Telekom)
I'm pretty sure these banks doing the profiling were in the U.S
Ah yeah like they were on the hook for laundering Mexican drug cartel money?
Actually, no; they won't.
That is unless you find a crooked banker (probably a number of them), which is willing to help.
While it's a nice illusion that a bank will do anything for money and this may have been the case 30 years ago this has massively changed.
The reputational risk and the risk of criminal prosecution, including loss of the banking license in critical markets, is much too big as that a reputable bank would willingly engage in such shenanigans nowadays.
That's not saying that it doesn't happen (see recent examples), but if it happens it's virtually always under circumvention of risk management and compliance departments at a bank.
There are tons of references online, but these are some:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-12-12/hsbc-mexi...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/jul/17/hsbc-execut...
https://www.foxnews.com/world/hsbc-knowingly-helped-mexican-...
Second link: they kowtowed to Congress because it would be worse if they hadn't. Look at what they actually did: they complied with the law and advised their clients on how to comply with the law. That's their job.
Third link appears to be all about allegations in a lawsuit rather than anything that was proven.
If it's about all sorts of illegal activities, shouldn't law enforcement use these things as a resource, rather than driving it underground?
In a previous life I administered websites for a number of different businesses. One was a dating site that opened a small business account at a bank and then a couple weeks later the bank abruptly terminated their account, stating that they were not equipped to service "entertainment" business accounts. I guess their real reason was they considered there to be some risk that there would be soliciting going on and it wasn't worth the bother for the bank. The bank was very brash about it, stating that they can close an account at anytime for any reason.
I guess we should close all the bankers accounts because of Lehman Brothers. Politicians also.
Very possibly what spurred PayPal to make this change.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/she-was-18-and-tricked-into-do...
That doesn't necessarily make them, or their principals, immune to US civil or criminal sanctions.
And the list grows longer every day.
Not quite correct: the pirates actually have or enjoy a superior product; they don't have to "ignore" anything. The legal product has annoying anti-piracy warnings that legal purchasers are forced to sit through, while the pirated versions don't have these warnings at all, so the people who use these versions enjoy a better viewing experience.
On top of that, the format is superior. Legal viewers are restricted to DVDs (very low quality), Blu-Rays (high-quality, but inconvenient and bulky physical format), or streaming (varying quality, subject to problems due to transmission path), while pirates get to have a simple digital file on their computer which is whatever quality they want (i.e. they can choose to download a lower or higher-resolution/bitrate version) which is now local so it can't be suddenly restricted by studio executives who want to make it exclusively available on their streaming service, and it won't be unavailable because your internet connection is slow or down.
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-ba...
Not in Australia.
I used to get "funny" too when sending money through PayPal to friends, never again.
In the description I put "fun times". I had a call from my bank asking me to explain the payment the next day. I've never been called before nor since that.
It certainly feels like they're a bit touchy about certain references.
I recently started using Venmo to pay a few people and the things I have wrote are awful. Recent examples include: "Human organ trafficking" "Lunch and murder for hire", "sack of shrunken heads" and so on. Let them call me.
Maybe they've gotten more permissive but don't do this with money you can't afford to lose.
I want to be as under the radar as I can be when it comes to stuff like this. My attitude is that the bank already knows too much about me, why give them more rope?
> You must meet certain day-to-day responsibilities if your business is covered by the Money Laundering Regulations. These include carrying out ‘customer due diligence’ measures to check that your customers are who they say they are, and risk assessing your business.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/money-laundering-regulations-you...
(That entire page, like the rest of gov.uk, is comprehensive and very accessible to read for a layman. If you have any passing interest in the area I recommend giving it a skim.)
They've otherwise been quite reliable since so jumping ship now would almost be asking for trouble.
Edit: It wasnt 15 years ago this happened, it was perhaps a decade. I'd already been a customer for some time.
I'd say they quite overstepped the boundaries. What are fun times to you and the recipient is certainly not their business. Why would they even waste time reading the RE line if they aren't doing your accounting for you at the same time?
There is even a party rental company named Fun Times. Would they interrogate every cheque written to/from them?
[0] Conditions apply: A bank isn't forced to do business with somebody who defrauded them in the last 3 years, for example. But the decision must be made timely (10 days), it must be explained and there's a well-defined path to legal review. Details at https://www.bafin.de/DE/Verbraucher/Bank/Produkte/Basiskonto...
If your friend sends you money "for sexual favors", that might be considered taxable income and you'll find yourself having some explaining to do.
The laws around things like sex work or drug consumptions, in most countries, are full of grey areas and willfully-contradictory positions (e.g. one can buy but the other can't sell, etc). So as soon as a transaction is categorised as part of a "problematic" economy, then police can get involved. If your bank lets through "hooker money" unchallenged, the police can eventually accuse the bank of facilitating activities which might be, at some level, criminal.
This seems weird, but is actually a perfectly reasonable legal regime that's all about power dynamics and enabling the authorities to approach people. Drug users and prostitutes are in much more vulnerable positions than drug dealers and johns respectively.
If you make selling drugs a crime, but not buying/owning those same drugs, now the police can approach addicts much more easily, and get them help (this is the much-lauded Portuguese model).
The same logic applies in reverse to prostitution: if selling sexual favours is legal, but buying is illegal, prostitutes are enabled to report abusive johns to the police, and authorities can approach them much more easily to try and get them off that life too.
The facts on the ground are that, dissuasion or not, these economies will never go away ("oldest profession", after all). Full legalisation would allow for complete oversight of such murky sectors, which would ensure everyone's safety better than the current arrangements, at all levels. For example, in many countries there is no way for prostitutes to legally ensure their own security, because any sort of professional relationship with a sex-worker is illegal (even if the business itself is not); at that point, whether they have recourse post-abuse or not, is basically irrelevant.
The legal situation around cannabis and prostitution is just a shitshow in most places, driven as it is by outdated sensibilities which have ossified through short-term political calculation. There is no point trying to find in it a logic that is simply not there.
