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Comment by hellbanner | Hacker News Reader

Looped in with IP Infringement, regulated or illegal products and services > Adult content and services Pornography and other obscene materials (including literature, imagery and other media); sites offering any sexually-related services such as prostitution, escorts, pay-per view, adult live chat features > Products or services that are otherwise prohibited by our financial partners Video game or virtual world credits Sale of in-game currency unless the merchant is the operator of the virtual world

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Indeed. This.

I saw the title of the article and had to do a lookup - the word democratised; it's a terrible choice here. This makes it sounds like stripe somehow made crypto send and receive easy.

They've done nothing of the sort. I'd say they have actually increased the chokehold monopolization of the major CC issuers instead.

If they used their clout to change the game, great, but they haven't.

You made some API things easier for developers - congrats. You are like paypal from a decade ago, but with 2.0 docs, and modern code for developers - except that paypal is actually helping more people take payments that are in threatened groups these days, and stripe just goes along with the censorship upstream and makes it easier to deploy.

Even coinbase is doing more to "democratize and reshape the digital economy" (not that they are doing it as well I had hoped they and others could).

To be fair, I don’t think any company is positioned to take on the CC companies and win.

Keep an eye on Apple, who has active, direct financial relationships with a billion+ consumers[1].

Services like Apple Pay, Apple Pay Cash, Apple Pay on the Web, and iPhone Upgrade Program are pieces of a larger (if relatively slow-moving) strategy.

[1] In early 2014 Apple boasted of having 800+ million iTunes accounts, most of which have one or more associated credit cards. In September 2014, Bono leaked that Apple had shared a figure of 885 million. https://9to5mac.com/2014/09/22/u2-bono-apple-itunes/

Apple has always and will still market themselves as "family-friendly", recently they announced that they will not produce any adult content for their original content lineup.[1]

[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2018/09/22/apple-tv-adult-content-origin...

I agree, and my comment is not really to down stripe - I think they are great, and have recommended them to people that take paypal in the past. My comment is more about the title of the post boasting that they did something magical for payments around the world, when it's actually kind of the opposite in some ways.

Funny thing is that it may be because of stripe that paypal is allowing itself to be used at more sexual places on the web (could also be that Obama and Holder have left and the current has changed from that direction as well)

I get it that companies are in a tough spot against the credit card companies - even governments are. On top of that, some of the tough things about the CC rules are indeed because of various governments and their pressures. It's a touch nut to crack, even walmart had trouble battling just a few parts of the CC monstrosity.

I still have hope that some kind of p2p easy to use bit-pay-like system does indeed democratize and revolutionize the payments system - something like firechat that is unstoppable. I would just not call stripe that system.

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