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Comment by rattray | Hacker News Reader

The hard part is the banking and payments side of things. That's where a new entrant would be useful (but unfortunately also ~impossible in the US).

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I'm sure these puritanical payment gateways and processors have no problem taking fees for sales of guns, cigarettes, and all varieties of snake oil. But porn? No that's simply too much!

"Well they're private companies." The pro-censorship puritans and meddlers love farming their oppression out to monopoly corporations.

Many vendors do block sales of firearms (or anything resembling 2A) due to similar risk factors. It's extremely difficult to find a gateway and processor that's 2A friendly. The small number of vendors that are 2A friendly usually require an FFL to further mitigate risk.

If you can find a gateway and processor that has an underwriting team that will not require an FFL, that would be a sight to behold.

It's often the banks who block the processors. (If the processors block it of their own accord, it's due to fraud/chargebacks).

I am not sure why the banks are so puritanical.

I suspect the fraud rate for porn is much higher than for most other categories and the cost doesn’t make business sense.

Just a better argument to force crypto, get a few exclusivity models and even if you have one or a few porn sex worker influences as a loss leader, you gain leverage - then it's worth it.

I wish this were true, but it's not that simple. For businesses, there is a lot of 'unknowns' with Crypto. It's regulated differently across jurisdictions, and Crypto in the USA is subject to things like anti-money-laundering and different taxable events when it's exchanged.

Many of the adult sites that have tried using crypto for payments have reported that less than two percent of their users are willing to pay with crypto. Until it becomes as easy as using a credit card or PayPal, crypto isn't going to be the savior of adult content.

Why not paypal? I remember in the early 2000s even the most dusty geocities sites having paypal buttons.

Their policy prohibits "certain sexually oriented materials or services".

https://www.paypal.com/en/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full

I feel like you could just sell an access code that allows you to download content rather than the content itself and be perfectly within paypals acceptable use policies.

You _might_ get away with that for a short while, but a fairly trivial account review would result in a funds freeze at the minimum.

Paypals policy bans using it for payment of any digital adult content [0]. Many artists still use it for nsfw commissions, but every payment is a risk of getting your entire account banned simply due to a bad comment in the note field.

[0] https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/what-is-paypal%E...

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