Full-on legalisation is not universally desirable, though — there's always heroine, cocaine, crack, meth... — and the asymmetric legality thing is still a very useful tool in those circumstances.
There are some truly horrible substances, but with current approach heroin and weed are sold by the same guy.
Also famously you do have to pay taxes on illegal income, otherwise the income is both illegal and tax fraud.
Last year there was a news article about someone getting a phone call from the bank because the description in a money transfer contained the substring "ISIL".
Machine learning is actually a misnomer. A more accurate term is function interpolation.
Let's say I have a training set of 5000 samples.
When I kick off the training process, I'm basically telling the NN run until it simulates a function that yields the desired response in those 5000 cases.
The rub of course, is that programs aren't only defined by what they do (yielding the appropriate response for the the training cases) but also by what they don't do (excessive false positive/negative generation outside the training dataset). Performing correctly on the training, but messing up on more general tasks (the human equivalent being becoming an excellent test taker, but a lousy practitioner) is called overfishing. A more broad subclass of overfishing that van occur would be undesired/discriminatory/illegal optimizations, such as using combinations of protected classes as a significant data point in coming to a determination.
There is no guarantee for any particular training session that you'll arrive at the same weights, or that that set of weights will cover the same set of things that the previous network did. I.e. Your network can make mistakes (just like a person).
The irony in all of this, is you're basically training a machine to simulate a human doing a task in reliability/consistency (admittedly without the constraints of interacting with the world through a human body) with all the volatility between training that just being a human from day to day introduces.
I'm honestly beginning to wonder if the push for machine learning adoption isn't anything more than the market trying to replace people with models that they don't have to pay benefits for, and onto which they can pass blame trivially because, "Of course we didn't make it to discriminate! There's no way we could have known it would do that ahead of time!"
Too bad it's being exported everywhere
More things are denationalized so private companies now have the responsibility but also the revenue (like "Autobahn" or some time ago the post).
When I understand it correctly those where initially financed by public money so it seems like this investment is now being absorbed by the companies overtaking the business.
Accordingly there are strong voices who demand less control of the economy by the government.
I think they had a good system running (look at the numbers) and now they destroy that by adopting the ideas of the US-system.
That ends up including things like utilities, but also most of the US automotive industry, banks, etc. (It also requires the listener to have an understanding of expected value, and other basic statistics.)
“socialized losses, private profits” seems to include any government spending that benefits society, such as public ownership and funding of roads, but private shipping companies (and all the industries that rely on them) profiting from their existence.
This isn’t about anti government sentiment, it’s about pro abuse of government sentiment to use the force of law to push your morality on others.
At least unless you weirdly classify Obama as anti government.
It is a shortening of “corporate fascism”, and is the idea that the government exists to protect the economy, which is best done by strengthening existing power structures that power the current economic system.
Therefore the government should defer to corporations whenever possible.
Jim Crow, Watergate, Catholic priest abuse scandals, regulatory failure in 2008, too big to fail, gerrymandering, police involved shootings, Hurricane Katrina flooding, Keystone Pipeline leaks, ...
And, yes, it happens in local markets too: taxi medallion systems, overzealous zoning, local corruption, running Amazon out of Queens, and so on.
We could call skepticism fanatical, but that dismisses some pretty substantive history and current events regarding government corruption and incompetence.
Never attribute to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by corruption.-Upton Sinclair
Let the government flex its muscles without artificial constraint, and watch how fast the market has to rein itself in to remain competitive.
The reason Medicare is loathed, is because Medicare has a mandate to not excessively spend, and it's pricing is actually determined by people with the public interest in mind first and foremost, as well as having its pricing accessible as a matter of public record instead of being hidden away in a locked filing cabinet somewhere.
The combination of those two factors are a powerful tool for shaping an industry away from "make as much money as possible while providing a service" to "provide as much service as possible while the money holds out".
It is a subtle, yet important difference.
Unlike with insurers where price gouging becomes viable.
I mean, if an engineer is assigned to a project, what else is he/she meant to do?
You can build gigantic multinational corporations, disrupt all kinds of industries, change significant parts of people's lives with tech all written with code and rules and regulations but somehow making a well-functioning country is too hard, even when there's well-working smaller prototypes available to learn from.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/business-economy-euro/banking-and-...
My bank has recently started to ask customers to clarify transfers, and even shoot and send some video of themselves, smiling, and explaining things. I haven't got that myself yet but several colleagues have. I'm thinking I should change banks, but am unsure if any other bank is any better, because this is the result of government regulation.
The EU laws to fight money laundering are in conflict with national laws for privacy. And because laws for money laundering impact tax revenue, they will triumph over privacy.
These things are usually treated as box ticking exercises, not as fervent investigative due diligence.
I would guess money laundering happens elsewhere.
For as little as $1m you can set up or buy a bank of your own. For $10m or more you can buy a regulated operating bank with employees and deposits.
The process is more complicated than plain old incorporation, but I would guess it won't be unduly troubling to people with a lot of spare cash at hand.
As usual some countries implemented it reasonably while others didn’t.
Series of transfers are a basic step in money laundering processes, so from that point of view the need for clarification of each step is understandable.
they will also close your account if you can't prove where the money is from.
i had this issue myself in europe. a friend paid me back a hefty sum. my friend had issues proving where he got the money from. my account was swiftly closed.
Stuff like gambling (which is legal in germany),or being iranian (which I suppose is legal too)
https://www.finanssivalvonta.fi/en/Consumer-protection/quest...
When is right / wrong to boycott? And who should be allowed to? (Persons or companies)
Context: in Australia the prime minister (Scott Morrison) is looking into laws to ban boycotts by companies (who are being compelled by people / public opinion)
Declining to buy from or work for a company is pretty much always justifiable. Refusing to provide customer-specific services/work (a rental crane, management consulting, etc.) is a more impactful move, but it's still basically a refusal to engage with the target, either by providing a limited resource or by being enabling their specific actions Refusing them non-scarce, non-specific transactions (e.g. buying lumber) is more extreme, and can become worrying in markets with little competition.
