And forgive me if this seems ranty, but it isn’t just payment processors, it seems to permeate so much that comes out of the USA. See the various App Store rules too.
And this isn’t about fraud rates. Because why are the fraud rates high? It’s because the sex whole industry is pushed to the fringes, and loaded with shame. “Oh that payment wasn’t me, my card must have been stolen”.
I feel pretty angry how much this puritanical nature in a foreign country affects the people I care about around me.
If you can let China censor your platforms, you can let Europeans have porn.
Ok, rant over. Please don’t downvote too heavily.
They're private companies, they have the freedom to do what they like, and "you" are free to start your own payment processor.
I think a lot of people think the processors are doing this out of some moral high ground to try and kill off the pornography business, but that's not what's happening. It's all about risk and opportunity cost. I forget the exact numbers, but pornography and gambling are near the top of the list when you look at industries with the highest number of fraudulent transactions. When someone reports a transaction as fraudulent, the money to refund the customer comes out someone behind the scenes pocket and often that money gets tied up in limbo while everyone points fingers at everyone else. Dealing with fraudulent transactions is a massive headache that wastes a ton of time.
Most major processors just don't want to deal with the hassle and the ones who do charge extremely high fees to offset the extra risk. OF has probably been using a processor that doesn't allow for pornography this whole time, but the processor has been letting it slide. My guess would be the risk has finally grown too large and the processor is cracking down. Like I said, there are other processors out there who are happy to work with the porn industry for a much higher fee, but it seems like OF has decided for one reason or another that that isn't as lucrative as just banning explicit content all together.
OF has been increasingly making use of step-up authentication to avoid disputes, which is the way the non-US payments industry is heading. My guess would be that if disputes are in fact the reason, it’ll be because the step-up authentication isn’t available or working for some significant slice of the market.
That said, I don’t think that’s the reason. Switching off porn altogether means the vast majority(citation needed) of OF’s content will be gone, which means this has to be a life-or-death move. MC has been placing legality/consent/age restrictions on adult content, including real-time monitoring of content / chat [0]. My guess is that this is onerous enough that it breaks OF’s business model.
[0] https://www.webshield.com/post/mastercard-introduces-revised...
I think at the company I worked at most of what is in there around record keeping wouldn't have been a problem because there were laws that required the company to do that already.
The "pre-screening requirement" could be problematic though.
> All uploaded content must be reviewed prior to publication to ensure that it is not illegal and does not otherwise violate Mastercard’s standards
That one seems crazy. I have no idea how much content they get uploaded daily, but I would guess it's a massive amount. If they needed a human to view 100% of the uploaded content before it's allowed to be published... I just don't see how they could do that profitably.
I think the hard part is the hand-wavy stuff you’re supposed to be looking for. How are you supposed to know whether some unusual sexual act violates their standards? Or whether gay porn is legal in all applicable jurisdictions for instance?
Also stripe identity really works for US users the most , with a global audience like OnlyFans that could be limiting as well
Yea I'm not sure how you validate everyone in the video has a verified identity and age... Perhaps machine learning could automate some of this. Stripe has selfie validation... so if you could do something like that on the video where faces in the video are compared to the identities provided... If there isn't a match then the video is flagged for review.
1. Addict puts $1000 into gambling site via their credit card
2. Addict loses $1000 in the next few minutes at gambling site
3. Addict realizing they can't afford it files a charge-back
4. Addict repeats cycle anyway
From NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/10/business/visa-mastercard-...
> Mastercard and Visa said they had prohibited the use of their cards on the adult website Pornhub, after the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that the platform included videos of child abuse and rape
BTW it’s silly of you to try to pretend to be some sort of industry expert and then immediately admit that you have never worked with porn payment processing. Everyone knows that the fraud rates for porn are very high, that’s not new.
What I am basing my statement off of is second hand knowledge from multiple people at one of the companies mentioned saying that the reason payment processors don't work with porn companies is because of fraud rates.
That's not definitive, but considering the person I was responding to gave us 0 reason to believe his statement is anything other than his opinion and his comment history shows a pattern asserting his opinion as fact. I'm going to assume he's talking out his ass and that I'm slightly more informed on this issue.
This is all well documented in mainstream media, I certainly shouldn’t need to provide any evidence to a purported industry insider.
This is a widely given explanation so I would entirely expect you to have heard it repeatedly in that context.
It is far less clear to what degree this explanation is accurate. Yes fraud rates are higher but they could easily be covered by charging higher processing fees (something that is often done for other risks.) There is pretty good evidence that other factors than fraud risk are at least partially responsible.
