Mastercard and visa are the de facto regulators of porn | Hacker News Reader

Mastercard and visa are the de facto regulators of porn

ft.com

461 pointsnotnice502 comments

Personally I think they should not be able to decide such things. A payment provider should be forced to accept all legitimate customers. It is absolutely unwanted for a private business (in an unrelated category no less) to be playing the role of legislator.

The problem is once a majority of payment providers (especially in this category where there's only really 2 major ones) starts blocking things, it becomes really difficult for fringe groups that are in fact perfectly legal. I understand that porn payments are a bit more risky but the providers can simply have a policy to deny chargebacks for this category and shift the risk to the customer. Similar to the way returns of sex toys are not accepted for hygiene reasons.

Recently there was a lot of news in the Netherlands about prostitutes not being able to open bank account because all banks refused them. Think of prostitution what you will but over there it's legal work and they pay their taxes. But not being able to get a bank account gets them into very difficult situations and pushes them to shady people (which was exactly what the legalisation was avoiding).

Also other platforms like fetlife have recently been forced to validate their users, leading to potentially serious consequences if this data ever becomes compromised. Many people there don't even show their face so the result is that they have to give a lot more personal info now than they would have wanted to.

Deciding who controls the definition of “legitimate” is exactly the problem.

Lawful? That's up to the government to decide.

Which government? If you're talking about something like paying for an abortion or marijuana, you're likely to get very different answers if you ask the US federal government versus certain state governments.

so which side are you arguing here - credit card companies can decide who they want to provide services for even if they decide not to service legal companies or that they should be forced to service legal companies?

Most specific law applies then. Not hard.

Yeah, subsidiarity or lack thereof can get messy, but it’s not that unusual to get different answers from different levels of government. It’s a totally different situation when a private duopoly or oligopoly supersedes democratic control.

I see two answers to this:

1) if something is legal wherever the purchase was made, then the credit card companies, as basic utilities, should be compelled to process the purchase.

which would be the easiest for me to understand, but possibly more complicated to enforce than

2) if something is legal wherever the credit card company is incorporated in, then the credit card companies, as basic utilities, should be compelled to process the purchase.

If laws or enforcement are unclear about the legality of a thing, handle it like it would be handled in case of a cash sale or have the credit card company be cautious and enforce the strictest rule.

You have to define legal. In the case of pot, it's not actually legal - the feds simply choose not to enforce the law in states that have legalized it at the state level. There is substantial risk there as a payment processor. If it were actually up to the states, then it could be more like you describe.

To expand your point, the impact can be international.

Weed is legal in Uruguay (restrictions apply, but you can do some paperwork and you'll then be able to buy it) yet the Central Bank suggested pharmacies to only sell it in cash, out of fear that it would have negative consequences for other CC transactions in the country, or for the country as a whole I suppose.

I can understand CC companies not wanting to accept payment for weed in another country if the card was issued in the US, but for local cards, that's basically enforcing one country's laws over another. And you could have local CC companies, which we do, but then those are only accepted here. So if someone local wants to have a CC that can be used abroad, they need to accept the fact that the CC company will enforce the laws of the US even if they do a transaction outside of that country.

And yet here in Québec, we pay for weed with credit cards all the time. What’s up with that dichotomy?

My guess is guess Canada is less afraid than Uruguay about the potential implications, the asymmetry between the US and Canada is a lot less than that between the US and Uruguay.

The SQDC is a government entity, not a private one. It would be much harder for Visa and MC to refuse to process payments for them.

The real irony is that SQDC doesn't accept cash for payment!

In this specific case, banks already have definitions and obligations regarding who they can refuse to deal with. I’d argue credit cards should at least be as permissive as these.

Businesses shouldn't be forced to serve customers

At some point when 50% of the world uses your service the rules must change.

Facebook and Twitter can sway elections with a press of a button.

Once your company can directly affects direct democray and lives of billions these kind of statements make no sense anymore.

Unless you like to be ruled by corporations.

Yes, anti-trust laws came about for a reason.

Yes, and we don't apply them to some companies for a reason.

We call these businesses natural monopolies and regulate them. Like forcing them to serve everyone or cap their profits.

Facebook and Twitter users sway elections.

Every company can affect democracy in some way. Foxnews had a massive effect on elections, Gas prices being high affects elections. Should these be regulated?

> Facebook and Twitter users sway elections.

That's not what gp is saying.

Facebook and Twitter control what users, in bulk, say in a way that can sway elections.

Facebook and Twitter moderate and suspend and users adjust what they say in order to not get suspended again, if they care to not get banned. (Those who don't care if they get banned are a red herring.)

There is also the algorithmic feed which gives a lot of control over what users say to other users.

I just quit Reddit and deleted all my accounts despite gilding > 10 comments over the past year because I got blacklisted from every community subreddit I wanted to participate in. I brought up the bias to the admins and was told mods can run their subreddit however they want despite Rule 1 of the mod guidelines saying to assume people are arguing in good faith.

I got banned because I say controversial things like Black people are not disproportionately targeted by police due to their race, but rather due to them disproportionately having guns and knives when the police show up.

The general public have a serious problem understanding nuance and statistics and I think it's disgusting that the media cry racism at every corner because it enrages people and gets clicks.

It's even more disgusting that people fall for it without realizing what the media is doing to them because they can't read past headlines.

I'll link to the actual TPS report that shows this but I'm on a slow connection right now and can't do it.

edit: nvm I'm dumb; it's not that but the report is named 9082-2018-TPS-Annual-Report.pdf if you can find it on its own. You can google "tps force report 2018 -2020 pdf". I'd find it myself but I'm downloading a 12mb pdf that's taking forever and I'm pretty sure this is the one.

Subreddits moderate themselves, it has nothing to do with Reddit. If a Reddit Admin bans you then you lose your entire account.

Rule 1 of the moderator guidelines from here: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/moderator-guidelines-for-...

Engage in Good Faith Healthy communities are those where participants engage in good faith, and with an assumption of good faith for their co-collaborators. It’s not appropriate to attack your own users. Communities are active, in relation to their size and purpose, and where they are not, they are open to ideas and leadership that may make them more active.

The actual post that was removed on me was in r/toronto a story I told about helping a homeless man wandering down the middle of the street in downtown Toronto. It was supposed to be a discussion of things you've done in the city that make you feel good. Moderators removed it because it wasn't relevant to Toronto just because it happened in Toronto.

Visit r/toronto and you will see feel good stories like this all the time in the subreddit. I pointed this out to the admins and still got nowhere.

