Obviously, the answer is to disallow that.
And if people break the law, and do it anyway, by trying to be "clever" then a judge and jury can punish them.
This punishment works especially well, with this thing called "discovery", in which the legal system can parse through your internal communications, to see if you are intending on defacto banning it.
> It would be challenging to stop without mandating some explicit formula too
No it wouldn't be.
Just do it, like we do many other laws. Give a vague description of whats not allowed, and let the jury figure it out. And give a large fine if they lose the court case.
That's enough deterrence to stop people from gaming the system. Just give them a huge fine if they try to do that.
If you mean "those in power who can and do make decisions that a majority of voters wouldn't actually support", then sure, I think that's the case, but that doesn't make it right, and that doesn't make it inevitable, either.
YMC/AML has been this way since shortly after 9/11 (aka 2001).
The level of outrage from the voters is…. Tepid.
Will it change at some point? Sure. Not seeing it happen anytime soon though.
Or does someone have to sit down and write a law or regulation that says "the risk for providing payment services to an online pornography company is X, and thus the processing fee is Y%"? I guess that could work?
But the thing is that there isn't much incentive to do this kind of skulduggery, because the companies are only protecting themselves from lawsuits and protests when they ban businesses, but imposing high processing fees would probably not satisfy the would-be tyrants who were trying to force these "bans".
Ie make it legal for the provider to report it, perhaps anonymously.
But when you think about it, this setup skips past important legal protections like due process and the presumption of innocence. It's like the government has quietly asked Visa and Mastercard to play judge and jury.
Unfettered electronic currency has not shined a light on honest arbiters
Quoting a relevant paragraph from the AML post above: Much like KYC, AML policies are recursive stochastic management of crime. The state deputizes financial institutions to, in effect, change the physics of money. In particular, it wants them to situationally repudiate the fungibility of money. (Fungibility is the property that $1 is $1 and, moreover, that you are utterly indifferent between particular dollars.) They are not required to catch every criminal moving money (that would not be a positive result!)
Normally, if the government suspects you of money laundering, they build a case and bring it to court. The burden of proof is on them to proof you’re laundering money or selling illegal goods. Here, they found a way to not only lessen their work load by deputizing private companies, but also affectively gave payment processors a moat and impunity to decide what people can and cannot sell everywhere.
Visa and MC are well within their rights to deny any person for any reason, but the government should have their own processing network. My gut is saying this will never happen since Visa/MC would lobby heavily against it. Even if one is created, expect it to be neutered.
Not government per se but isn't this what FedNow is all about?
True, but as payment networks take on a more utility-like place in society (I'd argue they're already there), we shouldn't allow them to discriminate for arbitrary reasons.
What strikes me is how much financial information I had to provide them. Bank accounts, salary slips, savings accounts, etc. I am more than happy to provide that information to my government in the course of, say, a tax audit, but handing it off to a private company abroad just to buy a few shares is not proportionate. And who else will have access to that information? Is it going to be sold to the highest bidder?
The goverment is outsourcing its policing duties and, sooner or later, that will come back to bite us all when a leak outs all this information.
(Poe’s law, take it as you want.)
Whereas gold in the ground is shiny rocks in the ground. You can say, wait out a tax on gold by burying your gold.
Hint: We’re globally headed to The Collapse (with capital C) now. See climate change, resource scarcity, water depletion, or just ecological overshoot.
I agree that perspective might have been misplaced, but the founders were not in favor of powerful oligopolies under the control of the government.
Valorization aside, let's remember that the US has only been close to a majoritarian democracy for the last ~70 years or so. We can't necessarily look at the intentions from 200 years ago to decide on how political structures should be made, but we can observe their successes and failures.
Transactional sex might not be something you want people drawing lines around with financial regulation, but usually people have a line.
There are other mechanisms to target illegal actions, such as sending the police to arrest the person. Those actions are guarded by due process and the right to trial.
Using the financial system to target people is not.
And there are also cases in which you can clearly know something is illegal. Someone purchasing guns in a country where guns are not legal doesn't need a judge, jury, and court process for a payment processor to decide they don't want to be involved. It's not arbitrary. And your right to make purchases using a credit card is not a basic human right.
In reality I don’t think there is any chance of a law requiring payment processors to process all legal transactions and definitely nothing about illegal transactions. If that were a possibility, I would back off my statement that they should be forced to process illegal transactions.
how do you know with 100% certainty/due process that this is indeed the case and it's not just your ML algorithm going crazy?
people can also pay with physical money if they desire to do so.
it shouldn't be my decision whether i want to allow the transaction, even if i wouldn't want to allow it. i'm not in a position to perform due legal process to determine whether you're indeed being paid for a hit job.
the provider should be in a neutral position.
The problem you're trying solve is caused by lack of competition and near monopoly players. The fix isn't to force those businesses to ignore ethics. The fix is hugely increasing the competition.
you should pass the transaction, as you should be in a neutral position.
edit: to clarify, payment providers/processors nowadays are a core utility function in our society. imo this is not something you can consider a regular private business.
would you like to no longer receive water or electricity at your home because your utility companies don't like you, despite (being willing to) paying the bills like any other citizen?
You actually think that there are certain situations where it is OK to force basic utilities to transact with everyone.
You just disagree where exactly the line is. But at the end of the day, yes you also agree that some companies should be forced to engage in certain transactions.
The fact remains that you now admit that yes you want to force certain businesses, specifically utilities, to sell to people, and this contradicts your previous statement.
You even did the best form of non engagement, where you then say "you can have the last word" thereby making it so either your statement remains unchallenged, or making it seem like you "win" because I responded, which is what you told me to do.
> non engagement
I didn't say I'd never speak to you again lol. Just that this topic is over because you can't seem to discuss it in a way that doesn't include personal attacks. Not interested in that style of debate in the least.
It's literally not. Your claim is that I suspect the local butcher sells meat rather than knowing that they sell meat. If my vegan friend doesn't want to do their accounting, that should be within his basic human freedoms. He's not the only accountant in town and the butcher will surely find an accountant who enjoys eating meat.
> Whether or not a credit card works should have nothing to do with someone's arbitrary ethics.
It shouldn't be illegal for someone to start a vegan credit card that only allows purchases at businesses that don't kill animals. More choice is better and you want to make all payment processors follow a one-size-fits-all rule. That's the opposite of the direction we should be pursuing.
The real problem is the near monopoly control of the handful of payment processing giants that currently exist. Fix that problem and increase the competition and offer more choice and you no longer needs to force payment processors to be neutral. Forced neutrality in the end means the government decides. Which makes sense in a handful of cases, but not when markets can do a better job.
If you “know” the money is for a hit job, you contact the FBI or local police and they can mobilize protective services and arrest forces.
Of course you contact the police in the situation I described. Do you accept the payment though or do you refuse the transaction? You keep avoiding a specific yes or no question.
There is a massive difference between "unethical business" and "illegal business". As banks provide critical infrastructure, they should absolutely not be allowed to refuse business they consider "unethical", just like a power company should not be allowed to cut someone off because they think they are behaving "unethically".
As to "illegal business", the simple fact is that the bank doesn't know enough to make a meaningful distinction. It is simply impossible for a bank to know for a fact what a payment is for. They only know the source account, the destination account, the payment value, and a user-provided description. That's just not enough data to make a decent judgement. Plenty of jokers out there who will label their rent transaction as "extortion payment", after all.
Sure, if they have reasonable suspicion they should forward the information to the police, but they should not be allowed to block it unless given a court order.
Banks do know enough to price in risk. And there is your problem. They must be allowed to price in risk and if they are allowed to do that they can effectively deny business by making the price too high.
PayPal isn't a bank but does payments. The real problem is there aren't enough alternatives like that. The solution to banks having so much power is to give them more competition.
Another possible solution to banks having so much power is to regulate them more. I know a lot of libertarian types don't like that answer, but it is a valid answer.
It means you have far more choices in who to give your business to. For example, in a big city you can eat at thousands of restaurants. Or cook at home. However, I cannot choose from thousands of payment processors. With more payment processors competing for my business, I would get a better product and more choice.
> Another possible solution to banks having so much power is to regulate them more. I know a lot of libertarian types don't like that answer, but it is a valid answer.