If you have an issue with people aaserting opinions as fact, maybe you should be more careful as you what you state as fact from a position of claimed authority.
This is exactly what happens, there are several payment processors (probiller, ccbill, epoch …) focusing on high risk transactions like porn.
I'm not against the promises of crypto - but the tech so far has failed to deliver anything but a platform to streamline illegal activity, asset speculation bubbles and a whole bunch of wasted energy/hardware along with reliving the problems people had historically with bank fraud in free banking and the likes (banks printing their own notes without cover till you get a bank run - this is why central banks were invented ...)
You don't have to sign up for an account or provide any personal info, just use your wallet to send certain tokens to an address, then you can use that wallet as a sign-in.
OnlyFans can then use Coinbase or an off-ramp to go from crypto to fiat.
It's a more seamless user experience and solves the payment processing issue.
In my opinion it's a matter of educating the masses to a very different method of paying for services and using services (both on the business and consumer side).
I'm a pretty techy guy but in this one sentence alone you said 5 things that I have no idea about nor even heard of ("USDC", "DAI", "sidechain", "Polygon", "Fantom").
The chance of the general population catching onto this stuff anytime soon is slim.
USDC and Dai are both US-dollar stable coins. They’re always worth 1 dollar each, they’re among the most trustworthy USD stablecoins, and they are perfect for storefronts. The problem is that Ethereum transaction (tx) fees are now around $15-$25 because the network is so popular. Everyone wants to use the highway but the highway is only so big. Ethereum 2.0 is supposed to increase the size of that highway by some order of magnitude to make each transaction cost cents to send but we won’t know until it happens in few years. But we need a solution now! — and not in a few years!
That’s where other less popular but still good enough networks [side chains] like Polygon, Stellar, Binance Smart Chain, Tron, and a few others come into play.
Side chain is a term for a non-Ethereum or non-Bitcoin blockchain. Think of it like getting off a tollroad and getting onto a less trafficked, cheaper, and possibly faster side road, with the risk of coming across some new undocumented potholes.
USDC (and probably Dai too) for example, can already run on the Binance(bsc20), Ethereum(ERC20), Polygon, Tron, Stellar, and a few other networks. This can be super confusing and shocking for users because if you send your BSC20 USDC to an ERC20 USDC address you usually lose it. It’s a good thing that many of these networks have different address formats and that helps considerably to have software preventing that goof but some networks like BSC20 and ERC20 share the same address format because ERC20 is a copy of BSC20. Very user unfriendly. Alright I know I might be loosing you here but the solution is next.
Now, here’s what I think a solution to this all is: Rename one existing Stablecoin on one of those networks and let’s call it something idealistic like Freecoin. For example, DAI on the Polygon network or something else. To make it simple, it’s only one coin on one cheap network that is anything but the Ethereum network and then boom, you’ve dropped your terminology down to just “Freecoin” and “where is an easy on-ramp to buy it?” It’s important that there is only 1 kind of Freecoin. Buy them on this Shopify website, these exchanges, or this DeFi exchange. Obviously you can allow people to pay with other cryptocurrencies but you can either give a 1%-2% discount for using a certain cryptocurrency or make the UI button for your cryptocurrency larger than the buttons for the other cryptocurrencies. Both are effective nudges.
If you have a product worth buying, people will beat a path to your doorstep.
What are the guardrails to prevent bankrun like the wild west days of banking?
There's been a lot of talks of regulating stablecoins to ensure backing, which I don't think is a terrible idea.
Do some googling before commenting please.
Much like tether, there is no proof that they have anywhere near the currency they claim and folks that operate in that market are the ones shouting the loudest about the apparent fraud occurring. I've yet to see tether or usdc provide proof otherwise, it always seems to be a "we wouldn't be this big if we didn't have what we say we have" - bernie madoff style. And to get in front of it, an attestation != audit.
And then you quickly realize how useless USDC/DAI is when you want to pay your rent, for milk, etc.
> OnlyFans can then use Coinbase or an off-ramp to go from crypto to fiat.
They can't because then KYC kicks in. This is exactly the problem with crypto at scale...you can't convert large scale amounts of crypto to fiat without someone noticing. Silkroad "worked" because there was no central authority taking money, just lots of a smaller drug dealers. Pablo Escobar wouldn't have been able to run his whole operation on crypto without getting seen.
> They can't because then KYC kicks in. This is exactly the problem with crypto at scale.
Isn't KYC only a problem for people trying to hide their income? Onlyfans (and other legit businesses) would not have this problem as they would not be trying to hide their earnings.
This is essentially how Coinbase is allowed to operate - it doesn't have whales on its platform, just millions of KYC'd minnows who are individually low risk.
