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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Stripe's session had something unsettling in their presentation. They boasted about how well they're good at dealing with bureaucracy and byzantine laws in fintech so we, as their customers, don't need to worry about them. In a way, they're admitting that the moat is built by the bureaucrat class and they're the beneficiaries of being inside the perimeter. They deserve it but we should sometimes take two steps back and confer to ourselves – "Wait...why have we built a giant moat in the first place?". Large corporations have perverse incentives to increase the moat by working with the only coercive entity we have - the Government.

Future has in for us more state corporatism than I'd like. It is sort of dystopian, but that word has been diluted these days.

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In the specific case of Stripe, Ill gladly take a larger bureaucratic moat in exchange for PCI compliance. The cryptocurrency world is rediscovering this tradeoff all over again.

Yea totally, however, I prefer real moats that are built on a technological vertical. SpaceX rockets, 5nm semiconductor process, iPhone.

Stripe is more like the bridge over the moat, than the people inside the perimeter defending it. Unless you can point to them lobbying for more rules only they could meet?

Finance laws are indeed extremely complicated and many are very questionable, but I don't know how much to blame government for that. Money is at the centre of so many conflicts, crime and disasters that a lot of those rules are the scar tissues from previous wounds. You can argue to get rid of them and cryptocurrency has provided a useful sandbox for people to try that, but a lot of the problems those rules were designed to create came back (e.g. AML law proved quite effective at stopping ransomware, hence why it all gravitated to cryptocurrencies). I worked on Bitcoin for a long time and the experience definitely made my view of financial law a lot more muted. The downsides of the regulations are only occasionally admitted to by the authorities and they aren't that good at building convincing arguments for it (because they don't have to be). But it's not like the laws exist purely thanks to Dastardly Dick.

In the absence of government, those same large private entities would simply build similar bureaucracies in their stead, and we would have even less recourse against them. Vote with your dollar or vote with your vote, the dilemma exists in both real and imagined societies.

Moats should be built through technological advancement, not appeasing regulations. I think you misread, I am not advocating absence of the government. But we should question decades of regulation that has piled up in a way that provides giant moats that do not do anything to build a better product (no strike for Stripe, speaking generally) but to satiate those regulations and prevent others from building anything.

This isn't new at all. Why do you think FB was asking the gov't to regulate social media?

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