I'm firmly not libertarian. Not even close. But I don't like to pull out the regulation stick until we see that more competition and a functioning market can't solve the problem. Since these transactions are now all digital, the potential for highly functioning markets has barely been explored.
Can you explain the massive difference? For example, easy access to guns is legal in a handful of countries and illegal in most countries. Where it's legal to easily obtain guns but also illegal to buy alcohol on a Sunday, what does that imply in terms of ethics?
> As banks provide critical infrastructure,
There is no physical limitation - like a local electricity generator - that requires this "infrastructure" to be dominated by a few huge companies.
> the simple fact is that the bank doesn't know enough to make a meaningful distinction. It is simply impossible for a bank to know for a fact what a payment is for.
That's wrong. The bank reasonably knows what I'm buying from Porn Hub or the local butcher. Even if they don't know exactly what I'm buying, they do know how the local butcher generates the bulk of its profits.
What you're suggesting is that it be illegal to start a vegan credit card - only works at businesses where they don't harm animals. What we need instead is more choice, not less choice. Break up the near monopoly and reintroduce competition and you fix the actual problem - which is that a handful of payment processors can collude against a business or industry.
However I find the argument you're posing apparently in favor of allowing a business like Visa to decline transactions on ethical grounds to be missing some important rigor. It's honestly kind of boring to argue about very clear-cut and extreme example like a credit card payment that is clearly for a contract killing. That's not where the meat of the issue lies.
If you'd like to make the argument that a business like Visa should decline transactions based on the ethics (as opposed to legal & financial risk, which appears to be how they do it now) of that transaction, then I think you need to come out of the gate with a bit more rigor. Here are the questions that immediately come to mind for me:
1. Can we agree that the rules applied to a multinational corporation with billions in income utilized by hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis to exchange legal currency for goods and services should be different than the rules governing the bakery down the street?
2. If yes, then within the context of multinational financial corporations, what is "ethical"?
3. Who decides what that definition is for a multinational financial corporation?
4. Is that definition industry-wide or specific to a corporation?
5. Is a corporation expected to hold to a consistent definition of "ethical"? If they are, how is that enforced?
6. If a corporation is not required to hold to a consistent definition of "ethical", how is this different from "for any reason or no reason at all"?
7. If an individual's small business is deemed "unethical" by a monopoly or near-monopoly, such that it is impossible _in practical terms_ for the business to exist based on an extralegal decision by a multinational financial institution, should there be any recourse for that individual? What would that be? Over what timeline could it be reasonably accomplished?
8. Remaining firmly in the context of applying your above answers to multinational financial corporations: how do your answers create a net boon for society? Who is likely to benefit from your policies? Is there any apparent harm from your policies? Is that harm a net boon for society? How and why?
Without some thought put towards these questions, or ones like them, your (apparent, there's not a lot to go on here) proposal of universal ethical freedom for all businesses looks a lot like "unlimited freedom without regard for how that unlimited freedom affects others." Which, if you are seriously putting that argument forward, I'd like to circle back to contract killing and ask what damn right does Visa have to limit one's freedom to run a contract killing business?
But even ignoring ethics, I don't think multinational corporations should be unilaterally deciding on questions of law, either. I don't think they will ever make legal determinations based on any sufficient amount of rigor, either. Sufficient in this case, to me, is "would be the same decision reached by a court of law after engaging in due process". And even if they could theoretically apply that level of rigor, why should we trust an unaccountable multinational corporation with that power?
Yes. The core of the problem is the near monopoly that the small list of current payment processors have.
2. If yes, then within the context of multinational financial corporations, what is "ethical"?
A vegan credit card is entirely reasonable. Any ethical stance you want to take is reasonable. As long as you fix the actual monopoly problem.
3. Who decides what that definition is for a multinational financial corporation?
It shouldn't matter if you fix the actual problem.
Etc.
Solving the actual problem instead of the perceived problem very often answers a bunch of doubts all at the same time.
So it should be illegal to start a vegan payment processor? Breaking up the current near-monopoly and giving you more choice would give the maximum possible freedom to everyone including you.
> unaccountable private corporation with that responsibility.
That's the beauty of a functioning market. With lots of choice the corporation must either be accountable or lose your business. The real problem is that you currently don't have much choice due to a non-existent market with almost no real competition for business.
I'd bet that orders of magnitude more people die because of cancer caused by cigarettes and in episodes of domestic violence or traffic accidents caused by alcohol abuse than the number of people assassinated by hit killers hired online and paid with credit cards.
So at this point we agree (as a society at least) that some businesses should not be allowed to conduct business according to their ethics, but instead must do business with anyone who shows up at their door. At this point it's just a matter of deciding which businesses that rule should apply to. I would argue that payment processors are approaching utility-like levels of essential use in our society, if they aren't there already.
This is due to a physical limitation. Payment processors have no such physical limitation.
> I would argue that payment processors are approaching utility-like levels of essential use in our society,
Correct. And the problem is not that they are utility-like essential. But that they are a near monopoly. There is zero reason for payment processors to be a near monopoly and that's the actual problem that needs fixing.
I never said to attack the ability of someone to function in society. That's a side effect of a near monopoly. The actual problem is that a handful of companies control payment processing so it's easy for them to act together. The fix is more freedom not less freedom: far more companies that process payments and more choice. This allows companies to choose who they do business with and customers to find a payment processor who allows the types of purchases they like to make.
I don't think it's unreasonable for a payment processor to refuse to allow gun purchases. Or that it should be illegal to start a vegan credit card. Likewise it's not unreasonable for a payment processor to accept even very high risk businesses and make that their claim to fame. The fix in this case is to break up the monopoly and reintroduce competition.
As for moral lines you are curious as to what people will and won't cross, those lines will be different for different people, and that's exactly why we shouldn't be putting these sorts of decisions in the hands of random unaccountable corporate employees (or, again, worse, algorithms).
You clearly want someone to say "no, of course I wouldn't allow a transaction to go through if it was for a hitman contract". But what if someone said "I see no problem with contract killings; I'd let it through"? That person could be working at Payments R Us, and clearly we don't want someone making that decision! So take it out of their hands.
The contract killer is of course an extreme example, but we already have real-world examples discussed here that illustrate the problem with this. Pornography is legal, and yet payment processors boot online porn companies from their networks. Someone who thinks pornography is immoral might have made that determination (I don't buy the "high risk of fraud" argument; you can always control for that with higher fees). Regardless of how you personally feel about pornography, do you think it's ok for a company to deny another company access to a big chunk of the financial system for entirely legal activities, just because they don't like them? I would sincerely hope that we can agree that sort of thing is bad.
A vegan credit card that only works at vegan companies should not be illegal.
> to a big chunk of the financial system
Here's the actual problem! We have a handful of giant payment processors that make up a near monopoly. That's the problem you want to fix. More competition and more choices (e.g. vegan credit card) means you'll for sure find a way to pay for your vegan porn.
> That person could be working at Payments R Us
I'm not talking about employees making a decision. I'm talking about the owners of a payment processing company being able to decide in a policy that is applied to all customers.
Does postal system open every envelope to see if there is cash inside sent as an illegitimate payment to someone? Because it's easier to do it online should not be the base for justifying it.
Would you be happy if your email provider scanned all your emails using ML systems to detect illegal activity? For some reason we value the privacy of our communication more than other types of transactions.
That's about the business implications, not about moral ones as the comment I replied to was asking about. Completely different argument.
You're thinking about this as if the question is simply about whether or not payment processors should have the job of examining every individual payment. There's a potential discussion to be had there, but that's the only dimension of the topic, and one of the things we're talking about entire classes of activity.
If prospective clients like "Assassination Central" or "Doordash Blowjobs Inc" approach you as a payment processor, you might have some idea of what's going to happen. And in general payment processors have both an incentive and regulatory obligations to understand what kind of business they're facilitating, not to mention whatever individual inclinations they might have.
When it comes to something like Venmo, I'm not really sure how to handle that. I suspect invasivity isn't the only issue, it's also probably practically difficult to police effectively, but at the same time, if there were means by which reasonable correlations could be made, it's not clear to me that there's no activity whatsoever for which there's a case for flagging, however controversial which cases meet that criteria might be.