I also wanted to post "We should try UBI but you have to vote to qualify. Thoughts?" in r/onguardforthee but that was also removed for trolling. That subreddit has posts similar to that one all the time.

I was definitely treated unfairly and double standards were used against me because of my reputation. I don't troll though, I just enjoy having difficult and philosophical conversations, which is why I can see it's perceived as trolling. I enjoy challenging people to think. I would never say something I didn't believe.

The admins doing nothing about the abuse was the last straw that proved to me Reddit doesn't care about finding the truth.

> I also wanted to post "We should try UBI but you have to vote to qualify. Thoughts?" in r/onguardforthee but that was also removed for trolling. That subreddit has posts similar to that one all the time.

Dude, cannot you see why if you start posting about how _Universal_ Basic Income, should not be universal and based on some sort of test, that people might think you are being a troll?

Like legitimately, what is the difference between your behavior and a troll who misinterprets things on purpose?

The difference is that this user is legitimate, asking legitimate questions for legitimate reasons to have a legitimate dialogue while following all the rules. The mere supposition of their malintent is an invalid litmus test. It's about as good as treating someone as innocent until suspected of acting similar to a person guilty of annoyance, then banning them from the community in perpetuity. "Because I we couldn't be sure" is never a legitimate reason to act so certainly in a manner which removes a member from a society.

Asking the same type of questions with the same type of answer and only providing same debunked evidence is not asking legitimate questions, it is sea lioning[1] combined with a gish gallop[2]. He is using his polite tone to convince us that he is acting in good faith.

Do you think it’s plausible that a person has been so curious on this topic that they’ve done deep research, can pull up such hard to find data that it takes them multiple attempts to find some esoteric source that supports them, and they didn’t find the high school level answers to the questions they are asking and require us to debunk each and every point they throw out without ever engaging with your counterpoints?

You’d have to believe that this person is incredibly competent at research while being simultaneously incapable of grasping the basics. You’ll notice he never tackled any point or counterpoint there. Just kept posting new sources as they were discarded while complaining that no one would look.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Edit: sorry, missed that this was a sibling thread. If you missed it the same user elsewhere in this post is also trying to argue that he was kicked off a Reddit merely for bringing up the unassailable point that cops only arrest black people more because they are inherently more dangerous. I assume you can see why I’m pointing out that the poster is unbelievable. I am already confident that they are not posting in good faith and only doing counterpoints for random third parties who might read this thread and be persuaded by the poster due to the lack of any counterpoint

Double edit:tbh this actually had the hallmarks of a 4channer mocking us to their buddies. I was one of those assholes in my youth and recognize the tactics. His “I just wanted to post, ‘{controversial statement}, Thoughts?’” is an easy bait sentence that brings out all the free speech absolutists to defend you for just “asking questions” while talking past the group engaging with the {controversial statement} portion of the sentence.

If you have not been on 4chan/8chan/2chan/whateverPermutation boards and wish to engage in internet debate it would be illuminating to observe. In between the gore and the shock porn they have random threads where they openly discuss using these tactics as they believe “normies” won’t be able to stomach their shock content to read deeply into it

The moderator guidelines are guidelines not rules. A community of people has the right to ban people for any legal reason.

You have been banned from every single subreddit you participate in because of your behavior and you don’t see an issue with your actions at all?

If you constantly smell shit, check your own shoe homie.

It was all the left-leaning run subreddits I was banned from.

The report I spoke of is in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31915214

edit: I still screwed up and realized it after getting to stable internet. This information is found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31915960

Hi all, I had to use Yandex to find this. Google wasn't showing the result. I hope this also shows how dangerous Google's censorship of search results is as well. I challenge you to find this report in Google search results!

https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/9082-2018-...

I can't download the PDF but if I remember right the table in question is somewhere in the 50s or 60s. You can ctrl+f for it. It breaks down by suspect race and weapon type when police arrive on scene.

The third side nobody wants to talk about in this argument is that police disproportionately use force against suspects with weapons when they arrive on scene.

The report you just linked to only has 40 pages.

Was this what you meant?

https://www.ohrc.on.ca/sites/default/files/Use%20of%20force%...

In what way is facebooks moderation on or algorithm related to specifically to elections

You are either incredibly naive, or you are being intentionally obtuse. When you can pick and choose what ideas or people are acceptable to even discuss, you are controlling the extent to which people can explore ideas on your platform, and subsequently, how they might vote. The innate human needs to belong to a community are easily exploited by a social network that is not necessarily organic. Same way religious institutions can sway elections, or any institution that dictates culture. Tech just enables that process to scale.

The issue is that they sway elections. Why is it more important how they sway elections versus the amount of influence? It seems the latter would have a greater effect.

> At some point when 50% of the world uses your service the rules must change.

It's worse than that. They've effectively levied a tax on everything (without representation). Even if you pay cash, you pay (e.g.) Visa if the vendor accepts Visa. Businesses are contractually obligated hide the transaction cost from the consumer. This means all products and services have their prices jacked up to cover the cost of accepting Visa, MasterCard, etc. Even if you're paying cash, you're paying into it.

"Cash back rewards" are essentially a discount on the tax they've imposed.

So they tax you, they decide what you can buy, and you don't get a say. Kinda fucked up.

We don't have a direct democracy nor should we want one.

The stock market is a type of direct democracy and look how unstable it can be.

Hardly democratic when it's controlled like a puppet by wall street super funds and the fed.

I wouldn't call the stock market a direct democracy. In a direct democracy, every citizen/participant has the same vote as another and all it takes is simple majority can invalidate the rights of every individual. Obviously that's not the case in the US, and for the better.

Switzerland has direct democracy as an escape hatch.

Civil Rights Act and the ADA disagree. As does Sherman Anti Trust and dozens of others.

Businesses are forced to serve customers everyday - from anti-discrimination laws to universal service for phone companies. There is also argument that oligopoly should not de-facto control payments and work as moral police.

This is how people want it. It's been two years of "Twitter is a private platform" over and over again. If you aren't going to stand for free speech when someone wants to talk about the Wuhan lab, why the hell would you expect anyone to defend your right to furry porn?

Because it’s not automatically the same thing just because both are private (e.g., non-governmental) organizations. A newspaper can exercise editorial control over what it publishes, but AT&T can’t exercise editorial control over your phone calls. Hacker News can moderate user content, but an ISP can’t moderate what you send over its network.