Refusing content-agnostic services is the most extreme and hardest to justify action. These are things that don't connect to the nature of their boycott target, and which many people rely on continuous access to, so even when alternatives exist being forced to switch is actively damaging. We've seen it with DDoS protection, payment processing, and DNS support, but it becomes more vividly alarming if we imagine denying electricity or highway access to an unpopular business. This is why even as Cloudflare decided to shut down Stormfront, they publicly worried that it was a dangerous path to go down.
Finally, I think the situation with payment processors is actually much worse than with DDoS protection, partway to providers of vital services like water and electricity. PayPal is not necessary for survival, but access to money essentially is. And the usual rationale of "you can't force us to deal with anyone else, go open a competitor" is compromised by the extremely tight regulation of payment processors. If PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard decide to shut someone down, there aren't many alternatives. And when we get into tightly-regulated businesses taking government-friendly actions that wouldn't be legal to demand directly (like blocking payments to Wikileaks), the situation gets even murkier...
I can understand their worry, but I think they did the right thing. If I owned a hosting service, I wouldn't provide services to people like that either. I don't want to be known as "the hosting company for neo-Nazis".
If a service is so important that no one should be denied it, no matter how repulsive they are, then I think it's government's job to ensure those people receive that service. No one can really deny highway access to unpopular businesses; highways are owned and operated by the government. Electricity is a little different, because it's usually privately-owned but heavily regulated because it's a local monopoly in many places, so I imagine most regulations would forbid them from supplying power to unpopular customers. Internet hosting service, however, is not government-owned, nor a utility or monopoly in any way. There's countless providers all over the planet. Or you can just set up your own; you don't really have to host your website on a hosting service. People used to run their own webservers all the time. Physical internet access (your neighborhood ISP), however, is much more akin to the electric utility.
As far as the basic elements of life - utilities and travel access - it's good that they're effectively guaranteed neutrality by governments. Given that living without running water and power is illegal in much of the US, it's obviously not reasonable for the providers to cut people off at will.
Hosting is certainly not any kind of right. Cloudflare's position is a bit different, because without DDoS protection an unpopular site will be permanently inaccessible - it's not just "go do it yourself" but "people who dislike you will effectively shut this down". Even there, though, you could plausibly find another provider or make an attempt to do it yourself. Internet access via ISPs is far more fundamental, which is why I don't mind Cloudflare's action but have serious objections to UK-style mandates that ISPs block certain content.
I suppose my larger question is where the bounds lie on speech as a practical right. It's easy to say "we're not stopping your speech, just your ability to put up your own website". And in reality, hateful content similar to what Cloudflare targeted shows up on all sorts of other blogs, forums, etc. But "you can't have a site" is tantamount to "you can only say this if you find another private party willing to leave it on their site". When we look at physical equivalents, saying "you can publish these thoughts if a mainstream paper will take them, but you're not allowed to print zines" would obviously be illegal, so I'd object to government-ordered shutdowns. But "somebody took all your free zines out of the box and burned them" is probably fair game between private entities, and is a closer analogue to "no DDoS protection".
Even more broadly than that, I think we have a pressing unsolved issue of private actions which are implicitly government-ordered. (This doesn't apply to the Cloudflare thing.) This was a big issue in the 1930/40s, with press and radio content being "managed" via the threat of IRS and antitrust investigations, but it was never actually resolved - practical changes just obviated the issue. Between TV consolidation, "safe harbor" laws, online payment processors, and large tech companies with strong government ties, that concern seems to be rising again.
This isn't really true though. Sure, not being able to find any hosting on the internet would mean no internet presence, but no one is stopping you from making a big sign and standing on a street corner, or using your PC and laser printer to print out a bunch of pamphlets full of your views. This is exactly what people did before the invention of electronic communications, and it worked.
There's nothing in the 1A about free speech being easy or convenient or global in reach, just that the government can't pass a law abridging it.
Yes I know coal is used for the production of other materials but there is more than enough coal currently being mined for steel. We just need to stop senselessly burning it when there is limitless energy raining down on empty desert.
[1] https://quillette.com/2019/02/27/why-renewables-cant-save-th...
This chain of comments is interesting to me because it seems to follow a theme I always see around discussion of mining in Australia. To put it extremely bluntly, it usually goes: "Australia is in an advantageous position for a pivot to solar energy" --> "Well yes but we can't just stop mining, and solar panels aren't perfect by the way!"
Related is the (to me) laughable notion that someone who uses products derived from Australian mining or benefited indirectly from that industry (almost unavoidable given Australian rare earth mining, for example, and the size of the mining industry in Australia) is somehow a moral hypocrite. I'm sorry, but by that logic, one is a moral hypocrite if one has criticized politicians but has not personally tried to make a difference in the system by becoming one; or one is a moral hypocrite for criticizing Google while continuing to use Gmail. It has no end. "Oh, you want a greener world, but I see you got on a plane once. Checkmate!!"
No one reasonable thinks renewables like solar are a perfect solution. They just don't produce on such a drastic scale things like unlined coal ash dumps that leak into the groundwater.
I’d say nuclear seems the good choice here versus a perfect that’s so perfect it’s utopian. It’s not wrong to question utopian visions. By all means, get rid of coal - is anyone arguing on this page arguing against it?
Companies do not (and should not, IMO) fall under the protection of discrimination.
I personally don't like it one bit; people should be getting medical services based on the latest medical science, not based on some millennia-old book of fables, but unfortunately that's the law and the situation currently. And you can't just say "go to a different hospital", because in a lot of rural or small-city areas, these religious hospitals are the only providers around, so they have a local monopoly.
As another counterpoint, just look at Chik-Fil-A. That's absolutely a religious company, and they're quite proud of it. I don't like it either, so I don't eat there (then again, I avoid fast food anyway), but countless Americans are either OK with it, or really like it.
Legal has nothing to do with it. There is an increasing degree of business that entirely revolves around feelings of people who yell the loudest.