Should it be illegal to start a vegan payment processing company that won't allow butchers to be paid through them? If so, then why should it be illegal?
If not, then you have no place making it. And I would argue that even if you do, you still have no place making it, as unaccountable private corporations should not be given the ability (or requirement) to enforce law.
Certainly we can legally require you to report suspicious transactions to law enforcement, but it should be up to people bound to follow due process to actually do something (or not do something) about it.
I think a reasonable compromise might be to allow payment processors to put a transaction on hold until it's reviewed by law enforcement, but even this has some significant downsides.
What if I want to start a vegan credit card that only allows payments to vegan businesses? You're saying that should be illegal?
The best compromise is to not have one and fix the actual problem instead of trying to fix side effects: make it far easier for companies to enter the space and with thousands of payment processors you'll very likely be able to find a company that is willing to process your credit card payments.
The real problem is a few huge players with near monopoly control.
We're talking about whether it's worthwhile to say something like "hey, maybe we will not allow legal markets for some things (say, murder) in our society" on top of "maybe we will ban make some activities crimes (say, murder) themselves."
Do you believe markets for murder should be legal?
Do you believe private corporations should be in charge of deciding -- with no oversight or ability to appeal -- whether money changing hands is for a legal or illegal purpose?
I guess "yes" is a defensible answer to that, but for me it's a hard "no". As flawed as the US justice system is, I prefer due process over arbitrary action.
If you try to hire someone for murder, then the police will arrest you and throw you in prison.
Forcing every private company to operate as an additional police force, judge and jury is incredibly dumb and dangerous.
This doesn’t work when it’s something basic like payment processing. It’s the same reason we decided as a society that people can’t “trust their gut” and deny housing to people based on the color of their skin.
Running a profitable online business is not even a basic human right. No one owes you payment processing. Forcing someone to be a supplier to a hate group violates their basic human rights. If payment processors were discriminating against a protected class such as race or age then you might have a point.
Banks right now are denying transactions because they ‘know’ it’s fraud, based on ML models and probability and no other evidence.
If you require someone to not ‘know’ something until they have enough evidence they could prove it in court, they won’t be able to function. Even investigators don’t have to meet that bar.
But "people" cannot use that knowledge to deny access to money to other people if they don't have evidence that can stand up in court. Yet banks can. That is wrong. That is giving banks too much power without accountability. Yes, some of the entities they cut off will "deserve it", at least in your eyes; but many others won't. We already know how this plays out: it's the same every time a centralized entity wants more power. They claim it's to "protect" us against something, but it's really just to enrich them at our expense. Don't take the bait.
Banks are doing this at the behest of the gov’t.
Oh, and those sanctions and the like - what do you think they actually look like paperwork wise?
I don't know. You used the word "people", not me. If you just meant "banks", it would have been clearer to say so.
> Banks are doing this at the behest of the gov’t.
Yes. That doesn't make it right. The government should not be allowed to deny people access to money without due process either.
> You seem to be arguing that what is, isn’t?
No, I'm arguing that what is is not what should be.
> If you want to say that what is, is bad, then hey I’m not arguing against that!
Good! That wasn't clear to me from your previous post. If you agree that what is going on now is bad, then we're in agreement.
KYC and AML laws require private corporations to deny people access to essential services for arbitrary reasons, without due process. These laws are garbage.
I don't think anyone is arguing that what is, isn't. They're arguing that it shouldn't be.
Would you be okay with the police being allowed to randomly enter your home and seize whatever stuff they want, just because they have a hunch? Or would you rather they have to get a search warrant first, which requires at least some form of evidence?
You might also want to look up ‘exigent circumstances’ and ‘parallel construction’.
Similarly, a payment processor shouldn't be allowed to deny a transaction because they "know" it's human trafficking. Evidence of such a thing should be given to law enforcement, and due process should determine what, if anything, is done.
And frankly, you can’t run a business meeting the judicial bar required to really he sure, not that the courts are usefully right here either. Did OJ Simpson murder Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman? That depends on which court you ask, and how many asterisks you’re willing to allow on the answers. And that took 10’s to 100’s of millions to get there.
The banks get the ‘privilege’ of being fined for transactions that occurred and were later judged ‘bad’ based on the results of a in-depth, very expensive investigation after the fact that determined they didn’t try to ‘know’ well enough who they were dealing with.
Pretty cozy for regulators. Pretty impossible position for banks.
Such work is paramount in order to maintain the foundations of an accountable society. The alternative being suggested here is no better than witch hunting in the worst case, wherein certain groups/classes of people are barred from doing their business online just because of the sensitive nature of a given topic. (drugs/medicine, pornography, gambling, political donations, etc.)
If you think something might be for human trafficking, you report it to law enforcement and let them deal with it. They'll gather evidence, build a case, make arrests, and hand things off to a DA/prosecutor who will file charges. Or, at some point, someone will decide it's not human trafficking, or at least that there isn't enough evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, and drop the case.
All that is just due process, and a payment processor should not be given that responsibility. Both because I don't think they'd want it (it costs money and carries liability), and because we shouldn't trust them with it (private corporations shouldn't be allowed to apply the force of law).
It's a thought experiment. There are surely cases in life in which you know for sure that crime is being committed. What you're asking for though is that due criminal process be a part of denying a payment. Which seems extremely heavy handed.
If my payment processing company doesn't want to help sell guns, or help with human trafficking, or hell, doesn't want to support the meat industry, then I should be able to run my business according to those ethical choices. My company isn't sending someone to jail. They are just refusing to accept a payment. There is no need for due criminal process to refuse a payment.
Should it be illegal to start a vegan payment processing company?
These are the cases of having evidence, right? Which should be reported.
> I should be able to run my business according to those ethical choices. My company isn't sending someone to jail. They are just refusing to accept a payment. There is no need for due criminal process to refuse a payment.
And if two or three large businesses cover 99% of a given market (payment market), how about some anti-monopolistic legal protections? Them colluding to stop the meat industry, continuing your example, would be a monopolistic practice.
Yes, that's the actual problem. Breaking up the existing near-monopoly and creating a functioning market with thousands of competitors would be a far better solution than trying to force the existing payment processors to process all payments, regardless of risk or ethical considerations.
Not for services deemed important enough:
> U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who cited her religious beliefs in refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples
or are you suggesting something more broad: that in the chain of cause and effect that eventually effects a crime, only the “last” party should ever be held responsible? e.g. anyone can sell weapons to anybody, only the person who pulls the trigger should be legally responsible? in this case presumably it’s legal to hire a contract killer, the only illegal part is the killing itself, and a skilled contractor could probably shift that final act onto the victim as well.
This isn’t even about individual transactions. The situation here is more like them saying, “your business has characteristics in common with the kind of a business that might facilitate a contract killing and we’re lazy so we just aren’t going to do any business with you at all”.
If the payment processor knows what your contract is for, it should have an obligation to report it to you. If the payment processor knew the transaction was for contract killing then it should have an obligation to report it to the authorities.
> are you suggesting something more broad: that in the chain of cause and effect that eventually effects a crime, only the “last” party should ever be held responsible?
No, I think that some parties between the "first" and "last" should be indemnifiable because they provide neutral services that everyone relies on for legal purposes. Without proof that a contract between two parties is illegal, it should be permitted.
Do you have any idea how many employers have unenforceable clauses in their contracts? If you think that payment processors should be held liable for criminal contracts then perhaps we should hold payment processors and banks liable for criminal contracts of all employers.
This is the difference.
You are not "aiding and abetting" by handling the money. There's already a well-established body of law outlining who is and is not culpable for a crime. We don't need to debate it from first principles here.
Same with postal service, etc.
Uh, guys, this is not true.
This is not how any of this works.
Don't let these people on HN mislead you. Even the postal service cannot knowingly deliver a bomb to a target and claim immunity. It doesn't work like that. If you know they are committing a crime, then you have to stop them. Or at a minimum try to stop them.
The training materials are approved by the federal government.
It’s technically a crime for them to repeat what they hear, including to law enforcement.
Some narrow exceptions apply, such as when the telecom company is committing a crime.
But technicians who have to listen in on calls (I don’t know if this is a thing anymore), are instructed to never report crimes they overhear.