The question of whether Twitter and Facebook should be treated like a phone company than they are like Hacker News isn’t a stupid one, and I don’t think it’s as clearcut as people on both sides of this debate would like it to be. But the question of whether a payment processor should be able to exercise this kind of editorial control over transactions using them as an intermediary is not really the same question.

Also, keep your paws off my furry porn.

Payment processors similarly prevented right wing sites from accepting donations and payments. Gab as one example had to create their own server farm and payment system in order to operate since they were shut out of every other provider.

Did you have a problem then?

If we want to subject payment processors—or social media—to the common carrier standard, then obviously, they can’t deny services to anyone who isn’t violating the law. Having politics Visa, Mastercard, or Stripe doesn’t like isn’t illegal.

The point I’m making is that I don’t think it’s hypocritical to suggest that such a standard applies to some companies, not all companies, which is what your original post seemed to suggest. I’d personally want to set the bar pretty high when it comes to taking away any business’s right to choose their own customers.

I thought it was funny but yes I definitely had a problem with payment processors' ability to do so.

There are alternative payment methods.

> This is how people want it.

Some people sure. Maybe even the "twitter consensus" or "HN consensus", but I think you should be very careful about taking apparent consensus on these sort of social media platforms as indicative of a broader consensus in society.

> talk about the Wuhan lab

When this is just coded language meaning "racist conspiracy theories", sites don't want to carry those posts. Social media sites are catching on to the coded language game.

If you want to make noticing that a few miles up the road from the epicenter of the COVID outbreak was a lab, doing experiments with that very virus, a racist act. I'd then make that claim that those who consume furry porn are pedophiles with greater accuracy.

Show me where someone who made the accusation about the lab was banned from a site for making that accusation and nothing else.

https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-suspends-dr-li-meng-yan-wuh...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-...

Ah yes, great examples. The people were clearly only pointing out that COVID originated from the same city where a virology lab exists...wait a second, they're both promulgating the "China made COVID" line.

There's a big difference between saying COVID originated from Wuhan and conspiracy theories saying COVID was manmade.

Personally I think they should, with objective, explicit exceptions common to all merchants, something like:

  1) rudeness or disrupting

  2) age and health

  3) intoxication and indecency

  4) whatever else society can agree on (good luck!)

Both service providers and customers keep ending up in court because the "right to refuse service to anyone" too often becomes "discriminating against a protected class", and the lines get blurrier every day. Much easier to just say "serve everyone or don't go into the business of serving people" and be done with it.

In fact, the obligation to serve customers by law would serve as both a consumer and merchant protection for cases exactly like this -- the fact that, until sodomy laws were ruled unconstitutional in the US just a couple decades ago, many banks refused to lend to otherwise-credit worthy gay couples or unwed heterosexual couples for mortgages (afraid of being accused of supporting illegal activities), which would be more of a moot point in this sense because the onus is no longer on the bank to scrutinize how someone lives their personal life so long as they meet objective measures of credit worthiness.

Monopolies/oligopolies should. Imagine if your power company decided they don't want to serve you.

Break up the oligopolies and I agree completely.

If Mastercard and Visa refuse to do business with you, you will soon find yourself out of business.

That sounds like a libertarian perspective that may apply to a radically different system of economy and government (one that does not exist in practice), but the system we actually have is not even remotely close to libertarian. In the mixed economic system adopted by nearly every nation on the planet, business face all manner of regulation and the more fundamental they are to everyday life, the more they tend to be regulated.

Businesses should be free to pick and choose only when there is also a public funded alternative or the product is targeted at a minority. Otherwise society starts falling apart.

Imagine there’s only 3 car dealers in your region and they all blacklist customers who have at least once followed Elon Musk on twitter.

Also in this category. Buying weed from a depensary. You can't buy it with a debit card or credit card. The processors won't allow it.

But you can ATM loophole your way through it.

Isn’t that different?

Weed is still federally illegal. Porn is not.

I think this is more because its illegal on a federal level, not because of brand or pressure.

This is correct

I am coming to the conclusion that we’re in the current situation by design.

A bunch of powerful people feel some stuff should be punished, but they can’t make it illegal. So they’ll stay in good term with de facto gate keepers and nudge them in their direction.

In the article it’s some billionaire, but ruling parties are probably doing the same extensively: instead of making the controversial decisions themselves, go through all the paperwork and get all the backlash, they’ll have a private entity deal with 95% of the problem (the industry “self-regulating”) and call it a day.

A pettier exemple than money transactions: there’s no reason smartphones shouldn’t be able to record calls out of the box (using it within legal boundaries should be on the user) but phone makers will self-block that behavior with no specific interest on their side.

> there’s no reason smartphones shouldn’t be able to record calls out of the box (using it within legal boundaries should be on the user) but phone makers will self-block that behavior with no specific interest on their side.

Which smartphones block call recording? Every brandname Android I have had enables this feature for voice calls. (Although the feature is missing for app calls, and I'm now at least 5 years behind the newest phones.)

> Which smartphones block call recording? Every brandname Android I have had enables this feature for voice calls. (Although the feature is missing for app calls, and I'm now at least 5 years behind the newest phones.)

This explains a lot because this is a more recent development. https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-is-banning-call-recording-...

As the article says it was blocked a couple years ago but there was still a loophole which is now being closed as well. Though it's by blocking apps using it from the play store which can still be avoided by sideloading so technically there still is a loophole :) But it's definitely seeing more and more restrictions.

In some cases there might be local laws involved. If you buy a Samsung (or LG, but they don't make phones anymore) in Korea it will come with call recording available.

Might be, though all places I went had services stating upfront they record the call, so recording in itself wasn't illegal.

The main issue is that neither Google nor Samsung seem to understand European law on this point - it is blocked by both of them in Europe, presumably because of GDPR, but any lawyer who claims that GDPR prevents an individual for recording their own phone calls locally for personal use would get laughed out of the room.

Except at Google and Samsung apparently. And there's no way to contest this decision for users, query it or even get a straight answer out of either company on it.

It might have something to do with the high fidelity voice calling having a reasonably large bandwidth that you could theoretically use as a data channel - many times larger than an old v.92 modem. Maybe that's not so relevant these days with more people having unlimited data plans.

Why would the phone manufacturer care?

(And in any case, as you suggest most people pay more per bit transmitted on a mobile voice call than they pay per bit as data.)

Purely for fun, it would be interesting to hack up two smart phones to transmit data over a voice call. Presumably, you can keep everything binary, if you control the end-points.

That's how SMS works. It's running a baseband modem over the voice channel.

SMS is transmitted over digital signaling or transport channels. There was never any analog coding involved (except for a few retrofitted implementations on landlines in Europe).