A bank doesn't need to know any more about you than wherever is necessary to complete a transaction and report tax details to you and the government, and honestly that can be done with only a tax identification number (which should be separate from a Social Security Number). The same goes for payment processors, though payment processors may additionally need a company/individual nickname (for convenience in printing on receipts) and a bank account to deliver funds.
I see absolutely no reason for an organization like PayPal or Chase to know who its clientele are, just whether they're legal from a tax perspective, unless the customer provides that voluntarily. And I could even see legislation preventing the collection of such data since it could be used to restrict access to essential services like banking.
I think this gets us most of the benefits of cryptocurrency from a privacy point of view, but still maintains the ability of a government to track down fraud by cross referencing tax data with transactions. The only time someone need be connected to their bank account or payment processor account is if they're suspected of a crime, which would require a warrant.
It shouldn't be possible, IMO, for payment processors to just refuse service based on dislike for the line of work the business owner is in. There are no restrictions on how currency may be used, so digital payments should be treated the same way.
Know your customer and Anti-money laundering.
Those two are why banks need to know about you. Cash is harder to track, while well-organized digital cash is not.
Any time someone is dealing with money, both of those need to be covered. It is why Stripe is so valuable, they handle PCI, KYC and AML with a fantastic API.
We dont know and we dont care !
The ease with which you can do chargebacks in the US is harmful in a lot of cases imho. I have been a merchant (of digital goods; gaming, not gambling or adult) and got annoyed enough of US chargebacks (including from Paypal) that we started doing annoying KYC and added very long waiting periods before product delivery for US customers. We had certain payment methods (bank, and there were some payment methods that do not allow chargeback) that had immediate delivery. That fixed it, mostly. It hurts sales, but I rather make less revenue and more profit than pay for product only to lose it to scammers.
In the EU I couldn't get a chargeback even when the company said they mistakenly charged me twice, and that I should do a chargeback.
I know that theoretically the law is on my side, but practically I found it to be a huge hassle in the EU.
And of course, SMS 2FA is not secure at all. Now if there's fraud and the scammer used 3dsecure with spoofed SMS, good luck convinging the bank it wasn't you.
"But SMS is not the only option" you say, "other banks have better 2FA", actually, I use other banks too. And they have something insane for 2FA: https://lobste.rs/s/1cyltz/two_factor_authentication_now_ava....
And yes, agreed, SMS stinks. I have tokens for everything and insist on that. Unfortunately some banks now only have sms...
And chargeback was always impossible in my case. In the US I click a button in the webui, or call a phone number. In the EU, I had to come in person to the bank three times, and fill all kinds of forms, and in the end, I still didn't get my money back.
Edit; I know there are more reasons for chargeback and those you can get across the line here too, however, 'frivolous' chargebacks are not good for anyone but they are easy in the US.
My partner's parents were hit hard though, about €5k. They argued back and forth with the bank for about 6 months to no avail. "Sorry, we can't do anything" type of answers. The bank also tried to trick them into signing "fraud forms" that in the fine print absolved the bank of any responsibility. It was only after I actually filed a claim with relevant financial authorities, and then hit the bank with that that they suddenly got their money back.
The interesting thing is that this mentality is so prevalent that even the non-fraud department bank employees genuinely didn't know that the bank is supposed to actually help them. Many of them told us their own stories about how they were defrauded (I have no reason to suspect they were lying because they were family friends, and I heard the stories before our incident).
Who could possibly threaten a bank over handling financial transactions for sex workers? And what could they possibly threaten the bank with?
Even if it's some big business like Chick-fil-A...
Presumably they only bank with one bank, and presumably the porn and sex work industry has more money at that bank than Chick-fil-A.
How's this actually work? It's not making sense to me.
Have any relevant links?
The SESTA/FOSTA for banking seems to be coming:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-sex-workers-are-wary-of-el...
"Warren’s joint effort with Florida Senator Marco Rubio in 2017 to introduce legislation that would enable banks to discriminate against sex worker, known as the “End Banking for Human Traffickers Act.” (Despite bipartisan support Warren and Rubio’s initiative was never voted on by the Senate, but the same bill has been reintroduced this year as H.R.295 - End Banking for Human Traffickers Act of 2019 and just passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March.) "
The government. The sex work industry was targeted by the Obama administration under Operation Chokepoint. Banks that dealt with customers the administration didn't like were subject to greater scrutiny and regulatory action.
The government. They do it right out in the open.
> And what could they possibly threaten the bank with?
Shutting down the bank.
The Bank Secrecy Act requires banks to provide "suspicious activity reports" on a wide variety of transactions, which can trigger seizure of funds without convictions. And structuring rules can make do the same to suspiciously-organized <$10k deposits even without evidence of other crime, which has happened to a number of small business owners who by sheer coincidence did that amount of revenue.
Filing those reports can get all of the assets in question seized, and failing to file them or filing them too slowly can incur extremely large fines. So the bank runs the risk of 1. having the funds in question seized, so they don't even get to collect interest, and 2. being fined a large multiple of the amount of money in question any time they overlook an instance. That's not directly involving the bank in anything illegal, but it amounts to "if you handle suspicious transactions, you won't make money on them and can potentially be fined lots of money". It effectively threatens banks for working with anything that looks similar to illegal transactions, even if they know its a different industry. And since the private cash transactions for this sort of work can look like either escorting or drug-dealing...
I suspect it's just fraud, people using stolen credit cards and bank details to pay for porn (because porn can be delivered digitally)
So these accounts disproportionately show up in the fraud department and the fraud department spends more time dealing with those accounts than the profit generated.
Eventually, the bank or payment processor decides it would be less effort just to get rid of the customers causing issues. The moral questions probably means nobody internally feels like defending them.
Usually it’s not stolen credit cards, usually it’s their card but they say it was stolen and try to do a charge back.
Hubby pays for porn.
Wife looks at bill.
Hubby denies it, must have been identity theft!
They demand a charge back since clearly card stolen by unknown porn hound, not innocent hubby.