1. The accused party must be aware of the perpetrator’s intent to commit a crime
2. The accused then took action to help or encourage the perpetrator in carrying out their intent
If both are not met, the accused person cannot be held criminally liable. I’m sure each of us have met a single one of these requirements in isolation. For example, if you watch a crime happen, you likely met #1 and if you helped out a random stranger and the help you rendered later assisted them when committing a crime, you met #2.
We as a society agree that just the act of solicitation for murder is crime, one that is totally separate from a murder charge. It is also a crime to sell a weapon if you are not licensed to do so in some jurisdictions.
A lot of legal theory revolves around the concept of “mens rea” (which itself has four levels: intent, knowledge, recklessness, and negligence), and “actus rea” which is the subsequent action as a result of the accused’s state of mind. Entities that act as a common carrier are shielded from this because their position in any transaction precludes any knowledge of the specific details of what they are facilitating.
Fun story about the electronic toll pass, which I refuse to use and as a result get to places slower by never taking a toll road, in over 20 years.
We had tolls. You throw a couple of quarters in, and you go on your way. They were replaced by the electronic toll tag. Which is linked to your name, your credit card, and keeps a timestamped transaction history, forever.
There was a custody battle, and the divorced husband got the kids. The court looked at the wife's toll records, showing she comes home from work real late, and that would impact the quality of life for kids. Boy, I bet she never thought she'd lose her kids by using a toll tag. I bet she did think after the divorce she'd have to start coming home earlier and probably set it up with her manager. We'll never know.
Thing is, it should have been an anonymous electronic RFID wallet you reload, to replace the function of the quarter coin, and it became a government tracking device attached to your car.
Now answer me this: is your ISP responsible for you downloading that torrent full of child porn? Well, that's probably a bad example. Is Cisco, the maker of the network switch that ISP uses, legally responsible for it?
Do you have a source for that? Google wasn't being helpful.
Here is an article https://www.wbez.org/stories/how-your-private-illinois-tollw...
"many of the requests for I-Pass records in civil matters were divorce cases"
This is from the first search result linked in the other reply.
"In child custody disputes, a parent who believes the other parent is not fulfilling their parental duties may use this data to establish the parent is not caring for the child. A parent may use the data to establish the other is not with the child, but instead on the road headed to a different location, such as a race track. The parent who believes the other is not meeting their obligations may be able to use this information during custody litigation or as support for a modification to an existing agreement"
"“We routinely utilize I-Pass records in discovery,” says Maureen A. Gorman, a divorce litigator at my Chicago law firm."
Now, let me spread some more anger, because let's face it, people love being angry. Road tolls were supposed to be temporary, to finance building the roads. They were never supposed to stay permanent. Toll revenue is more than road maintenance. In fact, over 50% of toll revenue, is redirected to other uses, and increases close to 100% per decade. Some of it is used for mass transit - so people in cars, pay for people on the subway. Many toll roads (and city parking meters, and red light and speed cameras) are run by private companies, with taxpayer-paid city staff enforcing that private corporation's profit.
What can you do? Only thing I've found is to not participate, at a great inconvenience to yourself. No, I don't use city parking meters. I pay way, way more, for private parking - although I'm only in a car a few weeks per year, usually in a work-paid rental. The benefit - for me - is to fall asleep fast, without laying there for hours in the dark getting more and more pissed off at things I can't fix.
The problem is, it's almost all allegedly fraud.
No one has the time or money to prosecute all of the attempted fraud in the system.
"lawful" is the rub
not all laws equal and not all nations are democracies, or equally moral or enlightened
I do agree we should have less "meta-crimes".
Nearly everyone with a credit or debit card will have one with one of the major payment networks (that just all happen to disallow these sorts of high-risk businesses). No one has the ability to pay with CCBill unless they've run into a high-risk business and have decided that's a (possibly pretty big) hurdle that they're willing to jump. And many people won't want to sign up with CCBill... the end result is that these high-risk businesses are less viable. Maybe they should be less viable, but I don't think unaccountable corporations should be making that decision for us.
Visa/MC are relentlessly profit-oriented. If they’re not engaging with entire market sectors it’s because they don’t predict it to be profitable.
I’m a bit confused by your second paragraph. You can still transact with CCBill from MC/Visa. CCBill is like Stripe for high risk orgs.
Do they just have to eat it? Or can they charge higher fees to those merchants? If the latter they could quickly use that to discriminate. $100/tx fee would kill most any normal business.
Perhaps the problem is the government doesn’t provide a non-cash lowest common denominator, so people are basically forced to use Visa/MC?
> ... how do you square that with one category of business causing way more chargebacks than average?
Simple: Liability shift.
The liability shift is what spurred merchants in the U.S. to finally, albeit begrudgingly, modernize by upgrading their terminals to take chips and NFC. They did so because the cost of not doing so was too high. Some hold outs exist, but they are quickly realizing their error in calculation.
Liability for card-not-present transactions and your typical our-word-against-theirs dispute has always been entirely on the merchant. The card issuing bank just facilitates the dispute resolution. Banks pocket the interchange fees either way, so who cares about the rest? About as neutral as you can be, setting aside the fact that the cardholder is the bank's customer (because they are also the merchant's customer).
Liability for fraudulent in-person (card-present) transactions was on the bank, which is why banks make such a big deal about fraud detection. There's no liability for a transaction that is denied. However, since the liability shift, fraud liability for card-present transactions is only on the bank if the merchant is using a new chip or NFC terminal when the customer presents a chip- or NFC-capable card. Swipe a chip card, and it's back on the merchant.
In the end, theoretically, you have merchants and banks both interested in quality of service and fraud prevention.
There are numerous examples of companies doing something legal, that later blows up and they become the scapegoat for letting it happen.
As long as that happens, payment processors are going to protect themselves by avoiding certain industries.
So they'll never give financial institution carte blanche immunity, because they rely on them to choke off the money for illegal activities. And even if they did give immunity, you know they'll turn around a say "well, we didn't mean you could just ignore blatantly illegal activity" and the banks will fall into line.
If you see comments calling for payment processors to be dumb money pipes free of liability, those are likely coming from libertarians.
:)
In my not so humble opinion, payment processors should be transaction-blind - they should process any transaction and all transactions.
Be sure to define it in such a way that you can't be labeled as such in any cicumstances.
Thank you for thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion with you.
You go on the website, order your stuff. When the normal payment screen that comes up, instead of Mastercard or visa, you choose "Cash". You'll then be sent a text message with a number (or the number appears on the screen if you don't have a phone). You go to any ATM anywhere in the country, put that number into the ATM, feed the cash into the coin and note slot, and then your goods will be ordered.
The same system is used for paying taxes in cash, utility bills in cash, etc.
They can do refunds in cash using the same system.
You do pay a fairly hefty (10% if I remember correctly) fee for using that service though.
What they don't get is the buyer's information.
...except for the time and place, with a device that almost certainly has cameras for theft deterrence. Which might be fine now, but seems pretty law-enforcement-capturable.
Which has monetary value and thus will be monetized, sooner or later.
Check out "Level 3 data"
Many shopping carts don't bother sending the data, because they'd rather say "let's support 900 obscure payment platforms in a de-minimis way" than "let's support a handful WELL"
Then there's actually getting the right information into the message to the processor. There's vague and inconsistent documentation on how to tag things like "commodity codes" and data formatting (Should the per-unit price be rendered as $12.79 or $12.7903?)
Even if you have the right intentions, you can easily blow things up by just having out-of-bounds data-- encoding a nonsense discount or tax rate.
What happens is that people set up software that sets up bare-minimum and mediocre data for every order that's good enough to get the "you sent level 3 data" rates, and the actual visibility is still quite poor.
Maybe there are some top-tier merchants who actually do everything right, but there's a hell of a lot of noise amid the signal.
Absent any information, I just assumed that any supermarket that can handle EBT/SNAP etc was sending transaction details anyway -- the computer will refuse or only partially pay the transaction if any items not elegible for benifits is on the order.
Long version:
I don't think Georgia has copied what I think of as the mistake of KYC, yet at least.
I feel KYC regulations as they exist today are a big mistake, that does little good, more harm than good and causes a lot of extra work and annoyance.