That would give you a 128 kbit/s channel under absolute ideal conditions (the maximum bandwidth supported by the EVS codec).

Practically, you‘d be better off using a throttled (after exceeding the included data volume) native data connection.

I see. Yeah pretty terrible.

> Which smartphones block call recording?

iOS?

I'm not sure of the current state of Android but back in the early days this feature also wasn't there (there were tons of apps that claim to do it but they all exploited some device-specific quirk and wouldn't work universally) despite the hardware being capable of doing this from day 1.

The reason call recording is shunned is that tons of scummy companies would suddenly end up in trouble if call recording becomes widespread and accessible to anyone.

Not just scummy companies…. Politicians, cops, judges, bureaucrats, managers, bankers, and so on. Corruption is endemic in our world, and these laws are there to protect that status quo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

> A bunch of powerful people

More than likely it's a handful of well-placed (by design or by luck) moralists acting at the willing behest of legal

I'm the exact opposite. this is regulatory automation gone haywire because one bad thing happened in the past.

for example: I work in a repair shop and I know I can buy absolutely zero bottles of acetylene on the company card because visa will flag it every time. they report it to the atf and you get a lovely visit...

but propylene? just as dangerous and flammable but i can buy it by the ton. we literally swapped out all our equipment for hot work cutting because visa.

If it happens only on Visa, is it regulatory ?

I'd expect that to be Visa covering their butt in advance to not even have to think about it ...

Unless the name of the company is Acetylene R Us or something, I don't see how visa is finding out. And if visa is somehow finding out what you buy, how is the company selling it not telling it's customers and warning them they can't pay with visa?

How does any welding shop deal with this? Or does it only apply to newcomers and old shops are grandfathered in?

Just like the third party doctrine to subvert the fifth amendment, visa/master function as a similar loophole

Fourth Amendment is the most aggregiously sidestepped by Third Party Doctrine.

Though I suppose a case can be made for the Fifth as well. The fact is that the Federal Government loves wielding access to the Financial System as a gigantic exercise of soft power. Centralization nakes exercising that power feasible.

I slightly disagree - I don't think Visa et al should be forced to do anything.

I think the problem is external to Visa, where a once capitalist money accumulating machine, is having internal debates on what Furry depictions are allowed.

I feel the unnoticed casualty of the "Culture Wars", that neither side seems to care about, is that harmless stuff should just be left alone.

We don't have to have a view on everything.

There are those, sadly, who argue that one person's "harmless, innocent thing" is a "crime most heinous". The measure societally is how much of the population considers it taboo.

To illustrate, take the artform known as 'loli'. Drawn pictures of fictional neotenous girls doing recognizably adult things most people would say crosses the line into being child pornography, even though the act of drawing it hurts no one real. The argument goes, by facilitating the fulfillment of the demand you create a follow-on market for the real thing, which is definitely illegal.

The problem isn't a harm inflicted against someone directly, but a perceived harm in potentia to the social/moral fabric and eventually the incentive structure to underpin physical harm to real victims by normalizing some form of deviance. A less controversial example (today) would be sex toys, (50 years ago) "free love", etc... In the past, many of these things were considered obscene, or at least things "not spoken of in polite company". This is exactly how you get businesses discussing whether these odd niche things are allowable on the basis of straddling the obscenity/deviance line, which necessarily entangles itself to some degree with the concept of legality.

Scale makes every question relevant. While I agree with your assertion we don't have to have a view on everything, I assure you, with a hierarchical power structure consolidating the power to make policy in fewer individuals, this necessarily means that statistically speaking, you're going to have a much smaller slice of the world that happens to A) be a payment processor/business facilitator, and B) think your niche is harmless.

So in short, while normatively we don't have to have a view on everything, practically speaking, it is guaranteed we will. Striking the right balance is a really tough nut to crack, and virtually guarantees somebody is leaving disappointed.

This post brought to you by a really interesting Philosophy of Art class covering the interface between obscenity and cultural systems. I find the nature and mechanisms of determining exactly the periphery of the obscenity line in the highest resolution possible fascinating.

> Think of prostitution what you will but over there it's legal work and they pay their taxes.

Prostitution may be a line of work where less tax is paid.

This does not make the act of prostitution less legitimate.

Hair dressers and tattoo artists also, on average, declare less of their total income, and we don't consider hair dressers and tattoo artists illegitimate businesses. We just expect them to pay taxes and tolerate, to some degree, if they don't. Going to the hair dresser or getting a tattoo isn't seen as morally objectional because of what they pay in taxes.

Less tax is paid because of cash.

This is also true for prostitution. In part because the anonymity of cash is preferable among the customers, because the sex worker avoids scrutiny by the bank, and because sex workers don't necessarily have work permits in the countries in which they operate.

Conversely, we can think of morally objectional jobs where taxes are paid.

I agree tax and legitimacy are not the same thing. Tax avoidance being common in an industry does not make the work itself illegitimate.

The reason I mentioned tax is that not having a bank account was making it more complex for them to actually pay their taxes as a business. Taxation in the Netherlands is no longer something you can pay with an envelope of cash. If you want to run a legit business you can't do so without one. It was one of the things mentioned during the debate about this.

I'm not sure how it turned out because I don't live there anymore but there was talk of mandating the banks to offer them an account. After all without overdrafts or loans there is no real risk to the bank anyway.

I think it's more to do with prostitutes needing to keep the identities of their clients secret. So they keep no records, and are hard to audit for taxes.

It would be interesting to compare to other (legal) business that keep identities secret in this way.

When I go to the barber, I don't need to tell them my name either. Similar for the supermarket when I'm paying in cash.

So I'm not sure prostitutes are anything special?

Both barber and supermarket keep records of what services they performed or goods they sold, but not who purchased them (when paying in cash). A prostitute could do exactly the same.

> It would be interesting to compare to other (legal) business that keep identities secret in this way.

Basically almost any business where you can pay in cash?

If you want taxes, just fund the IRS. Allow and enable them to legally update and automate their systems off of 70's level technology and staffing levels which have persisted into the *2020's. Raise salaries. Improve image. Regulate tax preparers more so that not just any idiot with a PTIN can do a $20 million dollar company's return and put whatever they're told to on the return. It's not trucking rocket science.

Even easier, just simplify the tax code. But tax preparation lobbyists blocked those attempts.

The IRS is getting record funding. They are stockpiling ammo with all the extra funds. Taxation is theft anyways. The complicated tax code ensures that wealthy people pay less taxes while the IRS can go after middle class earners. Throwing more money at the problem won't help in my simple minded opinion.

