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Comment by temphn | Hacker News Reader

Sure, Aaron Greenspan/thinkcomp complains too much about Facebook. But here he absolutely has the State of California dead to rights. This is about as clearcut a concrete example as you can get of how "regulatory uncertainty" kills businesses dead. The key bureaucrat involved won't even state the net worth you need to be a payment processor in CA! His name is:

  Jacob Appelsmith
  jacob.appelsmith@abc.ca.gov

A polite email asking him why it is now official CA state policy to persecute payment startups might be useful.

EDIT: Mr. Greenspan, your exhibit at the end made me laugh out loud:

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20111019.aaupacket.pdf

Awesome and very funny. You might want to make these pdfs bigger, or just make the webpage one long html file.

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It's not just that.

The same bureaucrats perpetuate the falsehood that high net worth requirements somehow protect consumers. They do not. The extremely expensive surety bonds put in place as insurance (since FDIC protection does not cover money transmitters) only go a very short distance, and beyond that, they only cover licensed money transmitters. This means that the whole system is pointless, because consumers are never protected from the highest-risk money transmitters: those who never bothered to apply for a license (maybe because the requirements are so high). So despite the facade of regulation and consumer protection, the system actually increases risk while protecting incumbent interests.

I don't agree with the government and hate their authoritanarianism but isn't this essentialy what the OWS protests are all about? Its become pretty well known that big finance / big banking own the government and anything that threatens them is going to be responded to very harshly. I just think you may benefit form taking your message to a larger audience as it is more indicative of the overall corruption of the government than anything else and may not be specifically related to most other tech startups.

Yes, this is definitely related to the general protests that people have related to the banking industry, and especially debit card fees. See:

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/durbin.html

So I agree--more people need to know.

> the falsehood that high net worth requirements somehow protect consumers

Perhaps they serve to protect that vulnerable segment of our population, the mega-corporation?

Once yours reaches sufficient size/influence [never to be explicitly specified] it may be able to claim such rights for itself before the U.S. Supreme Court, the supremely sympathetic arbitrator of such matters in this country. [/sarcasm]

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