People always seem to think that de-anonymizing things will always make things better.
As I get older I feel the more someone wants to know my real identify the more likely I am to be abused somehow.
Meanwhile, talking to thousands of absolute strangers here on HN or via an anonymous reddit account or something feels relatively safe.
I have also with time started to think that in the long run the risk from governments harming me or my family is a lot bigger than the risk that someone else does it.
Even if the ship has sailed on living in an identity-optional society, at least in most of the world, I still think it's good to record the benefits of such a society.
KYC is not needed as cash is still a thing. It’s accepted that pretty much anonymous physical transactions can and will occur and the police will need to do old fashioned detective work to find the criminal.
It has some limits (10000 BRL when i used it) but thats more than enough for most purchases
https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/verify/can-you-send-cash-...
https://apnews.com/article/archive-fact-checking-9264421609
You should report to the postmaster general if you are refused service; they would be interested in hearing about this.
https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-are-the-Limits-for-Insur...
I found this out the hard way trying to overnight about $500 cash to a family member.
Without cash we will see credit fees rise significantly.
I've only used my card with Uber a handful of times in 2016.
Digital has use cases.
Cash has use cases.
We can have both.
(Can't imagine pornhub selling gift cards at the supermarket checkout next to the App store ones)
NYC cashless ban law exception allows a fee-free machine to convert cash to prepaid digital payment mechanism, e.g. stored value card.
US Coinstar kiosks offer fee-free conversion of coins to Amazon and other gift cards.
Maybe EFT (e-Check) or Zelle does? It's still on line and tracable but is not going through card processor networks.
Could do it with pure stablecoin.
> The comptroller would also be required to create a mechanism that would allow the new gold-backed digital currency to be used by citizens for their daily transactions. “In establishing the digital currency the comptroller shall establish a means to ensure that a person who holds the digital currency may readily transfer or assign the digital currency to any other person by electronic means.”
Then there are the people defending the steps to the cashless society because those steps happened to be on people they didn't like: canadian truckers and pornhub.
I recall one explicit comment I can't find now so I am willing to believe I hallucinated it.
> No one is arguing for a cash-only society.
My statement was about the opposite, i.e. co-existence rather than exclusion :)
Let me be the first to argue for it. Electronic money is horrible. It obscures how much you're really spending on things. It requires a middle man in every transaction skimming a bit off the top. One company runs all the debit payments here. Mastercard and Visa used to split the credit card market but I assume they colluded to monopolize on on MC here. The government has passed laws demanding business partake in the racket but nothing to require acceptance of cash. Cash not accepted for public transport. Laws stating a maximum value of a transaction that is permitted in cash but have never increased the limit while they've been inflating the value away.
It misses the obvious fact that an elected politician needs the privacy of cash for taking bribes.
A cashless society can only work in an authoritarian regime that simply doesn't care if the populace knows about bribes or not.
Future digital payment systems can have a wide range of transparency, they are unlikely to be limited to public blockchains.
China is rumored to have a do-not-see list which excludes selected elites from detection by ubiquitious surveillance cameras.
Cash is nearly impossible to use on the internet. The web is a window into what the physical world will look like without cash. Incidents like Pornhub's show us the power a few companies will wield over us when the transition to cashless happens.
When I was in Asia using UberEats and Food Panda, "Cash on Delivery" was the recommended option by most of the locals.
Hell, people would buy things from me and just post cash in an envelope.
We don't need to be giving our governments any more control over the way that we spend our own money. And we certainly don't want to give them the power to shut people out of the system.
I use Canada as an example because it was a vast and wanton act by the government affecting and threatening thousands of accountholders at once.
It's a shame we don't have more libertarians representing the interests of the people in the Congress.
Can only hope whomever might be the next president would have the Coglioni to reform civil forfeiture.
Thus, doing this to them was justified and good. Meaning the government should have such powers.
If only there were some sort of clever computer algorithm that could create a money system that no one can track of block.
As an outsider looking in oon that debacle I have two point to make:
1: What I wanted to be addressed was why Canada went so much further than any other country in N. America in response to COVID, and what purpose did it serve when it's biggest trading partner (The US) was also starting to pressure it from it's border restrictions?
2: As a former street demo activist, I can tell you violence doesn't always have to resort to physical altercation; it takes many forms, and those impacts can take just as long if not longer to recover from. Financial censorship is a form of violence, you are depriving people of their own property and agency. It compounds further when their way of living is being stripped from them and they are unable to feed themselves or their families, thus causing further discord and strife in Society--be it in bankruptcy or divorce etc...
The vaccine-mandate is just one response to a litany of others that proved to have efficacy in combating COVID; better diets, exercise, sunlight and Vitamin D proved an even bigger boon for people's health and well being and yet those are OPTIONAL even to this day.
My point is why did it even come this? And why are so many proponents of the State being able to ruin the lives of fellow members of their class (non-elite/political class) with such fervor in Canada?
Some of it might be due to the current administration's "double allegiances" to China. [0] [1]. Notice Beijing too is set on it's "0 Covid Strategy". Canada was notorious for having delayed vaccination the Trudeau administration funneled 44 million dollars [2] and months [3] of taxpayer funded research work to CCP controlled CanSino, with little to show for.
> most French I've encountered see their dialect as uncouth
What? We have an office in Montreal with French-Canadians, French and Swiss employees and I've never heard of such thing.
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/9658738/trudeau-foundation-china-...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65054559
[2] https://globalnews.ca/news/7302194/canada-coronavirus-vaccin...
[3] https://ipolitics.ca/2021/03/12/a-waste-of-a-lot-of-time-res...
That does make sense, Tornoto and especially BC has always been an enclave for the Main-lander to setup shop in Real Estate and then eventually educate their children or eventually expat to, and the place is rife with abuse, and at times violence, towards HKers while the local government or schools not doing much in response.
> What? We have an office in Montreal with French-Canadians, French and Swiss employees and I've never heard of such thing.
Its work enviorment, and the line of thinking you're taking follows as:
I don't see passive-racism in my office, where we pay people to work cordially for a salary with people they otherwise wouldn't be around, therefore racism doesn't and mustn't exist.
Racism is an over-used word in the modern lexicon, but ultimately this is a racial thing: you speak my language and are white, but clearly not from our specific ilk therefore we will ridicule you for it in order to show how inferior you appear to me/us.
I lived and worked in European/N. American kitchens, and restaurants frequented by all of the above; God help you if you only knew what they think about people from Angola or Mali. I was first there during the refugee crisis during the latter part of the financial crisis (11-14) when they couldn't house them so many just lived in city parks in any major town.
Swiss-French, specifically from Geneva, always got a pass for some reason: must be the Banker money/wealth thing attached to it. My friend was from Bern (difficult native mundart speaker even by Swiss German standards) but spoke French with that accent for work as a corporate worker at SBB at dinner parties. Whereas Vaulis always got a strange look if it were in earshot.
But You honestly cannot be oblivious of the way the mainland French perceive it's various dialects, hell even Alsace or Marsille dialects/accents get the cold shoulder from Parisian speakers at a table: but personally, Normandy sounds the best to my ears when spoken by a woman.
It was used to disperse people from protesting at the Capitol, because the government wanted to crush people protesting without talking to them and not any imminent threat. People who were only parked in the street with signs, gathered together to demand a change in policy.
They would give the plebs some scraps of coz. It's better to be homeless with some food than being hungry
This is what I found to be the case too, it was really alarming; it was like MAGA was sped up and shipped to Canada despite it being supposedly a US-thing, whereas the US was dealing with Police brutality via the BLM movement, Canada just seemed to welcome it's draconian police state because it carried all those other features if you were from that 'class.'
Terrifying and sobering to say the least.
Or did Sanders et al. suddenly become the majority of the Democrats while I wasn't paying attention ?
Sanders is not pro business. He is at least trying to help the ppl. He is not the usual democrats.
Sorry what's the point that u r trying to make? I never mentioned the US in the first place.
The law that allowed them to take these extraordinary measures includes a required independent public inquiry into their use. That has happened.
It found that the use was justified, measured, and rescinded immediately once it was no longer necessary.
The paper from 2017: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320247611_Scalable_...
The general idea is called channel factories.
