Yes... but if payment processors are going to be charged in criminal cases that involve the use of their systems for purchasing things that are illegal, then they have an interest in not being in that situation.
From earlier this year:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-whistleblower-says-maste...
> Jan 24 (Reuters) - Mastercard and Visa failed to stop their payment networks from laundering proceeds from child sexual abuse material and sex trafficking on the popular website OnlyFans, according to allegations in a previously undisclosed whistleblower complaint filed with the U.S. Treasury’s financial crimes unit.
> The whistleblower, a senior compliance expert in the credit card and banking industries, said the two giant card companies knew their networks were being used to pay for illegal content on the porn-driven site since at least 2021, and accused them of “turning a blind eye to flows of illicit revenue.”
And from 2022:
https://corporate.visa.com/en/sites/visa-perspectives/compan...
> On Friday, July 29, a federal court issued a decision in ongoing litigation involving MindGeek, the owner of Pornhub and other websites. In this pre-trial decision, the court denied Visa’s motion to be removed from the case on a theory that Visa was complicit in MindGeek’s actions because Visa payment cards were used to pay for advertising on MindGeek sites, among other claims. We strongly disagree with this decision and are confident in our position.
Given this, it is a completely reasonable position for payment processors to decide not to touch anything that they can be brought into legal liability.
They'd likely prefer not being gatekeepers of money, but if they're going to be brought into a court and sued each time someone uses them to purchase something that may be illegal, they're going to take steps to not be brought into court.
It’s a choke point on the entire economy for any sufficiently motivated interest group that wants to ban something that would otherwise be legal…lobbying a few executives at Visa/Mastercard to shut off the taps is much easier than lobbying government to pass a law.
With no mandated open protocol for (legal) payments or legal protections like the internet has, this will continue to be a problem and will only get worse.
Ultimately I think digital payments should be facilitated on government rails just like cash is. Where any decision to block a payment should be determined by law, and require actual skin in the game from elected representatives who are fireable by their constituents.
But the start-up costs are mind-bogglingly insane, and the organizations best equipped to help you with capital and/or navigation are the very organizations you would be rug pulling in some way or another.
Is it? Assuming nobody opposed you, you'd need to convince merchants to have a different payment terminal and train staff on it. You'd need to convince POS providers to provide an integration. You'd need to convince banks to allow your card to be accessible in their systems (or find an alternative way for your customers to pay their card). Once this is done you have to convince people to become your customers for a card that only works in some scenarios.
Assuming absolutely everyone felt neutral about this, what's the incentive for any of the above parties to say yes? For everyone involved it seems to be a lot of work for little benefit.
When they block a payment it’s typically due to some interest group threatening bad PR hit pieces on them.
If you’re running a duopoly money printer, the worst thing that can happen is to have people realizing it and talking about it.
Hence why you’ll never hear an ad from Mastercard or Visa touting the dominance of their payment networks or even trying to sell you their products. It’s always brand-washing PR fluff about saving whales or Olympic ice skaters.
>sued each time someone uses them to purchase something that may be illegal
The removed content was gross, but it was legal content. That's the heart of the issue.
You assume it is legal until shown to be illegal
> “If Visa was aware that there was a substantial amount of child porn on MindGeek’s sites, which the Court must accept as true at this stage of the proceedings, then it was aware that it was processing the monetization of child porn, moving money from advertisers to MindGeek for advertisements playing alongside child porn like Plaintiff’s videos,” Judge Carney wrote.
> Judge Carney: “When the Court couples MindGeek’s expansive content removal with allegations that former MindGeek employees have reported a general anxiety at the company that Visa might pull the plug, it does not strike the Court as fatally speculative to say that Visa — with knowledge of what was being monetized and authority to withhold the means of monetization — bears direct responsibility (along with MindGeek) for MindGeek’s monetization of child porn, and in turn the monetization of Plaintiff’s videos.”
No one is arguing that Visa/MC should be forced into processing illegal transactions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_Australia#Illeg...