Illegal activities are only a problem if law enforcement makes it their problem, I don't think there is a case where law enforcement went after the payment provider for facilitating transactions for illegal activities, it is website/marketplace responsibility usually
> Illegal activities are only a problem if law enforcement makes it their problem
And now this is where AML kicks in. Now you're dealing with banks and not credit card processors as the source of the issue. No US bank is going to work with a company who is converting money from crypto to fiat at the level of billions of dollars.
Exchanges are doing pretty well to convert USD to say BitCount, despite Bitcoin's unsavory reputation for illicit/ illegal transaction like ransomware payments that actually happen on the coin. Even single transactions in the millions barely register these days.
I am not sure porn as an industry earns in billions and even if it did the market is today large enough that it won't be sticking out all that much.
Friction is a problem, but I don't see why sending Monero has to be any harder than with conventional payment methods. The hard part is overcoming the network effect of payment cards.
Adoption is a thing and takes time. Crypto itself is also a technology still in its infancy with at least a decade+ of engineering remaining to begin to resemble something that everyday people can use, but it's already quite promising.
Monero is really the only thing that makes sense here.
I wonder how we can be more open minded as a society while still keeping enough skepticism to not accept literal garbage.
Pick any "we should oppress this thing that other people want/like/are" and there are people who miraculously realize that actually, there's a reason people want/like/are that thing once it happens to them.
I think it starts from some combination of factors like fear of the unknown, superiority complexes, downright stupidity, etc., which are only un-blinded when it smacks you in the face.
What does this mean? Its an example of a business in addition to politicians, how is that the reverse?
What are those last 10% worth to you? Unless it's still the difference between personal financial independence and wage slavery for the majority owner, I can't see how that's the rational choice. That's why I'm concluding lack of imagination and borderline incompetency.
Of all companies that could adopt mass crypto this one would be somewhere at the bottom of the list imho.
The percentage of consumers with crypto is maybe 1%. The percentage with credit cards is maybe 90%. If OnlyFans moves to crypto, they cut their addressable market by 98%.
For big companies that have to respect laws anyway, yes, but it still brings lots of opportunities for regular people and small organizations that can fly under the government's radar.
The circumvention you mention is incidental, not primary. "Something better" was the, admittedly lofty, goal. And if not purely "something better" then at least "an alternative".
There was a story about an online dildo seller who couldn't sell specific colour of dildos because American Express didn't like them. I think it was lovehoney
But yes, these are consenting adults (a fair number of them quite highly educated and absolutely aware of what they are doing) selling solo videos or videos with other consenting adults. It’s legal, it’s a huge business, and it’s dumb to push it further to the fringes.
It bothers me that they have the power to shut businesses based on what appears to be their own subjective moral code. If a website is shutdown for any reason it should be due them breaking some law, not the payment processors feelings.
Regulation should passed to stop this from happening. While a lot of people may agree with their actions so far, it shouldn't be their decision to do this.
They are in business and need to adapt. If they can’t hack it take my route: employment in a demand industry.
No you don't. There are many people who are become porn actors as a result of only fans. That is likely why this is happening.
- Sexcoin, launched in 2013 [https://sexcoin.info] [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/sexcoin/]
- Titcoin, TIT [https://titcoin.github.io] [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/titcoin/]
- Tittiecoin, launched in 2014: "TittieCoin Accelerates Your Digital Transformation", now Limitless VIP? [https://tittiecoin.com] [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/limitless-vip/]
- Spankchain, by Spanktoshi Nakabooty [https://spankchain.com/]
- Fapcoin [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/fapcoin/] defunct
- Pornrocket [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/pornrocket/]
- PornStar [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/pornstar/]
- Intimate [https://intimate.io/]
- Okoin [https://okoin.io/] defunct?
- Analcoin [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/analcoin/]
- VGINA [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/vgina/]
Has it been useful? I doubt it.
I hope that was a legal name change.
They could try to block that (they probably need to already), especially as the alternative seems to be to shut down now.
I've experienced this first hand. I was a compulsive liar in primary school and one time I told my friends that I saw a webcomic that had this gimmick that every panel ended with the phrase <insert topic> is EVIL(BAD) ("Złe/zły/zła" in Polish).
Oddly specific, isn't it?
Well here it is in the flesh:
https://www.deviantart.com/oliko/art/Pablo-Webcomic-ep-221-1...
I have a fair number† of friends and acquaintances who have OnlyFans. Some for side income, some for a substantial portion of their livelihood. And to see that get taken away because the payment processors want them to fall in line…I guess I’m on the crypto train now.
†Yes, I have a slightly strange life, I know.