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Comment by harel | Hacker News Reader

Just last year Stripe wouldn't even allow any crypto business to be their customers. You could not use Stripe if you business was crypto related. A client of mine had to switch implementation to checkout.com because of that. I wonder what changed...

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Yep. Until very recently, we weren't able to support businesses selling crypto. (The regulatory details are complex.) We're now rolling out support and this page is basically about that change.

So now you can sell NFTs using Stripe, but still VOIP business startups competing with RingCentral, 8x8, etc. get their Stripe accounts cancelled...

Maybe Stripe is using the adapter pattern — once fiat is deprecated, they can remove the technical debt around business restrictions. ;)

To be honest, I thought your refusal was probably well justified considering the disproportionate levels of credit card fraud involved in anything to do with crypto. I'd love to see your end of year statistics now...

> disproportionate levels of credit card fraud involved in anything to do with crypto

Source?

Personal observation on 2 projects. See above for details on another reply.

> disproportionate levels of credit card fraud involved in anything to do with crypto

I'm really curious what your source is for this. Anyone legit in crypto who's taking fiat is doing way more KYC than your average ecommerce store.

Besides, why commit credit card fraud when there are so many scam options available in the crypto world. :)

There are always scams of different flavours around - that doesn't stop anyone from picking one or another. The appearance of easy money attracts those who seek easy money.

My personal observation. A large proportion of credit card payment were fraud, or flagged as such. It was such a huge number (% wise) that I (thought I) understood why stripe pulled the rug out. And in another project I observed a very large and sudden increase at attempted fraud right after elements of crypto were introduced (including attempts at impersonating me, and someone else involved).

But honestly, when it comes to the crypto world, I'm that guy who laughed at that other guy for buying bitcoin at 20 cents. There was a lesson there somewhere.

That’s way a huge amount of NFT’s don’t end up as rug pulls and scams right?

I mean that's different from the kind of fraud the parent post was talking about. If a user used their credit card to buy an NFT that quickly went to zero, that's not a fraudulent credit card transaction still - the user authorized that transaction. CC fraud would be if someone stole your credentials and bought something before the card was revoked.

How will a bank that has restrictive policies around crypto know that a Stripe payout made into a customer's account was not related to an NFT sale?

Essentially, how are existing Stripe users protected from Stripe's reputational self-harm here?

How would this bank even know stripe is accepting a new currency? Why would it matter. Money will flow into your account from stripe. Stripe is not a cryto service provider defined by banking regulations.

That's like saying a bank won't accept a transfer from another bank because that bank allows you to pay them in cryto.

> Stripe is not a cryto service provider defined by banking regulations.

But it's now a payment provider that allows businesses in the UK to engage in what surely must be considered high-risk crypto business by the bank (NFT marketplaces).

This is the sort of thing that gets businesses denied banking service.

> That's like saying a bank won't accept a transfer from another bank because that bank allows you to pay them in cryto.

Or a bank won't accept a transfer from your bank because your bank might be taking deposits from entities subject to strict sanctions, and the plausible deniability is very thin.

I think banks are working on that as we speak. Cold days in Cypress soon, etc. The reputation risk of "doing crypto" might be decreasing, but the legal risk of violating sanctions seems to be increasing.

Can you be more specific than "Regulatory details are complex"? I think we would enjoy hearing about the complexity! :)

Well, regulatory details have been complex for years and capable companies with smaller compliance/legal teams found a way to do it.

My sense is it's more about the window shifting enough that it's palatable enough for a Stripe product team to stake their professional rep on now. "If Twitter and Square are doing it..."

To an extent, I wonder what the impact of the SEC ruling for BlockFi (crypto exchange) did to clarify the regs for larger companies like Stripe.

Did anything necessarily change? I imagine there can be a different answer between the two questions "are crypto businesses bad risks as a payment provider?" and "is cryptocurrency a bad risk as a payment mechanism?"

while the crypto community wants to avoid as much regulation as possible, it's important to realize that sensible regulation is a boon to the industry as it clears a path to allow institutions and traditional FinTech companies to hop onboard.

So, the timing of this Stripe announcement could be related to the Biden EO: https://apnews.com/article/biden-cryptocurrency-executive-or...

What changed is, someone very powerful said this: "One of my incredibly big misses over the last decade was not buying enough Bitcoin. At $60k per Bitcoin, I'm still not sure if one should aggressively buy it, but surely it is telling us that we are at a crisis moment for the Fed."

I searched for who said this but came up empty. Where is this quote from?

Pretty sure it was Peter Thiel.

https://sports.yahoo.com/tech-billionaire-peter-thiel-says-1...

Thanks for the link. I didn't find that quote in the article, but maybe it was in there. If it's not in there then it's crazy that you linked that article saying "Peter Thiel" - another commenter said the same thing. If it's in there then it's weird that my quoted Google Search didn't yield at least that article.

And pretty sure by "not enough" he means only bought single digit 1000s of bitcoins rather than hundreds of thousands or millions of bitcoins.

a recent Peter Thiel talk: https://youtu.be/Bw1ByVhJt7A?t=740

I'm not sure he actually is all that good at picking such things given his history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Clarium_Capital

> Thiel used $10 million of his proceeds to create Clarium Capital Management…

> 57.1% return … 7.8% loss … 40.3% return

> …By 2011, after missing out on the economic rebound, many key investors pulled out, reducing the value of Clarium's assets to $350 million, two thirds of which was Thiel's money.

Sounds like it was overall somewhat profitable?

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