> Even easier, just simplify the tax code.

I'd say 'simpler', not 'easier'.

> Taxation is theft anyways.

Not really. Just pretend that living in a country is like renting a shop in a mall. The owners of the mall decide what they want to charge you for. In the simplest case, they just demand rent, but they could also charge you for the number of blue scarves displayed. That's just silly, but not theft (as long as the possibility of such a charge is mentioned in the rental contract).

If you don't like the mall, move and set up shop in a different one.

Similarly, most countries let you leave, too. (Even though eg East Germany and North Korea weren't/aren't so keen on that, and the US charges you an exit fee.)

Vote with your feet!

(For example, I grew up in Germany, but wasn't too keen on the package of taxes and government services on offer there. After a few years in different countries, I settled in Singapore, which is much better value for money. I'm happy with what I am getting here for the modest amount of taxes they take.)

> If you don't like the mall, move and set up shop in a different one.

Except in a lot of (if not most) cases, you can't. I grew up in Russia and I feel blessed to live in Estonia now. Most of my fellow Russians can't, especially nowadays.

Another point is, you can set up your own mall and don't pay anybody, but good luck setting up your own state and not getting shot by your neighbour (provided you even find a little piece of terra nullius where you can do that – most of the land is claimed by one government or the other, even though it's mostly sitting there unused).

Yes, migration is not as easy as it should be.

Typically hair dressers and tattoo artists are artisans who rent a chair.

There’s no pimp trafficking you or getting you hooked on drugs and in debt to so you can make him money. Despite what the pornhub interviews tell you, it’s typically a low skill gig where you end up, not aspire to.

> Typically hair dressers and tattoo artists are artisans who rent a chair.

I suspect that depends on jurisdiction? I'm fairly sure that eg in Germany it's more common that they are employees. No clue about the Netherlands.

> artisans

It’s “content creator” now. ;-)

I wonder if the card companies themselves would be happy with those rules. I don't think it's a grand conspiracy. I think they are just looking at the business and realizing that the amount of money to be made from it (especially with chargebacks) is very small compared to the potential lawsuits/headlines of facilitating child pornography and as a result have been conservative.

If they were forced to allow it then it would give them cover and also their competitors would be as well - so there'd be no competitive disadvantage.

Normally I would disagree with you, but there's only two major credit card companies. People aren't given a choice.

There’s also American Express, depending on your definition of “major”.

True but in Europe this is really hard to use. My work gives me an Amex and requires I pay all business expenses with it, which is really horrible over here (they know this as it's an EU company but they probably get great kickbacks or something).

For starters, only hospitality sectors accept it here (hotels, restaurants). Outside that you can forget it. Even taxi drivers will laugh in your face in a country like Romania. In France some will accept it but usually the machine is suddenly 'broken' when it's time to pay. Then when I whip out my personal Visa it suddenly works. Right... I often have fights with the finance guys over this because I had to pay with foreign cash or my personal card.

I think the issue is that Amex charges the merchants more or something. But it's just not a useful thing over here. I curse that card.

I don't think any bank here offers it to their customers either, it's always bank-branded mastercard or visa.

>I think the issue is that Amex charges the merchants more or something. But it's just not a useful thing over here. I curse that card

At this point it’s just network effects. Visa charges more for their premium tier cards (VISA infinite/Mastercard world elite) than AMEX charges for their basic cards; but people won’t turn away a Chase Sapphire Reserve

I don't think this is true in europe where CC fees are capped (and as a result CC rewards schemes are much more limited)

AMEX, Visa, Discover, MasterCard.

All prohibit "badthink".

Discover also basically doesn't exist in most of the world, and AMEX barely so.

Sounds like we should be lowering barriers to entry, not piling up more regulations?

> but the providers can simply have a policy to deny chargebacks for this category.

Which then allows the porn providers to do very shady things.

The problem with porn is that the players on both consumer and provider side tend to be really shitty. The consumers are causing a bunch of chargebacks whenever they get called out for porn or trying to get porn for free.

However, the providers aren't innocent either. LOTS of OnlyFans girls get called out for not delivering what they promised which certainly should be able to be charged back. The big aggregators are generally run by people that will absolutely push the boundaries of dark patterns fully knowing that in person interaction will be embarassing while a chargeback isn't.

I agree, you can't end chargebacks on this category. You could maybe require a chargeback for 'i didn't buy this' to disable that card for that category (maybe that's a feature you want anyway?). You could maybe require enhanced authentication for this category (3D-secure??). You could charge merchants a higher fee and/or hold payments for a much longer time to avoid the need to pull the money back from the merchant. I think most chargebacks need to be started within 120 days of the initial charge, and it's fairly annoying to need to wait 4 months to get paid, but it's better than not being able to access payment methods.

Do similar laws apply to any businesses besides public utilities?

We have non-discrimination laws on a variety of protected classes. It seems there could be support for expanding those classes, like the recent story about political affiliation and that dog shelter.

Many businesses can't discriminate based on set classes, but they broadly aren't required to take on all customers

This is a really good point. I think payment providers are like utilities these days, as cash becomes more obscure in society.

This is the reality. Payment processing is a utility. Small businesses literally cannot operate online without payment processing. On first glance there appears to be many third party providers, but ultimately they are all processing Visa/MC, and are selecting customers on the same criteria.

"Personally I think they should not be able to decide such things. A payment provider should be forced to accept all legitimate customers."

Payment providers are companies. They should be able to decide what they'll cover or not. In this case the bigger issue is that you essentially have a duopoly that allows 2 companies to affect the market with those decisions.

I feel like in today's world they are also kind of utilities. This is where the trouble starts. If you want to run a business these days (especially online) you need a payment provider in many cases, and pretty much always need a bank account.

> Payment providers are companies. They should be able to decide what they'll cover or not

Companies exist to provide people with goods and services. They have no inalienable rights beyond that. If a company does so in a way we see as unacceptable (in this case discriminatory), we have the right to force it and the only rights it has are to comply or cease operation.

> In this case the bigger issue is that you essentially have a duopoly that allows 2 companies to affect the market with those decisions.

Yes, everyone know that's an issue. The solution, obviously, is to limit their ability to manipulate. We can achieve a big part pf this this by forcing them to serve everyone equally.

"We can achieve a big part pf this this by forcing them to serve everyone equally."

Why don't we force all companies to do this then?

The other alternative is to break them up and create true competition.