- 8 billion people
- 96% reduction in block space over the naive approach, per the paper. (EDIT: the signature aggregation being referred to is Schnorr signatures, and it's become reality since the paper was published)
- 7 transactions per second, 86400 seconds per day, 365 days per year
8000000000*(1-0.96)/7/86400/365 = 1.45 years
Current transaction fees are $3. Assuming that stays constant, every group of 20 users would need to come up with $3 between them.
In the past, fees have at times been both lower than today and higher than today. That will be true in the future too. Satoshi Dice didn't ruin bitcoin in 2013, and neither will ordinals in 2023.
Admittedly, I was more focused on Kazakhstan's populace uprising more than Canada's issues for personal reasons when the two occured--I can share why but are entirely moot for this argument.
As time went on and Bitcoin was used to bypass this egregious example of financial censorship I started to realize that this was a milestone: we can solve the technical issues with our technology, as we had in Ukraine in 2013/14 during the Maidan Revolution and would later do again during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in '22. But this is only a part of the solution.
What bifurcates it as a success or as a failure is often not even the goals it has accomplished but rather sadly it is entirely on the Governing body and the narrative the population that it governs adopts to said Governments actions; in the case Ukraine it was a complete success and has led to things like United24 because of it's immense impact in the early days of the war in the case of Canada, an incredibly draconian society masking as a liberal democracy as seen during COVID, showed its true face.
Many were aghast to see not just how myopic, but how absurd the laws they were enforcing were regarding seeing family or traveling even within provinces, but stood idly by and thought that nobody would resist and it was only a matter of time before things went back to 'normal' if they just obeyed (and things got extended further and further); it was a complete shock to me! I was working on a side-project with mainly people from Toronto and it was shocking to see the sheer brutality and contempt they had for their own from within...
Activism and street demos only work if they derail Society from it's normal operations, that is what it's intended goal is: to make Society pause and address the internal affairs of it's supposed Social Contract. Failing to do so, and let 'business as usual' continue while letting them 'vent' is the exact ultimatum most authoritarian and despots desire, as they can manipulate and shape it to serve it's own end: think the '2 minute Hate' illustrated in 1984.
As an early adopter of this tech, who has made most of his entire tech career in this space: I think Crypto has no real utility if it cannot secure it's own providence: and 99% all fail at that, even the best funded (ETH), whereas Bitcoin does solve this--when people see energy being mispsent what they fail to realize or take into account is the true cost of REAL verifiable security with an immutable record (ledger).
They never consider what this is for until things like this happen, often far too late, and they seem to undervalue the immense need for providence and trust in an ever-growing digital World until it directly harms them--most here never really ever experiencing this hence the prevailing sentiment of 'its all just grifters' not realizing that it is the VC and Ivy Leagues who start or hi-jack projects that actually do the most grifts.
Sadly, where this technology comes short is to ensure that tyrants do not suspend constitutions via decree, threaten legal action against legitimate businesses (exchanges), and ensures that the serfs/plebs who make Society function have a valid legal recourse to dispute and arbitrate these matters.
That's why street demos and activism is a fundamental part of being a Citizen in Western Society: minor disruptions to daily Life pale in comparison to reverting to the barbarism of living under authoritarian and despotic regimes: some of us are (un)lucky enough to have living generations who survived/lived through this first hand so we have a working memory to base our out-views on.
And the government. In Canada the government suspended the constitution (because that's a thing over there?) because of some peaceful, free-speech protected, protests in the capital and started arbitrary freezing protester's bank accounts. Of course, without any due process (remember, constitutional rights were suspended!).
For reference, the Emergencies Act doesn't 'suspend the constitution' it suspends certain Charter rights for a period of time. [1]
You may be thinking of the 'notwithstanding clause' but that's totally different.
You can see here how wrong and violent these protests were. The bouncy castle and hot tub were a danger to society!
They loaded up the capital area with 3,200L of fuel and started bringing in propane tanks. You think that wouldn't be considered a threat in front of the White House? Especially since the fortified compound around the White House is significantly further from the roadway than the comparatively unguarded Parliament is from Wellington St.
With respect, I suggest you stick to commenting on the US, or at least things you have some specific knowledge of.
Maybe read some contemporaneous news coverage. From Ottawa where it was happening.
> Mayor Jim Watson declared a state of emergency Sunday after a dystopian weekend of carnival-like scenes, heightened lawlessness, growing tensions between protesters and residents, and relentless noise, diesel fumes and fireworks.
The fact you think the situation was limited to 'bouncy castles and hot tubs' is pretty telling of how little you know about what you're discussing.
You know the invocation of the Act was supported by multiple political parties at the Federal level and Provincial Premiers of all parties?
[1] https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/mayor-declares-eme...
Uhm, I dislike this weird defensiveness of newspeak. Does it suspend some rights available under normal circumstances? If yes, then it effectively suspends the constitution? Why does it feel like Simpsons nailed it so hard when Lisa proposed temporary refund adjustments and people cheered thrice out of sheer misunderstanding of the language used.
And all that before we get to the part whether giving government power to pinky swear give all that power back when invoked is kinda playing with fire on the scale comparable to Patriot Act.
As [1] states:
> Any temporary laws made under the act are subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Bill of Rights, and must have regard to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
In re:
> And all that before we get to the part whether giving government power to pinky swear give all that power back when invoked is kinda playing with fire on the scale comparable to Patriot Act.
Absolutely not how the Emergencies act is written or functions. In fact, once the emergency is over they're required by law to hold an inquiry on whether the action was justified in the first place.
Further, the invocation can be rolled back by the House of Commons, the Senate or the Governor General - or honestly probably the King (albeit risking a constitutional crisis) - at any time, and all the temporary laws expire.
This particular invocation was carried out under minority government meaning the invocation had to have the support of multiple political parties too, and risked calling an election. It also had the support of the Provincial Premiers of all political stripes.
It's nothing like the Patriot Act.
What you conveniently leave out is that government in its infinite wisdom can simply decide it does not apply under exceptions[1] in section 1 of the charter. Shocking. Government left itself an out. What is more annoying that people defend it as it is not what it actually is.
Now compare it to what the act was intended for ( some sort of senior politician kidnapping ) and what it was used for in peace time ( forcibly dismantling a protest ).
I guess what I am saying is that it can be governed by Charter all it wants, but at the end of the day it is, apparently, governed by what ruling party considers a crisis.
<< Absolutely not how the Emergencies act is written or functions.
How it is written can be open to interpretation and it functions the way politics does ( expediency of the moment squared ). I am not really writing anything groundbreaking here.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and...
Minority government, meaning multiple federal parties, in addition to all the provincial premiers. So basically, every elected official - plus the unelected official, the Governor General. It's why we elect them - and have them, respectively.
Literally everyone had to sign off on this. If you think they're malicious then we have much bigger problems because frankly, they could find much easier ways to harm you than this.
And again, it can be ended by basically anyone and immediately rolled back.
I don't think you've made your case at all, tbh.
But we can agree to disagree.
Sorry if I came across prickly, lol, I was typing faster than thinking.
The state media and government tried to pin mailbox bombings and an instance of kidnapping to this group called the FLQ until an RCMP agent was caught literally red-handed (with severe burns and a torn off finger) planting bombs in a mailbox to pin it on the "FLQ"! [0] The feds then confessed to more than 400 illegal search and seizures, criminal trespass, breaking and entering and arson incidents and the bomb planter admitted he “had done much worse for the feds” (all of these incidents that were used to invoke the constitution's suspension!).
Who was prime minister during that time? You guessed it, Justin Trudeau’s father. What a coincidence.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...
So the government will investigate... the government. Do they at least wait for an administration change? Worked out beautifully for police departments...
> the Senate or the Governor General - or honestly probably the King (albeit risking a constitutional crisis) - at any time, and all the temporary laws expire.
Are any of those actually elected or are these just positions nominated by ... the same government who declared the suspension of rights?
You know the government is currently a minority government, meaning that they require the support of at least one other party to remain in power and an election can be called at any time. Canada's has elections every like 18 months on average under minority government.
Any impropriety in the process would have almost certainly toppled the government and led to an immediate election.