CONSEQUENCES
Card processors and especially customers of card processors get their accounts flagged for too many returns / charge backs, which cost much more to handle than the original transaction fees compensate for. Rates go from a couple percent to 20%, making business models not work.
Banks that the processor deposited into when card swiped, have to risk manage how much money to hold back from the customer in case 2 months later all the deposits get sucked back out by charge backs. What happens if the bank customer had withdrawn their money?
BAD OUTCOME
Very hard problem, easier to just not deal with sectors that have extreme and unpredictable charge backs.
Do you want your bank associated with that? Do you want to be sued because you benefited from the conduct or financed it?
Unless you can find a bank that only does 1 thing and it happens to be a thing you like, there will always be something to be up in arms about. Maybe not immediately, but always something, some time. Today it's PornHub, tomorrow it's meat, and next year it's oil.
Because, indeed, discrimination is illegal, but suing a bank for it is long and very difficult if your account is frozen.
It's criticized because it's useless for this use case, people involved in this scene in practice don't care about it to any serious degree beyond it being a talking point, and because anything for legally working around financial deplatforming still needs strong interfacing with the rest of the system as well as compliance with legal regimes, which BTC has nothing to say on that.
In fact, you can make your own payments platform denominated in USD and that's as useful as BTC for legal activities. So why go through the extra steps?
Building your own PayPal is way harder than building a payout mechanism for Bitcoin.
By contrast, the barrier to entry for a new system denominated in USD is much higher. People can't really start using it until there's a company around to support it, and starting a company to run a payments platform isn't for the faint of heart.
Still, I've been keeping an eye on GNU Taler[0], which seems to be tackling the technical side of that problem. I'm unclear on some of the technical details, but it's the closest thing I've found so far to digital cash.
This technical problem has not been solved and the "lightning network" just turns exchanges like Coinbase into a bank or Paypal that can be shut down or run away with your money, which basically ruins the entire point of using Bitcoin.
Until Bitcoin can scale without "lightning network", I don't see people using it outside illegal activities. And from what I can see, the core concept of Bitcoin (and other cryptocoins) is fundamentally at odds with fast transactions. If you make confirmations 2x faster, then it just becomes 2x easier to fake a transaction. So paranoid merchants will just require double the confirmations.
I'm used to using the bank, the apps they have and de debit cards they provide (and now also Apple Pay) to send and receive money instantly every day, and there are on average ~10 instant transfers daily to both other private accounts or businesses to pay for things.
Perhaps this is an exotic or luxury position, or there is some unseen cost to this, but I'm not aware of that at this point.
And $20 for a wire transfer pales in comparison to the fees people charge for converting bitcoin to cash https://localbitcoins.com/
Yes transferring large sums of money internationally is useful, but it is a niche, and bitcoin doesn't even do it that cheaply.
The closest thing to cancelling is making a new transaction which makes the first one invalid (e.g. by emptying the source address) and hoping the new one gets added to the block first.
Because transactions can have fees attached to them, you could presumably make it more appealing to mine the second transaction than the first, but I don't know if this is something people do, and as far as I understand it most miners prefer the first transactions they see.
there is a mechanism called replace by fee, so it becomes a question of incentives
The payment processors can scan the mempool for transactions that would invalidate the initial transaction, so then it would be a question of lead time. Great for digital services etc, not so great for in life purchases.
So if you absolutely 100% need confirmation, then yeah 10 minutes is what you need to wait, but that again is a question of probability comparative to credit card chargebacks/fees etc.
Even the next block inclusion isn't a guarantee... it just means that you have at current prices approximately 200k insurance. With enough resources and luck, someone could +EV roll back your transaction, but the cost scales exponentially.
The current viable solution for small inperson transactions is pretty much replicating the banking system. Current versions of abstracting the banking system into something decentralized are clunky/buggy to say the least.
Of course, they've been saying all of that is not so far away for a couple years now, but we will see. I'm tentatively optimistic.
And PoS has been "not so far away for a couple years now" because they keep finding problems with it.
This argument is tired. There is no rule that dictates that the same amount of work or stake is equal to the same amount of security across different coins. I trust ETH transactions just as much as I trust BTC, and there are others that I trust equally also.
And now that BTC costs more in fees, their solution is to move to less secure off-chain layers. I'll take on chain ETH, monero, BCH, and a few others any day over a low security off-chain solution like what BTC offers. I may hold BTC, but I'm not buying it, and I'm not using it.
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper#modified-g...
Ethereum's PoS is currently implemented in seven independent and fully interoperating clients. Multi-client testnet should roll out soon, and production is expected first quarter 2020.
9943589 (gas limit) / 21000 (minimum price of a ethereum transaction) / 14.57 (average block time) = 32.5 transactions per second.
Everyone that has replied to you is just providing more info than I did.
And your response is "ethereum's transactions per second are comically low right now"?
Making confirmations faster usually just tends to make them weaker. The security of each confirmation is based on the work down (or cpu hours). By making confirmations take half the amount of time, this only makes confirmations half as secure, because the amount of CPU hours spent is the same. You can also make confirmations faster by shrinking the amount of work done per block. This means that while confirmations are faster, it will also take longer for your transaction to get into a block in the first place.
Take a look at this and notice how coinbase requires over 10x more confirmations for ethereum than bitcoin.
https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/593...
In Bitcoin, the chosen block is the one with the most hashpower in the linear chain behind it. Abandoned forks contribute nothing to that.
With GHOST, the chosen block is the one with the most hashpower descended from it, in all forks. This way all the forks contribute to a block's security.
With a linear chain, propagation time is an issue. If blocks are too short it's more likely that miners will find more than one candidate block, causing the work on abandoned blocks to be wasted. With GHOST, no work is wasted.
The original GHOST paper, which proposed the algorithm as a modification to Bitcoin, has some math to calculate, for a given propagation time, the block time that would produce equivalent security to a linear chain. It was significantly shorter.
Orphaned blocks are very rare in Bitcoin.