>Why don't we force all companies to do this then?

Because this can end up adding a barrier to entry for new businesses, especially in new niches. However, I think once any company becomes large enough then this should apply to them.

> They should be able to decide what they'll cover or not.

Why? Companies can be regulated. In cases where there isn't effective competition providing real consumer choice, I think it's perfectly reasonable to regulate them in the manner suggested.

"where there isn't effective competition"

That's my point. The solution to this problem already exists - antitrust. The government has just chosen to to enforce it.

I don't think it's anti-trust that keeps eg competition between restaurants or shoe manufacturers alive.

It's low-enough barriers to entry.

If there is not enough competition, the problem is one of two things:

* barriers to entry created by regulatory restrictions

* a naturally monopolistic industry creating a tendency toward monopoly/oligopoly

In the case of the former, the govermment should simply repeal the regulatory restrictions.

In the case of the latter, the government should directly provision a public option, until that public option becomes the de facto monopoly. With blockchain technology, the government could even subsidize the development of public good smart contracts that enable participants to coordinate, without an intermediary, to provide the good/service in question.

I don't see any moral justification for allowing private citizens to build their own successful enterprise, and then seizing control over the enterprise to dictate how it is utilized.

> and then seizing control over the enterprise

That's an exaggeration. For example, we already require companies to serve disabled customers. They can't just choose to refuse service to them. Have we already "seized control" over these companies? I don't think so. Nor would it be the case with this proposal.

>>Have we already "seized control" over these companies?

Yes, the government has. It just allots them quite a bit of liberty over how those companies are managed.

Fundamentally, once the state dictates how the property may be used in private interaction, it has abrogated the right of the nominal owner to their private property.

> Payment providers are companies. They should be able to decide what they'll cover or not.

Legislation in other industries ensures that companies are not allowed to decide what they cover or not, because when companies pick and choose it leaves parts of the market being under-served (as is happening here).

As an example - Under the Affordable Care Act, health insurance companies in the USA can't refuse to cover you or charge you more just because you have a “pre-existing condition”.

Or as another example, the idea of net neutrality.

We could add new regulations. Or we could enforce the current ones around antitrust and create alternative services out of them.

By the way, I thought the ACA allows charging more for pre-existing conditions but set a multiplier cap on it?

> I thought the ACA allows charging more for pre-existing conditions

Nope: https://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/about-the-aca/pre-existing-co...

Power companies, water companies, natural gas, heating oil companies, telephone companies are also private companies, that we classify as utilities because they are essential. They aren't allowed to discriminate at all. In 2022, I think credit cards should be viewed as a utility, as well as the internet itself. It's very difficult to live without either in the US and a lot of the world.

I would potentially even go further than that. I think governments should make their own (digital) card payment systems that work like cash. Ie they should be as anonymous as cash and would have to serve all customers. This would have drawbacks in cases of fraud, but it could then be used exactly like cash is, but with less inefficiency.

I would go even further and say that governments should get out of the business of issuing cash. Especially having a monopoly on issuing cash.

(For this proposal in eg the US, the Fed can still control the money supply. It's just that banks would print their own cash; exactly like they mint their own account balances that you can use to pay with already.)

Municipalities should issue their own bank notes.

Maybe? Not sure they would be best suited for that? Just like we don't have municipalities produce their own smartphones.

However, as long as there's no government-enforced monopoly or subsidies involved, it's fine?

Wouldn’t that just cause a massive amount of confusion over what was legal cash and what exchange rates are? One of the economic strengths of the US is its unified currency which has been poorly copied by the euro.

A provably anonymous and untraceable digital currency backed by a government would see instant adoption. Before anyone complains about catching baddies just remember that serious criminals will astutely avoid any traceable currency or will find ways to launder it, only law abiding citizens and bunglers will be caught up in a surveillance state. The corrupt and criminal will remain as free as ever.

> Wouldn’t that just cause a massive amount of confusion over what was legal cash and what exchange rates are?

In practice, this has never been a problem, when it was tried historically.

What typically happens is that the different vendors standardize on a common unit of account (eg Pound Sterling in Scotland or Canadian Dollars in Canada, both of which were defined as a particular amount of some precious metals).

Typically issuers will redeem not only their own notes, but also accept other vendors notes at par---as long as that vendor is known to be solvent.

(The US was an exception to the latter, owing to their widespread bans on banks having more than a single office.)

The situation was pretty similar to how bank accounts still work today: if you have a dollar in an account at bank A, bank B will typically accept a transfer at par.

If someone is trying to pay you, you only need to know whether your own bank accepts the notes in question (or respectively whether your own bank accepts a wire transfer from their bank).

> One of the economic strengths of the US is its unified currency which has been poorly copied by the euro.

That was also a global strength during the gold standard. Common acceptance at par is enough for this. It's not necessary for everyone to use the same brand of currency.

See eg https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/white-the-theory-of-free-b... and https://www.cato.org/blog/what-you-should-know-about-free-ba...

George Selgin's book 'Good Money' is especially interesting. It's about Britain during the Industrial Revolution when the Royal Mint refused to mint enough small coins for factory owners to pay their staff. So some factory owners made their own coins (redeemable in demand into Pound Sterling).

There was this pedophile in my neighborhood that received water, gas and heating from companies. People were upset because without water he wouldn't have been able to become a pedophile

The difference is that you have one electric line to your house (often via infrastructure controlled bh the municipality), but you do have the option to hold credit cards from various providers. The issue is that antitrust isn't being enforced.

More often than not, antitrust laws are used by the side who can afford lawyers to inconvenience the competition.

A more straightforward approach would be to lower barriers to entry. Both for startups but also, and probably more importantly, for companies from other industries and other countries who want to branch out.

At one point, Walmart wanted to become a bank in the US. The existing banks lobbied hard against that and prevailed. Say what you want about Walmart, but that would have been a breath of fresh air for retail customers and much needed real competition.

The difference is that power companies aren't liable when their services are used to distribute child porn. This is the problem with cancel culture. Without any external pressure, there is no reason for Visa and Mastercard to care about regulating porn at all because that's creating an unnecessary cost center for the sole purpose of rejecting revenue sources. In these sort of cases, a group of busybodies, which can be anyone from politicians to keyboard warriors, want to cancel something, but are too uncreative and lazy create a set of standards and moderate the content themselves. Instead, they choose to pressure those in their reach to act, which in this case is Visa and Mastercard. This way, Visa and Mastercard receive all the backlash to the rules instead of themselves. Don't blame the companies for responding to market incentives. Blame the people who are creating them. This applies basically for all forms of internet censorship (e.g. Youtube).