The person who found the government was justified in its use of the Emergencies Act [1] was Paul Rouleau [2] a justice of the Court of Appeals of Ontario.
The senators are appointed by various leaders and are, at least in theory, not aligned with any political party and given lifetime appointments. The House of Commons is elected and comprised of various parties. The King is obviously a hereditary role and lives in England, not beholden to any one person in Canada really, but instead to all Canadians. Obviously the King is neither nominated nor elected. And the Governor General is also pretty unaligned as the King's representative to Canada.
So no, you're wrong, oversight comes from all over the political spectrum and all kinds of affiliations.
Are you applying an American lens? The political system in Canada is quite different.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/four-highlights-emergencies...
Didn't they just have an election that resulted in the minority government? Meaning all parties knew their chances of overthrowing the current admin were slim.
> Paul Rouleau
Weird. He was nominated by a Liberal administration and found no wrongdoings in the actions of... a Liberal administration!
> The senators are appointed by various leaders and are, at least in theory, not aligned with any political party and given lifetime appointments.
By who? Who nominates those people?
> And the Governor General is also pretty unaligned.
And nominated by?
> The King is obviously a hereditary role and lives in England
So weird to read that a foreign, non-elected person can have such a big impact. Feels completely alien.
This was a public inquiry that was participated in by members of all major parties. [0]
> By who? Who nominates those people?
The leader of the party in power at the time, which historically alternates between Liberals and Conservatives. In lifetime appointments. Generally, though, the nominations aren't aligned with any federal parties, and the senate has its own political parties. You can learn more about the Senate here. [1]
> Weird. He was nominated by a Liberal administration and found no wrongdoings in the actions of... a Liberal administration!
A Liberal minority that can be dissolved at any time. An important point you keep ignoring. [2]
> And nominated by?
The PM. Not beholden to the PM - and they aren't re-appointed after 4 years. Of course, the PM can't remove them. An exit from this post can only occur through death or incapacitation, resignation, or if removed by the King. [3]
> So weird to read that a foreign, non-elected person can have such a big impact. Feels completely alien.
Charles III is King of Canada - among many other titles - and therefore not a foreigner. [4] Canada has its own independent monarchy. Note that in fact any commonwealth citizen is not considered a foreigner in the UK - a commonwealth citizen with permanent residency in the UK can vote, hold public office and join the UK armed forces.
You wanted someone with oversight who isn't beholden to anyone and suddenly they don't count because you don't like it and it feels 'alien.' Much of their power is ceremonial and as I indicated, if they did reject legislation it would likely trigger a constitutional crisis.
I'm done covering grade 10 civics with someone who has made up their mind on something they have no understanding of. It's playing chess against someone playing hopscotch.
Respectfully you're just asking me to spell out the absolute basics of Canadian government. You can simply ask Google things like 'who appoints Canadian senators.'
[0] https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/about/the-commissi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_of_Canada
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_governments_in_Canada
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_General_of_Canada
Looks more like there’s a right and a wrong _cause_ to protest.
How about the Canadian truckers protest where Canada's handful of banks froze their accounts and their gofundme was seized?
How about all of China?
There's no way government can be trusted. We would need a bill of rights applied to our money first to protect us and have a check and balance. We already need this!
One of them is that this kind of anarchism tends to quickly turn into a plutocracy.
Another is that systems don't exist in a vacuum.
If third parties want to regulate you, they will. So we've just added a layer of indirection that may be harder to manipulate by governments, great, but is manipulated by mining cabals and cryptomillionaires.
I don't mean to say it's all bad, there are very valid fringe use cases for cryptocurrencies. But it was never supposed to replace mainstream currency. The government is already a system for consensus, and frankly one that would be deeply unwise, to say the least, to throw away (in particular one in favor of money voting or mining voting). Specifically democracy is the best invention of mankind in my opinion.
(Weirdly enough, I think all big crypto thinkers have been trying to invent, using arcane cryptographic techniques and a lot of algorithms, something slightly (or significantly) worse than what we already have, which is a democracy where every real world individual is given a voting right. In their credit democracy is great, but it's already here, use it!)
(The inconvenient bit is that they are not required to give change.)
It doesn't matter that cash is "legal tender" if the business can just refuse to enter into the transaction in the first place.
In Brazil it is called PIX, and was implemented in 2020. Last month it has processed more than 3 million operations.
Works 24/7, 0 fees to end users, low cost for business. IMO, going cashless is not an "if", it is a "when".
BCB is a governmental institution, composed mainly of career civil servants hired rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leadership. They answer to the government, not a political party.
The Complementary Law No. 179/2021 defines a four-year term for the nine members of the BCB’s Board of Governors that does not coincide with the term of office of the President of the Republic, as well as establishes the rules for the dismissal of the Board’s members.
The personal information and the information related to the operation (value etc.) transmitted in Pix is protected by banking secrecy, as governed in Complementary Law 105, and in the provisions of the General Data Protection Law.
All transactions take place through digitally signed messages that travel in encrypted form.
I say that as someone whose government currently doesn't like them.
If everyone is using gov’t e-currency, you’d not have that option.
Many of the arguments for privacy focused technologies is not that it should be impossible for the government to infiltrate or disrupt your life, but that it should be somewhat impossible for the government to infiltrate or disrupt millions of people's lives for the tiny cost of some compute cycles. The former is necessary for law enforcement. The latter is a recipe for genocide.
Also, thinking of it from a systems reliability perspective it’s a massive Single Point of Failure.
That system stops working (due to kleptocracy, or shitty rules, or a mistake) and literally the largest economy in the world grinds to a halt nearly instantly.
It would make the days of dealing with cash (which has it’s hassles) seem like Utopia.
The system works if democracy works. If we lose democracy, of course, the blocks built on top of it would crumble. That does not means everyone should stop building on top of democracy. Even more so for things that makes the life of the people better.
You really don’t want the folks in power to have even more of that kind of power, no matter how convenient it is most of the time.
At least Visa/MasterCard, etc. mainly just care about making money. The gov’t doesn’t even have to care about that!
Using ‘we’re currently in a democracy’ to justify creating an even more tempting and likely to be abused tool of oppression is not a good idea.
In your hypothetical scenario of nazis taking the gov, lets assume there is no central database. Nazis would go: ok banks give me your databases or else. Banks gives databases because they care about money. There, now nazi have central database. And in this scenario you have deprived the people of enjoy a really nice service.
Where is the win here I don't see it. Let's not do good thing because, oh, in a doomsday scenario good thing might be bad. Like, shouldn't we channel efforts in ensuring doomsday never comes to reality in the first place? This way we all enjoy good life with ever improving services.
I’m also pointing out not-that distant past events, and you’re also just completely ignoring them.
Good luck! Just don’t do it in my economy.
All the transactions are controlled by multiple independent parties, whose interests do not align to do that as they’d lose their customers to their competitors when it came out what was happening.
Some of the data does go through central clearing at some step (ACH, Fedwire), but credit card charges, Zelle, cash, checks deposited at the same bank, etc. do not.
With cash, you stay out of those databases in the first place.
Definitely not impossible, but much harder than if there was a single centralized system - dramatically harder.
Cash is king though, as you say.
BTW, Brazil Central Bank now is "independent", that is, their president was indicated by the looser candidate can do what he wants. In USA at least they respond to Congress.
International institutions such as the Bank of International Settlements have recognized PIX as a successful case:
https://www.bis.org/publ/bisbull52.htm
A similar service has been prepared for years, and US Federal Reserve will launch FedNow this July:
CBDC will allow govts, at their discretion, connect your money to your ‘good citizen score’ (much like China’s Social Credit Score) and lock you out of society.
> The small organization that helped bring the porn industry to its knees
https://www.godreports.com/2022/12/the-small-organization-th...
> How Pornhub – one of the world's biggest sites – caused untold damage and pain
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhu...
> Pornhub sued for allegedly serving “under-age, non-consensual” videos
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/pornhub-hosted-r...
> The Children of Pornhub
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...
A simpler exemple would be independent new commenters, political organizations, or non aligned artists suspended by Crowdfunding platforms, Patreon, Paypal or even VISA directly because the competition or politicians don't want them to exist.
