Advertisers are also regulators. I've seen sites start heavily censoring themselves because someone complained to Google and they pulled the ads. Stuff like this ruins the web.
Advertising is a different beast altogether. Being able to to exchanges (money for goods, etc) is something quite a basic right(If I can call it that). That doesn't apply to making money though. I don't think it's normal in any way to force anyone to conduct business with someone they don't want to unless is a basic necessity in that particular day and age.
We don't need crazy things like crypto - we need decentralised and accountable banks and payment processors (not that the distinction between the two makes any sense either). Speaking of credit card companies: why do they exist?? Why can't my card just sign a digital request for transfer and tell the POS terminal to send it to my bank to be executed. A room of computer science students could write an open standard for that in like a month and have a working implementation within the year.
It is named PIX.
All banks implemented it, so, no matter what is your bank you're able to do payments from your smartphone using your banks app.
It is so popular and easy to use that even street merchants accept it.
In most banks you must first authenticate your smartphone app by going to an ATM where you use your card and some sort of biometrics to authenticate along with your pin. The app can only be used after this first "machine" authentication.
There are also customer-customizable limits, the usual anti-fraud controls. Of course, there is a lot of scams involving people with less instruction, but it is not substantially different from the levels in other types of transfer/payment.
Don't give fuel to the FUD.
Because the POS terminal (or more likely, the payment processor) would have to work with thousands of individual banks. The credit card companies handle that complexity so that payment processors only have to integrate with a handful of credit card companies instead of thousands of banks.
> A room of computer science students could write an open standard for that in like a month and have a working implementation within the year.
(While I don't share the optimism regarding the timeframe, I agree with the general sentiment)
But now I'm curious, what are the challenges with having a large number of entities implement a standard? Is it "just" the shrink-wrap effect of having a few-initial or large players, is it getting the parties involved to even agree to the standard, or what?
Credit card companies handle all of that and much more in exchange for transaction fees.
There are multiple types of decentralization and the one we need for finance isn't the "everyone is (theoretically) equal and there are no rules" of crypto but the "distributed network of trusted providers" that we use for things like public key infrastructure and email. People WILL get hacked, lose their wallets, etc. so recovery MUST be possible and like it or not, law enforcement SHOULD have the power to freeze accounts and take back money that doesn't belong to someone.
Take security: with natively programmatic money, security providers can be debundled from currency issuers and payment providers. For example with smart contract wallets it's possible to assign your own guardians which act as security backups and who need to approve all transactions, based on whatever conditions you set, e.g. m of n need to sign to approve >x amount withdrawn within y time frame.
This massively opens the space for competition which inevitably increases quality and efficiency.
It's the same with the security of data: the centralized finance approach has all customer data stored by one party. If that party is compromised, you have a massive leak affecting millions of different people. With programmatic money, digital commerce can work like cash, with no private information disclosed at all, to any one, and no private data being collected in large centralized repositories.
There are also basic institutional advantages with programmatic money on autonomous networks: the rules cannot be changed without consensus, so a rent-seeking party cannot use the network's monopoly status to extract economic rent. A centralized authority, like a regulator or a private company, can always abuse monopolistic control over an industry, meaning that risk will always hang over traditional industries, making them unreliable in the long run.
As for rollout: the NFC payment rollout took like a year to get to the point where I haven't encountered any non-NFC terminals since and that required all new hardware. Now that the hardware is out there, adding support for a new system is just a matter of software. At worst, a technician will have to visit every terminal and update the firmware manually (not sure if those things have OTA). "All the major credit card companies" == two, and it wouldn't really matter for their systems anyways since they're not banks, they are now-obsolete middlemen. People could still choose to use cards and vendors would likely still want to support them, there would simply be one more payment option available.
And yes, I agree that this would probably take forever in the US, but they're still using magstripe and the government is too big of a mess to be able to mandate a technical standard or even pass any legislation regarding banking anyways, so I think they have other things to deal with first.
Sounds like you're saying we need crypto. Decentralized banks? That's exactly the sort of crazy idea that's just not gonna happen outside of crypto.
> Speaking of credit card companies: why do they exist??
They provide a useful service. They pay for stuff for you, then you pay them back later. This is great because if fraud occurs it's their problem to deal with.
Banks already are a decentralized system, just not a very good one. I can send a SEPA transfer from any EU account to any other EU account no matter which banks they are with and there isn't a "SCT processing company" that handles that for me, the banks communicate with each other - the system is decentralized. But that transaction takes up to a day for pretty much no reason, so we use payment cards for most things. Those are centralized. If Visa/Mastercard doesn't want to handle my transaction, I'm screwed. If instead cards simply signed an SCT message and my bank refused to process it, I could simply switch banks.
> credit card companies
Yeah, my bad, I should've said payment card companies / card payment processors. For debit card transactions they don't provide any benefit, they are only middlemen between me, the merchant and our respective banks.
> For debit card transactions they don't provide any benefit
Agree.
But no! The state! oh the horror! Cant have state-run things!!!!
We need decentralized currencies with strong privacy guarantees. There must be so many nodes in operation no single government on earth has any hope of stopping the processing of transactions. Currencies must exist independently of governments, especially their monetary policies. It must be mathematically impossible for them to trace anything. Only then will people be free.