Part of the issue is that Steam wasn't properly enforcing rule 6.
6. Content that violates the laws of any jurisdiction in which it will be available.
And since they weren't doing that, the payment processors were getting pressure and in turn putting pressure on Steam.
So now we've got rule 15.
15. Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.Wherever a good or service is legal, a global duopoly of payment processors should be forced to process payments for it.
So why wouldn't the Australian government go after Steam? If you're a legitimate company legally operating in a locale, then it would be reasonable to assume they are following the law if the local authorities are not taking action.
Was anyone ever arguing that child porn is not illegal? And from the Judge's statement, Visa and Mastercard were aware it was there and also aware it was illegal
So.. what are you even trying to say here?
Make an argument, don't just blindly post paragraphs like that is supposed to discredit what I'm saying
And just to clarify for certain: what I am saying is that when Visa and MasterCard became aware of the child porn they should have taken action at that time
This is clearly about them failing to do so
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_Australia#Illeg...
While some of that content may be legal in the US, it isn't everywhere else in the world. As such, they're going to be in the situation of Collective Shout saying "when we sue {company} for hosting that content, we're going to sue you too for allowing {company} to monetize it through your system."
Payment processors have lost that court case before and are likely rather risk adverse to be brought into another one.
They can follow their regional laws and whatever
If we're not going to have a global law we shouldn't have global companies and global payment processing
>While some of that content may be legal in the US, it isn't everywhere else in the world.
Okay, then they deal with it in the other parts of the world. We wouldn't have much of the internet available if companies had to comply worldwide with every local law.
It would be reasonable for anyone to believe that a registered business that is a major operator is following the law. If they are not, then why hadn't the government intervened? As a user when you go to pornhub or any other site with the legal footnote about age, you have the reasonable expectation that you aren't going to get child porn.
Itch.io, in the US? I'm 99.9% certain. I don't believe any game there has the presentation to do any live action stuff to begin with.
With the surge in anti-gay 'groomer' conspiracy theories now retargeted towards trans people comprising much of the electoral campaign of the incumbent president, it is hard to imagine a less appropriate climate for a US government to create anything to fill that gap.
In other cases multi-nationals (e.g. AWS) are perfectly willing to claim that they're operating a local company under local laws and you can totally trust them to protect local customers from extraterritorial government reach.
Additionally, if this were only about legal risk to the payment processors themselves there would be no reason for them to demand that those games are delisted. They'd only have to refuse supporting the transaction. The game stores could continue to list them and require different payment methods.
https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/client-alerts/when-does-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_Australia#Illeg...
That is not what happened here. Instead an Australian group demanded Australian law be applied globally, and now you can fuck right off and maybe learn about the fact that an entire planet exists outside of where you live, with not just wildly different laws, but also wildly different attitudes towards what is considered real or not.
The Australian group said to Visa and Mastercard "people have taken your merchants to court before, and you weren't able to get out of those cases. We're going to take Visa and Mastercard to court for Australian law infractions, and you're going to be part of the defendants, again."
Visa and Mastercard then put pressure on Steam and Itch to remove anything that might bring Visa or Mastercard into court too, and if Steam and Itch didn't, they would drop them as merchants.
From the article:
> “We raised our objection to rape and incest games on Steam for months, and they ignored us for months,” reads a blog post from Collective Shout. “We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us.”
Payment processors do not want a repeat of what happened before...
> On Friday, July 29, a federal court issued a decision in ongoing litigation involving MindGeek, the owner of Pornhub and other websites. In this pre-trial decision, the court denied Visa’s motion to be removed from the case on a theory that Visa was complicit in MindGeek’s actions because Visa payment cards were used to pay for advertising on MindGeek sites, among other claims. We strongly disagree with this decision and are confident in our position.
It's really icky to say the least. There's plenty of groups I'd love to see debanked on a personal level... that said, I think it's entirely wrong for anyone not breaking domestic laws where they are.