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/orphaned-blocks?offset=0
Even if you somehow saved all this wasted hash power, you would only maybe increase hash power by less than 1%!!!
Read my comment here for more details.
And that's how Ethereum gets away with 15-second blocks.
ETH ave. block time: 10s. Time to get to Coinbase confirmations (35): ~350s
BTC ave. block time: 10m. Time to get to Coinbase confirmations (3): ~1800s
So I can make 5-6 transactions that coinbase thinks is "secure enough" on Ethereum in the time it would take me to make one transaction with Bitcoin.
Add to that the fact that the throughput of the network is higher, and ETH is actually about 17x faster than BTC, and that's totally ignoring the on-chain scaling that ETH is much closer to than BTC.
Also I don't currently hold any crypto, so you can stop pretending that everyone who is more informed than you is actually just biased. I cashed (of my mostly BTC holdings) in 2017.
I show you this to prove to you that 1 eth confirmation isn't equal to 1 bitcoin confirmation. If it was anywhere equal in security, there would not be a >10X difference. And also multiplying confirmations by average block time and seeing that it is lower than bitcoin doesn't mean coinbase thinks it is more secure. It can also mean that the value of the average eth transaction on Coinbase is lower.
A 51% attacker will be able to churn out 100x the number of confirmations if confirmations were made 100x smaller. It doesn't matter how fast you make them or how many tricks like GHOST you add.
These are some helpful websites/articles on understanding confirmation security.
https://medium.com/@nic__carter/its-the-settlement-assurance...
Most consumers will not want to do this because they don't know who they will be buying from and don't know how much they are going to spend. If they decide they want to buy from random website Z one day, making a lightning network connection between themselves and that website will be useless because establishing a lightning network connection needs to go on the regular slow block chain, so it'll take as long as a regular payment.
The only way it works is if a major exchange like Coinbase sets up lightning network agreements between other major exchanges. Then the user puts bitcoin into Coinbase and uses the Coinbase website to make lightning network payments on your behalf. This means you will probably put all your money into an exchange like Coinbase who can then run off with your money.
The "network" part of lightning network allows you to make a payment to anyone else on the network (trustlessly) through multiple hops. For example, if you opened a channel with a friend, and your friend had a channel open with Starbucks, you would be able to pay Starbucks through your friend without having to trust your friend.
And this works today. I have one channel open on the lightning network, and regularly make payments to random nodes on the network. I pay << $0.01 in fees for these transactions, and they settle in ~a second.
What if the trust chain is 20 users long?
Who's going to spend the resources to find this chain? And has it been tested to scale, or is it just like Bitcoin in the early days where people said it would scale and never tested it?
People are going to gravitate to putting all their money into a large exchange like Coinbase to avoid these problems.
Every hop only knows the previous and next one, nothing else, not even the length of the chain.
Your computer/phone finds the route and if you’re ok with privacy trade off you can outsource this task to your hub for a fee in single satoshis.
People are going to gravitate towards convenient solutions making all sorts of security, privacy and financial risks, that’s why it’s important to have multiple alternatives with different trade offs.
Large centralized lightning nodes will form and they will act like banks and be able to stop payments to arbitrary entities like Paypal, and even make the payment get stuck for days or weeks depending on how long the timeout is.
From the paper itself.
"the network will look a lot like the correspondent banking network"
You need to find a path because path needs to have channel capacity required for your transaction, that’s why you can’t pick random nodes, not because you want to trust them.
Stealing somebody’s funds from channel is just as hard as stealing bitcoin - you need to crack encryption or you need a private key.
You have no idea how lightning works, please do some reading before making incorrect claims.
Each node can still steal money from the node next to them by turning hostile such as not passing the secret and closing out their channel and getting time locks to expire, which is many magnitudes easier than cracking encryption or stealing a private key. The network has already been DDoSed. Now imagine the incentive to do it when it handles millions of dollars.
Do you not see the contradiction in your statement? You can’t spend your htlc without revealing the secret to the other party. If your stealing procedure involves ddosing random unknown party from being able to access any internet whatsoever to lock them out of minuscule amounts lightning payments are used for - good luck with that.
You only need to ddos the lightning network so it won't record their HTLC when it expires. There is no need to ddos them, though I would argue it would be equally easy to do. And so while the other party will eventually see the secret on the block chain, they can't get their HTLC unlocked on the network before it expires.
And the lightning network has already been easily ddosed! We will see it happen more often if the lightning network ever gets bigger. This isn't some hypothetical situation.
this is not even a thing. lightning network is collection of independent nodes, there is no registry of payments and channels, every node keeps their own record.
> And so while the other party will eventually see the secret on the block chain, they can't get their HTLC unlocked on the network before it expires.
why? if a party is stuck in a payment and especially if they notice they are getting attacked - they will take steps to mitigate. the moment commitment with secret is broadcast and in the worst case - the moment it gets confirmed on chain the other party will know the secret and can unlock their htlc. the risk is essentially the same as with deep reorgs - very low because those are very rare events. and the hassle is most definitely not worth the value of a stolen micropayment, which is the primary purpose of LN.
If it was just some crap exchange, why would anyone be bothering, and especially why would it be taking so long?
They need to commit regular bitcoin into a lightning network channel on the main blockchain before they can spend it.
Edit: Here is an example of a lightning network enabled wallet that works as a lightning node itself. No payment processor needed: https://lightning-wallet.com
I think there is a fair amount of logistics to work out here. I may be wrong, and that would be great, but at the moment I'm not quite seeing how this is going to work in practice.
Because you're both connected to a common lightning node, at least indirectly. There are several public lightning nodes that accept connections and they are joined together. Connect to one and you have access to their network.
> Similarly, if I want some random person to send me money, how do I convince them to run a lightning node and to let me connect to it?
Same as above. The lightning network is, of course, only going to work with other nodes who are also connected, but there is an incentive to join, since when you do, you can transact with all of its peers.
