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Comment by eurg | Hacker News Reader

This kind of outcry happens again and again, but nothing ever happens, because it's a niche problem.

Some time ago it was fetlife: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/payment-processors-are...

And maybe of interest: When the EU brought out GDPR, so many people complained about the injustice of one group of governments bringing their laws to the world. For the rest of the world, this is nothing new: The dominance of the US finance sector means that any US law is automatically international law. Visa follows US laws, nobody can exist without taking Visa payments, so everybody follows Visa rules, which means you follow US rules.

In the end, what is allowed is the intersection of behavior that's not penalized in any state of the world.

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>In the end, what is allowed is the intersection of behavior that's not penalized in any state of the world.

That is hardly true. We do not follow the rules of Saudi Arabia and Iran. What happens is that the laws of the US and the intersection of local laws are what needs to be followed.

The US is aghast that the EU is a large enough market to actually impact the rules of the global internet, and the laws are different enough that they will hurt the major US players. Now all of a sudden people are seeing why applying national laws to pure cyberspace is a bad idea.

I'm moving into using tor because it feels more like the internet I knew from 1998-2006, slow-ish, unreliable, unpolished, anonymous, ephemeral and private, with all the warts there to see. In short a new network that takes A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace seriously.

Fetlife is also the canonical demonstration that cryptocurrencies don't solve these problems.

They tried accepting BTC. Noone used it, even while they were struggling with Visa. They pulled the support citing lack of use.

Don't they only accept actual money now, via ACH or debit card payments?

This isn't true anymore. I just logged on to check, and they support payment by:

* Bitcoin * Bank Transfer (from select countries [0]) * Major brand gift cards * Checks/Cash through the mail * Prepaid Paysafecard * Przlewy24 (Something available to people with a bank account in Poland) * Interac e-Transfer (Something available to people with a bank account in Canada)

[0] US, European (with a SEPA supporting bank), Australia, New Zealand, Dutch (with iDEAL supporting bank), Austria (with EPS supporting bank), Germany (with giropay supporting bank)

No idea about the usage though.

And yet I'm constantly told that European banks make it trivial to transfer money without middlemen like visa. So why not just submit payment that way?

It's only trivial within each country, not across borders.

No, it's pretty trivial for SEPA countries.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/retpaym/paymint/sepa/html/ind...

Do you know of any problem?

Instant clearing/settlement is in TARGET2 which is the ECB's vision for 2020.

Stupid high fees from uk banks, for example (we're talking a flat ~15€ per transaction)

For SEPA transfers? Are you sure you're not mixing it up with SWIFT transfers?

Like with anything else, you just need to use a provider that doesn't suck.

That was true up to 1/1/2018. Now the transfers take a couple of minutes in most cases. The frustrating thing is that it is now quicker for me to move money between say ABN-Amro in NL and some Polish or Romanian bank than it is to transfer between ABN-Amro in NL and a RABO or ING account in NL.

They do. If I have someone's bank details I can transfer for free, instantly. (OK it sometimes takes a few minutes at weekends). There's two issues with ever using that for online payment:

1. There is no mechanism to obtain a refund for a mistake - eg I mistype the account number, someone else gets the money. Banks won't reverse but ask the payee to refund. If they still exist and are willing to cooperate. This is the route used for many, many scams like Microsoft calling because they noticed a fault with your Windows.

2. There is no protection under the Consumer Credit Act to obtain refund in the event the company goes bust or the product is defective and they won't refund. Credit cards have to provide that.

I use it with friends in preference to any other method, especially Paypal though.

With SofortBanking and similar services it is becoming more common to use this to pay online. It eliminates much of the issues you mention.

Sofort are problematic because they a) access your account via credentials that it's against bank ToS to share and b) they scrape and store (and likely sell) transaction data unrelated to the current transaction because they have access to your account.

You can't "mistype the account number", as it has control digits. I mean, there's a possibility, but it's really slim.

Credit cards definitely have check digits, pretty sure bank accounts don't, though I'm not certain.

Common enough that there's been a fair bit in the media[0] regularly, ever since instant transfers took off, and warnings from the Financial Ombudsman[1].

There's also been stories of people randomly discovering a few thousand appearing in their account and stupidly going out to spend it that day.

[0] First link in results https://www.telegraph.co.uk/personal-banking/current-account... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-22815716

Credit cards definitely have check digits, pretty sure bank accounts don't…

My (US) bank issues account number serially. No check digits.

IBANs have check digits. That's been the standard way of representing bank + account number for a few years now.

Maybe internationally, but usually domestically within the country IBANs aren't used, at least in Australia, UK, and United States. Hell, my bank here in the UK doesn't even give me an IBAN.