The problem is that we build these systems where no one seems to want to or have incentive to thin about responsible administration, reasonable feedback, appeal, and accountability. Everybody who can just gets lawyers that work to insulate themselves, sometimes because they don’t give a damn and sometimes because that’s what the incentives of exposure sometimes abused are.
Let’s just think why it would not be feasible to build proper system.
Maybe because bunch of angry assholes would take it down instantly filing bogus claims.
This is what the end-game of unspooling government functions into the private sector looks like. The decision still has to be made, but rather than petitioning representatives to arrive at a democratic solution, we have to appeal to corporations and fight public opinion turf wars where optics and boycott pressure are the levers of change for our collective rights.
This sums up my experience with my representatives in recent years. You only get a meeting with my reps if you're a large donor or you cause enough public outrage.
Otherwise they feel no obligation to their constituents and hope that the automated form letter (in varying font sizes and colors between paragraphs) they send you in response is enough to appease you.
Do you, as a developer, want to wrangle together 20 different payment processors so you can sell shitty 100% polyester T-shirts? No.
Do I, as a customer, want to have to carry around 20 different cards just so I have a chance at being able to pay at an arbitrary merchant? No.
And do I, as a business, want to pay for the additional complexity of managing fees across so many processors? No.
So everyone actually wants the same thing: very, very few payment processors.
Well, not really. Right now we're making two separate decisions. One for what is legal to sell, and one for what you can meaningfully sell. Those shouldn't be different, so the latter decision shouldn't be happening.
Ah, priorities.
But when they value something and it's taken away, yea. Recipe for mass anger.
However, for computer payment, I had another idea is to make a "computer payment file" that contains the order division and payment division, and with encryption and signature, and send that to them. You will first receive the file telling what payments are acceptable and can use that to make the file to send to them. Stallman mentioned the possibility of payment by cash by pay phones (or with a prepaid phone card), so that might be one way to do it, too; after you figure out the price, you can receive the payment code and include that in the payment file. Other methods of payment would be possible (e.g. store credit), so the payment file can work independently of what kind of payment.
I haven't seen a working payphone since the 90s lol.
Square is currently rolling out the ability for merchants to accept Bitcoin on their terminals.
If paid sites started accepting bitcoin, it would definitely spur wider adoption.
How much energy is the "right" amount?
How does that compare to the amount of energy used for paper and coin?
Can any amount be more than the "right" amount as long as the cost of the energy is willing borne by the entities conducting the transaction?
The proof of stake idea is like a ponzi scheme
I also know a guy who recently installed a dummy load in a thermal power plant which they switch on when they can’t give the power to the network due to overcapacity, as they can’t just switch off the plant willy nilly.
The point is, in a grid with lots of renewables in it not only there’s a lot of stray energy that can be captured, but a flexible load that can be switched on/off in milliseconds is actually hugely valuable if we’re to have stable grids.
Hell the whole reason why Steam got big is how FRICTIONLESS it made buying videogames.
Still people will go a long way for their porn fix so who knows?
They can be opened peer to peer, or hop between other channels, similar to dns routing
They are prefunded with a certain quantity of bitcoin that dictates the size of bitcoin that can move in that route at once - although smaller denominations can go through in rapid succession this just means more fees levied
All of this incentivizes a larger channel to be created by a well funded party, which can be coaxed into censoring transactions because they are a payment processor or institutional service. Likely an incumbent such as Visa joining the lightning network as a victim of LN’s own success.
There are some mitigations built in and actively developed. We are 8 years deep into Lightning.
lighting channels are expensive to open and close
as it stands, there already isn't enough block space for “mass adoption” users to all have their own single lightning channel
let alone several
lightning in its ultimate form will always be a hosted solution
and those with the acumen and willingness to pay to open and close channels (or perhaps use the L1 bitcoin) will be a separate class of people
(Because this is a textual medium, I need to state explicitly that I don’t ask that in an adversial way, just want to have a conversation!)
This is a feature for most crypto enthusiasts and a nightmare for anyone who is not capable of properly maintaining software systems or basic security
> What problems does Bitcoin bring along?