Believe me, you can't outrun it with your fancy digital currency with "so many nodes in operation no single government on earth has any hope..." is terribly naive. They can seize the networks man, they can arrest you, they can shoot you. They eat your bitcoin for lunch.
Revolt has worked out decently for the Iraqi Kurds and the Taliban. Jury is still out on the Burmese and the Houthis. Libya is a violent mess but technically they successfully overthrew the central government with significant external help, so at the very least that's a non-fail. Just for a few timely and relevant 21st-century examples that disprove your statement of "guaranteed suicide".
There is a third choice. Technology.
Every time some new technology appears, it subverts government controls. They must become even more tyrannical than they already are in order to regain the same level of control they enjoyed before. We'll either end up with an uncontrollable population wielding ubiquitous subversive technology or a totalitarian government which polices every aspect of our digital lives.
Most likely, balance will be found along the way. We're gonna find out just how tyrannical they're willing to become and just how much people really care about their privacy and freedom.
I'm not sure if you are missing contacts or providing irony. But the fact is payment processors and banking in general is extremely heavily regulated.
A few years ago when you saw almost all banks and payment companies starting to crack down on spending money to buy and sell cryptocurrency, that was to no small extent because federal regulators gave them a little side-eye about the subject. No specific regulations, to be clear, but a few pointed questions.
When every means of sending money overseas demands clear documentation of your identity, That's not so much because banks feel the need to know every detail of your business; it is strictly mandated by federal law. And while my examples all involve US banking, most governments around the world are similarly strict.
For example, if you do business with wikileaks, you will get a nudge from the regulator to 'reduce the number of high risk clients' you work with... They're not saying it's illegal, but they're also saying they're going to find some regulation to prosecute you with unless you do as they say.
It's a sad state of affairs when these kind of regulations aren't written in stone, but instead are flexible and applied on a case-by-case basis.
But the type of regulation that is needed is regulation of the banks and payment processors themselves. Not of their clients or things related to their clients.
You are correct. Web advertising is long overdue for some trust-busting. But for some reason, antitrust law is rarely enforced.
I remember a LOT of software being sold online (licenses and such) was sold via money orders or sometimes wire transfers.
While it was much less widespread than today, credit cards for ordering from a catalog or e-commerce was becoming quite common by the late 1990s but, as you say, for an individual, it was hard to accept credit cards pre-Paypal. (I had a small software business through about the mid-90s and I eventually was able to accept a credit card through a local reseller but it wasn't at all a routine process.)
You could often pay upon delivery even when shopping online, but there's no need of delivery for tickets.
Generally financial institutions are happy to take anyone’s money, and lend to them too unless they don’t think they’ll get their money back.
Their regulators can change those criteria though, forcing upon them an unfunded mandate. This is no different than policing entities washing their searches through private entities (e.g. the telecoms).
I consider this a pernicious trend.
You mean my web is ruined because I don't see more those ads selling the newest crypto ponzi scheme which promises 10000% yearly returns?
Let's deal with it, if advertising was totally uncensored that would be a nightmare for average user.
Somewhat obviously, you don't actually get a lot of people willing to pay for your content if you hold truly unpopular opinions.
Would you think it's okay if their water company tried to cut them off?
Suppose that your use of the water service was creating public lashback against the water utility for "supporting" your business. A loud minority is pestering the water board members and complaining that what you're doing ought to be illegal even if it isn't strictly yet. Some are pressuring other big water users to reexamine their contracts with the utility, and someone even managed to talk a pump supplier into severing their relationship with the utility. A different minority is yelling stuff about "rights" and making trouble at board meetings.
The easiest possible thing to do in this situation is to find some vaguely plausible reason to cut your access to the public utility, and tell you that you have to truck your water in yourself from now on. Note that this kind of stuff actually happens to farmers, refineries, and other businesses.
As far as what's "right"... Damn if I know. None of this is happening in a vacuum, and these decisions end up being made by people who are accountable to and influenced by their family, friends, and community for the choices that they make. Clear laws can dilute that responsibility, but only to a point.
It depends on what level the ads are being cut. But sure, that can be different.
> As far as what's "right"... Damn if I know.
I stand pretty firmly on "everyone deserves access to utilities".
Maybe with a throttle at a certain level if they're abusing the utility itself.
So charging more to big water users is usually fine, refusing to deal at all is rarely fine.
The point at which someone is acting so badly they need to be removed from utilities, where fines aren't even enough, is the point where they should be going to prison. And then they should have access restored upon release.
And sending money in a simple electronic way should be a utility in the US.
When it comes to the recent events around Pornhub and Onlyfans, the payment processors erred on the side of caution, because those two customers of theirs couldn't for definite guarantee that nothing shady was going on on their websites.
There is more childporn on Facebook than Pornhub, you know why? Because pornhub requires an ID. But Facebook is untouchable because it's too big.
If they were concerned about 'shady', they would shut down Wells Fargo for fraud
How can the provider of vital infrastructure be complicit in anything? Is the engineer who designed and built a bridge complicit when a criminal crosses it?
They should be considered neutral. Just like information carriers are considered neutral. Not liable for what goes on inside their networks. Searching for and punishing anyone violating any law is up to the authorities and they must do that without violating everyone else's privacy no matter how frustrating it must be for them.