If “cancel culture” is even one-tenth as effective at influencing the credit card duopoly’s polices as you think, how is it that Donald Trump is still accepting credit card donations?

I'm referring to cancel culture as a tool, not an ideology.

Visa actually did temporary halt political donations, so they were definitely entertaining the idea. However, they aren't really threatened by activists because nobody is going to stop using their credit card because Visa processes donations to Trump. Internet companies are much more vulnerable to activists, who can bring enough bad negative attention to dissuade companies from advertising on a platform.

In Visa and MasterCard's case, it's likely regulators or politicians pressuring them.

It's not possible to regulate porn and sexual content because of Rights™. Things like moderation can't be enshrined in a constitution.

Of course it's allowed. Congress was able to pass the Communications Act.

That's part of the U.S. Code, not the Constitution. Big difference.

You can still be charged with crimes for violating it though. Doesn't seem like that big of a practical difference.

And we should strive to minimize what companies need to be classified as utilities.

Eg these days it doesn't make much sense anymore to classify phone companies as utilities.

> In 2022, I think credit cards should be viewed as a utility, as well as the internet itself. It's very difficult to live without either in the US and a lot of the world.

It's also difficult to live without food, or without an apartment. That doesn't mean providers of either of these should be treated as utilities.

Btw, I never had a credit card in my life and don't intend to get one. It's perfectly possible to live without them. (But that's only a minor and pedantic quibble: I agree that it is hard to avoid the major payment processors like Visa and MasterCard. I just happen to use them via debit cards, not credit cards.)

I take phone company in this case includes ISPs and mobile providers. And I would say that those are the most important utilities in this age. Even more so than water and electricity.

They provide important services. Doesn't make them utilities.

> Payment providers are companies. They should be able to decide what they'll cover or not.

Restaurants are companies, but that doesn't mean they can stir shit into the food. There's no law, rule, or ethical principle that says that companies cannot be regulated.

I'm not sure how stirring shit into food is analogous, but restaurants, like payment providers, are allowed to refuse service to people in many different situations.

And disallowed from refusing service to people in many other situations, just as they are disallowed from stirring shit into food. That we tell businesses what they can and can't do is a fact, so it's:

1) useful to discuss whether or not we should allow or disallow things, and

2) useless to discuss whether private business can do whatever they want because they are private businesses. The answer to that is that private businesses can't do what they want, instead they're allowed to do what we haven't told them they can't do, and must do what we've told them they must do.

Yes, payment processors should 'process' all legit payments. However..

Visa/Mastercard hire people to do risk analysis though, those people are rightly assessing that pr0n payments is a higher risk than the insurance premium is worth. Which is newsworthy itself, goes to how credit card fraud is overtaking the insurance market and maybe those 2 companies should invest in that area.. But that's gonna take too long.

There are a lot of reasons for that. On a 'credit' card this makes sense. They own/lend the outgoing funds, you just pay them back with some interest.

The debit cards are not, the debit card is your balance being debited. Instantly. With 0 interest. I'm not 100% sure about the insurance on that, but from experience the bank itself will be the point of contact to dispute a payment that is fraudulent. The bank may or may not pursue lost monies from the insurance or debtor etc. But VISA as a whole, just processed the transaction.

There used to be, in Ireland at least, a debit card issued by banks under the name "Laser" so it was your 'laser' card you paid with.. Only in recent years, I realised this was competition. So V & MC cornered the market, "Use at X amount of ATM's worldwide" etc.

I would love to say "there is a way out, once the payment processors process without influence from V/MC" but imagine, a payment processor not accepting one of those.. That's game over.

I do think companies like N26/Revolut and co have standing to create their own 'standard' after really generating an incredible userbase, would prefer maybe open source but financal companies are slow to adopt.

Imagine a payment gateway standard that wasn't restricted, open source/readable and had it's own userbase. I'm not a proponent of using crypto as currency but you can see why they got carried away. The problems to overcome are just... Well, bureaucratic.

Think of prostitution what you will but over there it's legal work and they pay their taxes.

I don't know if this has any impact on V & MC payment processing, but the trafficking of women is still a problem in countries with legal prostitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_the_Nethe...

which should be treated the same as labor trafficking

the overlap with all forms of work are too numerous to point that out as if it needs a different solution

labor rights, more avenues for reporting, outreach, help, evaluation of the employer

and thats only available in a place with some form of legalized framework (which can be greatly improved even in those places)

Bitcoin fixes this.

Does it? Bitcoin just says anyone can transact. But that doesn't really solve the problem. The problem is that legal businesses should be able to transact. Illegal businesses should not.

Bitcoin just removes all the limitations. But that creates new problems, quite frankly. Plus, it's very difficult for businesses to utilize Bitcoin. Fiat onboards have similar limitations to Visa/MC. Many legitimate business models will be denied accounts at reputable exchanges.

For me it solves the problem. I provide advertisment for a visa forbidden area. In Switzerland I can exchange directly to SWIFT up to $1000/day and whatever it is per year without even KYC.

Crypto is the only common factor for payment I get these days. Every region/niche has their own weird alternatives with their own weird limits (Payeer, perfect money, ...)

Point is nobody can deny anything as I am 'processing payments myself'

Not unless Bitcoin makes transactions work better, faster and more scalable than they currently do.

It cuts both ways. Visa/MC have to deal with high numbers of fraud on these sites. Even worse, they have to deal with “fraud” where husbands get caught and blame it on fraud. It seems like linking porn accounts to phone numbers is the most sensible solution but how popular is that idea going to be?

But shouldn't that be handled on a commercial level? Riskier site, with higher chargebacks or less identity verification (like the historical no-signature-present) get charged higher rates and fees. This already happens, but the rates could be even higher if needed. There doesn't seem to be any need to police content, that is just factored in the risk and thus cost of service.

How about we stop trying to by default create identifier networks with the sole purpose of increasing the amount of information open to disclosure via Third Party Doctrine? The closer you get to a de facto UUID for a person, the faster it's going to be abused.

this sounds good until those businesses you are talking about are fronts for human trafficking.

I agree that they shouldn't be able to do this. I think once businesses become too big then they should have to serve all customers.

This is one type of regulation that I think needs to be more common. When the governments take the choice of playing politics with their customers away from large companies, then those companies can't be pressured into doing so by activists.

> I understand that porn payments are a bit more risky but the providers can simply have a policy to deny chargebacks for this category and shift the risk to the customer. Similar to the way returns of sex toys are not accepted for hygiene reasons.