> PayPal shuts accounts of anti-war publications Consortium News and MintPress News
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/04/uofx-m04.html
> Visa & Mastercard Reportedly Refuse Service to David Horowitz - Newest Victim of SPLC's Anti-Conservative Purge?
https://www2.cbn.com/news/us/visa-mastercard-reportedly-refu...
> PayPal Partners with Anti-Defamation League to Research Financial Pipelines of ‘Extremist’ Groups
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/paypal-partners-with-ant...
> Why Is PayPal Denying Service to Palestinians?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/10/why-paypal-denying-ser...
That's fine, but please understand that some of us believe it's worth having principles. We think it's better for society and humanity if people think above the dislike=hurt/like=help dichotomy.
Yes I dislike those who profit from CSAM and revenge porn, "it's just an app" doesn't change the horror of their actions. It's kind of a lowbar when it comes to principles, don't you think? Do you care about the people they hurt in their very flesh? The people who killed themselves as the result of sex exploitation?
> We think it's better for society and humanity if people think above the dislike=hurt/like=help dichotomy.
Both revenge born and CSAM are illegal, there is no dichotomy here.
If today, you lose access to your bank account for whatever reason, you still have various options how to purchase necessities: If you got some spare cash, you could use that; otherwise you could ask a friend to lend you some cash.
In a cashless society, that won't work: Even if the friend wants to help you, they have nothing to wire the cash to. They'd literally have to buy the individual goods for you.
The only way to fix this would be to get a new temporary bank account until the old one is accessible again. But if you got banned for whatever reason, chances are the bank will ban the new account as well.
Many porn actors have been blacklisted from the US banking system.
Conservatives got tired of losing US supreme court cases over censorship laws and regulations and shifted to enforcing their morals via the private banking system.
Ever notice that there's no law or regulation requiring banks provide even basic checking service to anyone who can establish a valid identity?
Going cashless cannot happen unless either the government starts providing essential (checking, savings, credit card, and home/personal/auto financing) services they are mandated to provide to everyone (which will never happen because the banking industry would lose a ton of control) or banks must be mandated to provide non-lending services to anyone and provide lending on an identity-blind basis (ie, only metrics may be used, none which identify the type of banking or business or employment or spending you do.)
The same thing has happened to conservatives. [1] [2] [3]
It's more of an establishment/anti-establishment phenomenon than a left/right phenomenon.
[1] https://nypost.com/2019/05/25/jpmorgan-chase-accused-of-purg...
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/pnc-bank-trump-mxm-news-account-178...
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gofundme-freedom-convoy-under-i...
First it was federal and state moral laws (mostly porn, but also race and gender related stuff) with state/local and USPS cops handling enforcement, back when there was no internet and the way you got information out was via newsletters, zines, and such. USPS cops used to literally spend their days steaming open envelopes and rifling through people's packages that seemed like they might contain lots of flyers for unions or newsletters for black panthers, or nudie mags. But religious conservatives lost court cases left and right, eventually giving up on that front.
So they shifted to banking to enforce a moral code in the private sector they couldn't do so via the government. After all - if you can't ban something, just starve it of money...making it impossible, or very expensive and inconvenient, to fund.
For decades, porn stars have been basically shut out of the banking system, blacklisted, finding their bank accounts suddenly closed with little warning, with little or no explanation. I'm not talking prostitutes - I'm talking people who are clearly employed and receiving paychecks for being adult actors in films, all very verifiable. What's wild is that clearly banks are spending labor and resources to have computers and staff go through and find these accounts and close them.
Criminals figured out pretty quick that porn stars had lots of cash hanging around, and they became targets for both organized (and less so) crime...as well as a place for organized crime to dump/launder money.
The credit card industry claims they restrict / charge such high fees for porn because of fraud rates, but...look at the gym industry, which is infamous for fraudulent billing practices, and how they have access to credit card processing and even ACH access. The banking industry also seems more than delighted to handle the finances of boy scout troops and catholic churches.
When ads dominated revenue, that was how censoring happened - major advertisers would contractually ban adult content from sites running their ads. With subscription fees taking over, it's now credit card payment processing. Most of the major crackdowns on adult content on various platforms have come from merchant and processing banks threatening to pull service because they don't like what they see on the site...or from the site trying to get an app onto Google and Apple app stores.
Speaking of which: that's also why Apple is so paranoid about adult content in apps, podcasts, etc. They make a massive amount of cash off their take from app purchases and subscriptions. Even a slight increase in the percentage they pay, due to "risk" or some percentage of the fees going to adult content - means a huge, huge loss in revenue for them. Well, that and I think Tim Cook has internalized a lot of the conservative "gay = child predator" stuff which is why he's so fucking obsessed with Protecting The Children (coughCSAMcough) - but that's another story.
ChatGPT, by the way? They didn't implement prudish (and pretty ineffective) censoring out of some moral code (otherwise they would have better filtered the training set, which clearly contains a LOT of porn), they did it to satisfy their credit card processor. The really big crackdown on naughtiness recently? Notice it happened right when they were submitting their iOS app for approval...
Umm. I'd suggest a background refresh on that one.
edit:
Wikileaks to sue Visa, Mastercard over "financial blockade"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-to-sue-visa-mastercar...
It is everything people on HN deride. Smart contracts. Web3. But it is necessary to save us from a future of CBDCs and Big Tech payment systems being the only choice.
is due process applicable?
has the supreme court established if a vendor is free to turn down business? (i do not claim to know the answer, but i believe there was some recent such issue they saw)
If we/the voter wants a copyright monitoring system or transaction monitoring bolted onto every tube we should get a bill for it. We should pay for every bit of work done at our request by the companies.
Let it cut deep into the budget. We want to know what the orwellian society costs.
2. 1.) can shut you down and you can be left without any form of durable payment or value.
3. Makes it very easy to track all of your consumption habits.
4. Creates a tiered society where the unbanked (poor and unhoused) are second-class citizens and cannot access the same things as others.
Also anyone with the means can still do a 51% attack if they wanted.
Not quite, at least in PoS protocols with off chain governance. If somebody with billions of dollars decided to attack Ethereum, the community would be able to fork the protocol and drain the malicious nodes of funds, basically burning the attacker’s capital over a short time.
My biggest pessimism around crypto is that if you cut off the convertibility of crypto to national currencies, make part of the punishment for using crypto civil forfeiture, and if you did this with just USD but especially with a few major currencies. I think you do that and you break crypto's back.
I think one of the things we should take away from crypto is that a small cabal of special interests being able to block payments is very bad.
In regards to 51% attacks they aren't going to happen to Bitcoin or Ethereum.
For possible flaws, to put it in terms that technical non-crypto people understand, his arguments are like saying "well Heart Bleed happened and this could happen again thus all computers are unsafe and you can never trust them to be secure" which is technically true but that doesn't mean we should give up on personal computers and store all our data in the cloud. Blockchain developers are very smart and build defense in depth against attacks, there's a reason why Ethereum has tens of billions of USD stored on it.
There are protocols for transferring cash on Ethereum (LUSD, RAI) that you can use that no one, not even nation states spending billions of dollars can stop you from using.
The tradeoff is they won't scale to the world. But then there are less secure protocols (DAI, USDC) that do scale which will be fine for 99.9% of people (who aren't terrorists or being targeted by the government).
Tech is all about tradeoffs and you can learn about them from experts in the field rather than an obviously anti-crypto YouTube video to understand them.
All of these are far more censorship resistant than any banks or traditional financial services.
I order something online. Get asked to confirm the purchase on my bank app. Log in to my bank website from my laptop as I am already there, enter my password. Then I get prompted to open my phone and enter the same password to confirm that it is me logging into the bank app. I am allowed into the banks web app, where I tell it, yes it's me and I want to make that purchase.
It's at the stage where physical shops might actually be quicker and less hassle, especially if you have forgotten or mistyped the password and need to go through the process of resetting it.
etcetera
Inevitably, the financial system is rigged to collapse, and it's just a matter of time before critical mass of people realize what otherwise currently at least hundreds of thousands of people across 160 countries realize and continue to. Apes Together Strong released recently on Amazon and Vimeo offers a reasonable perspective that does not intentionally lie by omission, despite that so many details are omitted probably due to time constraints and keeping information introduction simple for everyone not yet aware.