Not “is this tradeoff worth it?”
For a class of non technical people having the bank or credit card company in this case help them reverse charges when they’ve been scammed, and they are at risk of being scammed for a significant chunk of their resources.
I get why crypto enthusiasts like the irreversibility but the inability to understand why someone would want a protected system with an arbiter over it feels like the same energy I get from engineers who can’t fathom why anyone would choose the walled garden that comes with Apple products despite ample evidence for their popularity with the average joe
You could reimplement the traditional censorable banking system on top of bitcoin, where users never touch the asset, and instead interact with tokens/promises of money and transactions were reversible. Reversibility is not an inherent property of the medium of value it’s the property of the trustful model we’ve layered on top.
The difference is that normal people have access to uncensorable digital payment rails if they are motivated and accept the associated risks (the same they accept when performing cash transactions)
This is also not entirely true, to a minor extent law enforcement and the legal system can provide redress for scams. It helps to only do business with registered entities so you can at least take them to court/small claims.
Of course it is, since credit cards are a recent innovation if you are analyzing across historical time frames.
And even so, do you see most people preferring to pay in cash nowadays? Or debit card even? I’m not sure on debit vs cc usage rates but I’d for sure be surprised if cash was in use at a higher rate than cc
2. stability. Crypto is basically a meme stock and it's a mess trying to store currency within it. It's a full time job tracking its worth.
"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong." - Scott Alexander [0]
I don't have an answer on how to address that, though. You need to have a very strong stance early on to prevent witchery so your communtiy adjusts accordingly. But decentralization, by its nature, has no way to moderate behavior outside of the core design of the tech.
Banking is sadly one of those few aspects where you need some centralization, in my eyes. That's why finance is regulated the hardest in any given society. You need trust above all else to keep and use a digital currency.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
We had to quickly onboard them onto a new gateway, and while testing in their sandbox environment a rep saw the issue. Turned out one of their products ended up with an auto-generated part code that had the four-letter term for sexual assault in it. That was it.
And people wonder why many are anxious about AI. Garbage in, garbage out. Automating the process amplifies that.
The amount of times we got paged because we coudlnt take cards was ridiculous, because we couldn't ever do anything about it.
I am in no way implying there is no Cuban embargo, nor Cuban censorship.
By the way, why is the name "La aroma de Cuba" and not "El aroma de Cuba"?
Source: had the exact same problem with PayPal about ten years ago, except the trigger word was the name of another sanctioned country.
The post you are replying to mentions it is a cigar.
Game retailers could get together to form their own payment company, let's call it GamerPay, which deducts purchases directly from a bank account, just like most other bills we pay. They could probably get a lot of non-gaming related companies on board if they offered lower fees and/or more transparency.
People seem to forget that banks have been transferring funds between accounts for much longer than credit cards have been around. The infrastructure exists for bypassing credit cards, they just aren't what the majority use.
Where you set that dial is the kind of fraud you will get.
that's a weird thing to say about simply banning payments to people who profit from rape and incest content.
> AREN'T EVEN TOLD what is going on
it is very clear what is going on, they are making content profiting from rape and incest and they are getting punished for it.
Because, no offense, nobody cares what you find objectionable. You could've replaced "rape and incest content" in your comment with "silly content" and it would've had the same impact.
Not that I don't think rape or incest are objectionable, of course I do. I just don't think I or you get to make that determination. I'm self-absorbed, but not that self-absorbed. That's a collective decision that should be made.
Why would Visacard care about complaints? You need them more than they need you...
A local company who makes swords (very nice ones) ran into an issue where they couldn't take credit cards. No warning, they weren't even told, they were just added to a list and couldn't take payment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLIcohyT5Dc
They still haven't completely resolved the issue / don't know how they ended up on a bad list.
The idea that someone somewhere else complains inside an opaque system, and your ability to do business ends without warning is absurd. You can't appeal, you can't talk to anyone, you're just hosed. In some cases you AREN'T EVEN TOLD what is going on.