Jesus, this is precisely what the lightning network is for! Please, do a little research before dismissing it wholesale. The node you are connected to cannot refuse to pay, because you have a signed, but unpublished transaction of what he owes you (if he owes you). If he suddenly stops contact and says fuck you, you can just publish that transaction.
Seriously, this has always been the idea from the get go, so don't go blaming that you haven't read the latest update on how lightning works. If you don't understand something, don't go around spouting that it must not work.
I'll be deeply surprised if lightning is ever used at the retail level by more than a couple shady internet casinos and John Galt themed vape stores.
Anybody here know the currency Nano? The ORV (Open Representative Voting) consensus mechanism makes it possible to find decentralized consensus in ms without the power-intensive PoW.
For a first impression, you can perform a real on-chain transaction here: https://nanospeed.live/
Good call. These pornstars should just create their own payment platform instead of going through all the hassle of using BTC.
(I suppose one way would be to set up some sort of "western union" where you could deposit cash and someone at the "bank" would change the number in your account balance accordingly... But maybe there are regulations about this?)
Yes. The net practical effect of anti-money-laundering laws is that you cannot transfer money at scale without the government's permission.
This is demonstrably false in the amateur porn industry.
If I buy or sell BTC from coinbase, for example, they aren't going to care if the money came from the porn industry or not.
That's the difference. Apparently, for some reason, PayPal is shutting down people who are doing perfectly legal stuff, but coinbase isn't, to the same degree.
That is the practical advantage, right there.
I have never understood the obsession with complying with stupid laws. The solution needed here isn't "legally" working around financial deplatforming; illegally doing so will work just fine - and also probably have the benefit, as widespread disobedience often has, of putting extreme pressure on these laws themselves.
As in you get paid 550$, by the time it's yours it's worth $600 and the next day $250 ?
I wish. But I'm afraid no one will be able to ask him anything, ever.
Videocasettes? Check.
Internet? Check.
Thank heaven for prurient smut, driver of all great technology. Without it we would still be in the stone age.
It's also probably the only thing really using VR/AR right now to any significant degree.
It used to be that there was a porn convention at the same time as CES in Las Vegas. For a lot of years, the porn conference was the better of the two from a technology standpoint.
No firearms, firearm parts, or ammunition. [1]
[1] https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/What-is-PayPal%E...
In any case, it's not a meaningful financial risk for Paypal. It might be a risk of bad press, but "criminal pays for gun with Paypal and uses it to commit a murder" probably isn't actually going to result in many people not using Paypal.
But yes, you are correct.
The lightning network is a joke--a frankenstein "Engineering UI" layed over a system to route around bad development decisions re:block size.
None of these are things people want to spend money worrying about.
(Of course they don’t mention the irony to bitcoin scaling is not to use it)
That's because it is still federally illegal
There was Hatreon but Visa canceled their services for them.
I agree the porn industry is legal and nobody forces people to watch Pornhub, now I doubt the future of Pornhub. I don't use it but I support those who do under the freedom of speech.
There is one absolute in the world: porn will exist.
Look at every technology and one of the first adopters is porn. Porn has chosen the winner of most battles in tech.
Most of the marijuana industry is illegal in the US. States making it legal doesn’t change the Controlled Substances Act. As banking is federally regulated, banks don’t have the freedom to knowingly allow illegal businesses.
Porn however, is legal, and deplatforming a legal product/business is wrong in my opinion.
To be clear, I am not suggesting marijuana should be illegal at the federal level at all, only that it’s not inconsistent that a bank not serve those customers — after all they would then become criminals themselves by facilitating the moment of funds for a product that is illegal.
By why is the bank on the hook here? Is the ISP on the hook for serving the content? If the bank followed the regulations around KYC why would they be liable?
In my opinion, IRS successfully killed BTC use in the US by treating it as property rather than currency (for currency FX, transactions under $200 are exempt from cost basis reporting on schedule D)
In a cashless society, once the folks in charge deplatform you, you cease to be able to engage in any transactions of any kind, and you basically cease to exist.
When I talk to people around me about cash vs cards everyone agrees that paying with card is so much more convenient, especially when you just have to gently tap the reader with your card.
I know many people who have the phone case with space for a few cards. They don't even carry a wallet anymore. They have nowhere to put bulky coins or even bills.
Everything else: Decreased risk of being pick-pocketed, decreased risk of money vans being robbed, increased surveillance, increased control. All those are just secondary concerns.
Regimes working on creating cash-free societies, where there are no legal anonymous payment schemes, on the other hand, simply want to use the threat of turning off your access to the economy as a means of control.
You're talking about people on the edge of society, rightfully so or more they already have many ways of making deals
Meanwhile cashless in a country like Italy could expose the 30% of tax evasion that erodes our freedom as honest and "paying for everybody who's not doing it" citizens
In Germany every bank is obliged to offer everyone (including homeless, overindebted, asylum seekers, etc.) a so-called base account, which offers a way to receive payments and pay the bills and get a basic debit card. However, the law has a mistake: The price of the base account is not regulated. And many banks charge more than for a "normal" account.
Germany is still a cash country in many aspects. It's worse in Sweden in Finland, where you often cannot buy a train ticket without a debit (or credit) card, cash is no longer accepted.
That's very commendable; I wish more countries had such a regulation. Does it extend to non-citizens living in Germany? What about to visitors to Germany? Could someone open an account (by right) while there on a holiday?
In German there is the term of the "foreign co-citizen", not sure what an English equivalent would be. So when I wrote citizen I had in mind those with German citizenship and foreign co-citizens. It just includes everyone living in the country. (Illegal immigrants are smaller topic in Germany than the US, so there is little need to think about that distinction.)
What if they decided that I had too much money? What if they decided they didn't like who I voted for?
They'd just close the account and seize the money, and you'd have no recourse at all, because it's the state doing it.
https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/e-krona/e-krona...
Honestly, the behavior of paypal is abysmal and I wish there to be a real alternative. I despise credit cards and would like to have more options.
I doubt I will ever pay anything for porn, but there are a lot of content creators that can only receive money via paypal/credit card.