With SEPA I've been required to use the IBAN even for transfers within Germany. Which isn't all that different, as you only need to remember the two check digits and the order in which the old numbers appear within the IBAN. The UK and other countries that continue to use their own currency are a bit special regarding domestic payments, though:

SEPA does not cover payments in other currencies than the euro. This means that domestic payments in SEPA countries not using euro will continue to use local schemes, but cross border payments will use SEPA and euro against eurozone countries.

But you wouldn't see such a distinction in countries that use the Euro.

You can use IBAN domestically in the SEPA area for EUR account numbers. The banks usually allow the use of bank account numbers too and they then translate them to IBAN, so you don't have to. What's more, account numbers in some countries themselves contain check digits.

A Norwegian bank account number has it, so I guess it depends on the country

> If I have someone's bank details I can transfer for free, instantly.

> There is no mechanism to obtain a refund for a mistake

Neither of these is true for SEPA.

I did that a few times (buying bitcoin) and got my bank account suspended. I was told the other party was suspected of perpetrating fraud, and if I wanted to complete the transaction I'd need to do it in person in a branch.

Getting your bank account suspended is much more painful than a credit card.

As a result, I'm not very interested in executing transactions with random entities out of my bank account.

Because we already do, in some places – e.g. Amazon.de takes wire transfers, so does PayPal in Germany, and so do many/most German online shops.

And even for offline payments, we have in Germany an entirely separate card system based on that.

But you know, network effects and all. Internationally, it’s incredibly hard to buy anything online without a CC. So Germans who order lots online still often have a CC.

Also, getting a hotel reservation is much more painful without CC. Some hotels outright refuse to do a reservation without CC, others will charge a higher rate.

check out spankchain: https://spankchain.com/

-high speed -prevents this nonsense

Payment for adult content is where Ethereum and similar cryptocurrencies would solve a real problem. Of course tokens (like SpankChain) are not really needed for a solution, one could use ETH directly. The anonymity of transactions could be problematic though...

SpankChain is a very sensible layer on top of Ethereum, allowing workers to bring their reputation and fanbase with them across services and avoid lock-in. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes sense to build on top of Ethereum.

I wish them luck and hope they solve payment processing problems for adult performers once and for all. That said, the only point of a separate token I see is getting them money so they can actually implement the system. From end users' point of view it would be easier if ETH was used directly imho.

Well, if the client is the "end user", then sure. But consider the benefits that the worker gets.

> ... what is allowed is the intersection of behavior that's not penalized in any state of the world.

In a weird way, I think China does this right.

Winnie the Pooh is no longer allowed in China [1]. So they turn it off at the firewall. This is better than say, trying to force all the other companies in the world to comply with some stupid law that China makes up.

While I disagree with China on their use of the firewall to block speech, it's a far better way to do it than to sue Disney to prevent Winnie the Pooh products from coming over into China.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-40627855

Look at what China is doing to airlines -- "Say Taiwan is a part of China or we won't let you operate here."

They have essentially the same policy as everyone else -- we'll force you to follow our laws, and if we can't we'll shut you out. Blocking the Winnie the Pooh content is no different. If China made up a large part of the audience of those sites, they would "have to" change.

Ditto GDPR -- you can just ignore it and block Europe if you want, they're not forcing you to do anything.

Edited to Add:

The last time I checked, the US believes that Taiwan is part of China. [1]

China has the stupid laws here. Instead of forcing them onto the rest of the world, they prevent the content from coming into their state.

Likewise GDPR is a "stupid" law, so it's the EU's job to prevent non GDPR sites from coming into Europe, and not Facebook's responsiblity for complying with a stupid law.

https://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/35855.htm

> it's the EU's job to prevent non GDPR sites from coming into Europe, and not Facebook's responsiblity for complying with a stupid law.

As the grandparent said, it's not e.g. Facebook's responsibility to comply with the GDPR unless they want to do business in the EU.

To be fair, this article says otherwise:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/12/04/ye...

That article doesn't really say that:

> The organization would have to target a data subject in an EU country. Generic marketing doesn’t count. [...] However, any U.S. company that has identified a market in an EU country and has localized Web content should review their Web operations.

(It's actually a decent article that captures the nuances of GDPR well.)

Until they can't and become bullies like with Taiwan.

I'm actually pretty appalled how easily people point to one or two benefits to the way China handles something while completely ignoring the concessions as evidence of them "doing it right". Never mind these short term benefits are coming at the cost of policies that are an affront to liberty and the modern concept of democracy.

So, I'm going to offer a counter opinion; I do not believe China does this "right". Dumb lawsuits are dumb, but I'm not willing to throw the baby out with the bath water.

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