I do actually think a government should have some control over its currency, but if the institutions implement their own arbitrary rules, solutions like Bitcoin are the best alternative.
A lot of porn models are becoming the content creators now. The line between your favorite adult actor and your favorite youtuber is growing thinner every day.
Which makes us wonder if one near day we'll see amateur adult content with sponsored products "... brought to you by Questionable VPN!"
So porn models would probably be a thing even if all payment providers stopped their service for porn. It would just be completely counter productive since this form of sex work is probably as safe as it can be. And any life style decision shouldn't be dependent on payment processors.
Most forms of sex work are illegal in the US and other jurisdictions, and sites like PornHub are compliance nightmares where all manner of sleazy or illegal actions are likely happening. PayPal doesn’t want to be the financier for the next scandalous “amateur” producer.
If it's about this particular industry sub-group having a much-higher-than-normal rate of fraud or returns or buyers remorse or whatever causes more hassle to PayPal's processes than they're worth, then that makes commercial sense.
I tried other means such as money transfer and cash gift cards, but the exchange rate can mean to pay for $100 I have to spend $3-400!!
A proposal: sell btc giftcards. Each card will have a qr code which is a url that allows download of a wallet (with priv key) where the URL is active after payment. You can transfer the funds to your permanent wallet or spend it directly. Maybe you can even use it to pay for IRL goods somehow. Either way, the participation barrier is lowered. I heard of btc ATMs as well but I can imagine carrying one more giftcard is easier for stores than adding an ATM.
That said, I've heard that the ATMs in recreational marijuana shops are themselves significant sources revenue for the shops.
Until Bitcoin is ubiquitous (doubtful this will occur in my life time) we are still vulnerable to deplatforming when we go to exchange btc for fiat.
Which I’m sure are totally legit and not at all primarily used to launder money.
Maybe you’ve never heard of Fold app or Bitrefill. Some of us are actually trying to build a circular bitcoin economy. These companies not only offer onramps and offramps to the ecosystem, but they actively fund and incentivize building. Yes, they make a profit too.
So this is already a solved issue. They aren't deplatforming me right now!
That is a hypothetical situation which seems to me like it would be pretty unlikely.
Banks aren't talking about deplatforming coinbase, for whatever reason, therefore it is useful.
The whole "what if the government/banks banned Bitcoin!?" Is a pretty silly hypothetical, to me, because if you look at what these groups are actually doing, you will see that they aren't doing this and aren't really trying to do so!
The only reason why I am sceptical, though, is because I have heard these same arguments, about how the government will ban Bitcoin, for 6-7 years. And yet it hasn't happened yet.
So it is totally possible that this time is different. But I just feel like, I need to be very sceptical about these arguments, until they actually happen. Because I heard them before, and those people were proven wrong.
But you are right, in that it is very possible that maybe this time is different.
Literally told to take their banking else where.
How does using crypto help? Does it’s use suddenly make you immune from banks finding out your source of income?
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/banks-accused-of-slut-shaming-fo...
That's why it helps. PayPal censorship is much more common than crypto censorship.
> Does it’s use suddenly make you immune from banks finding out your source of income?
No, it doesn't make you immune. Being 100% immune to anything at all is literally impossible. But it seems like it makes it less likely.
My point is the banks don’t care about crypto. They care about your occupation. If you deposited cash, you may still have no bank account.
Canada is likely to have a BTC ETF in January, so you could say Canada is pretty open to BTC at this point (it is treated like any other exchangeable currency).
But the credit card industry is an oligopoly. If Visa or Mastercard don't like you, you're completely screwed as far as online payments go.
The great thing about BTC is you can send it so easily without going through all the hoops other 'systems' need. Sure, it isn't so easy to get started with BTC, but once you are in, it is a breeze.
Are there any payment options that have so far been immune to this issue?
Maybe it's worth setting up alternative payment methods, even if the percent they charge per transaction is much higher, just to ensure stability of access to funds.
Nano is instantly fully-confirmed, secure and immutable. All a model needs to do is display a Nano address (or QR code) in their webcam backdrop, or on their website. They get instant notification of payments, so have the option of instantly reacting to them. So they can be interactive with their viewers in real-time.
Nano is feeless, unlike Bitcoin, and will always be feeless. (Bitcoin's fees jumped to $6.25 on June 28 2019 so saying Bitcoin is currently 'cheap' doesn't really cover that.)
Nevermind the sex industry is probably the biggest attractor for fraudulent charges and overall sketchy business.
The US marijuana industry is, under federal law, entirely criminal, so that's kind of understandable, even if the underlying law is arguably undesirable.
Certainly there is some % of pornhub sex workers that are there against their will, but the dark web child porn networks are what our primary focus should be going against.
Right wing propagandists are rarely deplatformed compared to the other two groups and when they are it's generally for spreading conspiracy theories (remember that people have already died because of Pizzagate and QAnon "truthers") or inciting (racial/religious/homophobic) hatred.
The difference is that right wing propagandists are also a lot more vocal than the other group (or left wingers for that matter), skewing the perception. There's a widely known joke about how many comedians have shows on mainstream platforms with titles like "Cancelled" or "Triggered", complaining about "things you can't say anymore". Also see the "Intellectual Dark Web" whose whole shtick is being "deplatformed" by academia and the mainstream while having a massive mainstream media presence.
At a certain point they will start to ask you "where did you get this coins?" because sooner or later you'll have to convert them to real currencies
Cash is still a better option, there are plenty others: rechargeable CC, gift cards, vouchers, etc etc that work better than bitcoin, require no setup, no knowledge and can be used without hassles.
The number of ways in which someone, somewhere will be offended by products or services for sale is growing, driven by a rapidly improving worldwide communication network and delivery system, and by people terrified of the change that brings.
The response by PayPal and many others has been to cut service. With each case, the circle of people finding themselves cut off from the traditional economy grows.
Bitcoin is often criticized for its lack of use cases. I find a very high correlation between the strength of this belief and lack of awareness of financial deplatforming in its many guises.