But chargebacks have nothing to do with return policies [1]. In theory, when you issue a chargeback you are basically saying "I didn't authorize this purchase". How do you have a general policy that says "you won't get charged for fraudulent charges, unless those fraudulent charges are porn"?

[1] If I buy a sandwich with my credit card, I can't then return it if I decide I'm not hungry 15 minutes later. But I can dispute the charge (dishonestly) and say that I never bought a sandwich in the first place.

But isn't that what 3D secure and SecureCode are supposed to solve? They confirm the customer gave personal authorisation. They can offer it only with those.

'Supposed' being the keyword here. The last time I looked into them, they weren't actually very secure.

Maybe it depends on the country, but here in the EU with the latest regulations we have MFA for payments, with either an SMS, or authorising in the bank's app all payments over a certain sum. So the merchant, the payment processor and the bank are a 100% sure it's you.

The only case remaining is "i did initiate the transaction, but the merchant scammed me by not providing what was agreed".

Well, SMS is not really secure. Eg it's relatively easy to use social engineering on the phone company.

You need to steal someone's bank card, know their phone number and operator, socially engineer your way through it, execute a payment and validate it with the code received by SMS, before the victim realises either their card is missing or their SIM card no longer works? That's a stretch, and in any case that's why most banks do MFA with their app.

> But not being able to get a bank account gets them into very difficult situations and pushes them to shady people (which was exactly what the legalisation was avoiding).

It's the same situation for dispensaries or other legal cannabis companies operating legally in states where it is approved, yet because of the federal status, banks will not accept them either.

Not quite the same thing. The dispensaries are operating illegally. The fact that the states "legalized" it, doesn't mean it isn't illegal. There are plenty of other federal laws that don't have state equivalents outlawing them that are widely understood to be illegal as well.

But what is different are the social norms and expectations. The general agreement that they are legal, makes them defacto legal ... except where the federal jurisdiction matters. But, if there was political appetite for it, federal law enforcement could arrest and prosecute everyone involved in the recreational cannabis business in "legal" states. There is just no political appetite. The Rohrabacher–Farr amendment, though, prohibits this for medical usage (just enforcement, it still is illegal).

Note I do think we should broadly decriminalize (not the same as make fully legal) most drugs, and fully legalize things like cannabis.

it goes according to financial risks of high chargebacks, it's not a moral choice just a choice of avoiding high chargebacks.

But the article here explicitly makes clear that it isn't.

I agree, given their hegemony of payment systems they should be required to accept payment and government should state that they have to provide payment services to any _legal_ enterprise. That would also give them cover from the bible thumpers.

Citibank also tries to regulate the firearms industry:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/citigroup-tried-and-failed-to-r...

I think "the right to spend and receive money" is (or should be considered) a human right. Being able to live is for a large part contingent on paying people and/or receiving money from people. Companies involved with payments should be regulated on this basis.

This doesn't address the banking thing, although spending and receiving money at times requires a bank account.

Eh, the right not to touch money that was involved in activities you don't like has just as much standing in my opinion.

Or do you want to force people to deal with money made from 'blood diamonds' or from fossil fuels or tobacco or abortion clinics or gay wedding cakes or pineapple pizza etc? (I deliberately picked examples from different points of politics and with different levels of severity.)

Instead of regulating more heavily, we should look into lowering barriers to entry, so that people doing legal things can find someone to facilitate their payments (without the need to force anyone to facilitate payments they disagree with).

On level of individuals I would agree. You should be free to choose your customers.

But when you are the dominant player let's say 20%+ of market alone or with your partners it really changes. At that point no, you should not be able to choose your customers. Outside individual reasons like repeated fraud or attempts of such.

I think sibling has a stronger argument, but I just want to add that, even if you take a free market approach for everything else, I think paying and receiving money deserves to be treated separately.

Monetary transaction is fundamental to civilization, more than any other single service or good. You very nearly can't participate in civilization and can't at all in the free market without being able to freely spend and receive money. And this is the first time in history that monetary flow has been centralized to this degree, and it's hard to imagine things going less digital.

what would (does?) a government run electronic payment system look like?

> Personally I think they should not be able to decide such things. A payment provider should be forced to accept all legitimate customers. It is absolutely unwanted for a private business (in an unrelated category no less) to be playing the role of legislator.

Why? I would say just the opposite: by default people should be able to decide who they want to do business with. Payment providers are no exception.

Some people might want to refuse to facilitate payments for eg bakeries that refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings. Some other people might want to refuse to facilitate payments for bakers that bake cakes for gay weddings. (Similar for many other issues you can think of.)

> Recently there was a lot of news in the Netherlands about prostitutes not being able to open bank account because all banks refused them.

The bigger problem here seems to be a lack of competition? If barriers to entry were low enough, presumably someone would open a bank that accepted prostitutes' money and make a tidy profit (since there would be less competition, when they are the first ones).

Banking is regulated so heavily in an attempt to keep out even slightly 'shady' things, that the effect is to drive people into the arms of the really shady.

> A section on furries, an online subculture interested in anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities, reads “content that depicts furries and humans engaged in sexual acts are not permitted across the board. Content that depicts furry engaged in sexual acts with another furry is acceptable across the board.” Lest that leave any room for misinterpretation: “Please note, per Visa regulations a furry that contains human-like characteristics is not permitted.” So, no half-man, half-furry.

Oh, what I would give to be a fly on the wall in that meeting

A fly with human characteristics doubly so

David Cronenberg really predicted the future in 1986.

This reminds me of alt.sex.stories with disclaimers like "all events in this erotic story take place on a planet where 1 year in the story = 100 earth years." So the step-dad in the story is merely hanging out with a 1,700-year-old babysitter thus it's not lewd at all.

As a furry: what's actually hilarious about these regulations is that they describe the exact opposite of a common sentiment within the furry fandom -- specifically, that erotic artwork containing non-anthropomorphic animals (i.e. without the "human-like characteristics" that Visa is concerned about) is "bestiality" and inappropriate, but similar artwork with anthromorphic animals is acceptable.

A digital payment rails that functions like cash, as in my bank can’t prevent me from handing it over to whoever I want for whatever legal reason is a critical aspect of a free society that has gone digital.

You might disagree with bitcoin and co being the answer for this, but it’s the only tech that’s posed a viable solution as of now. Viable is not perfect. But if this article bothers you, at least understand this a (the) major aspect of why people work on serious cryptocurrency projects.

I think within the next couple of years, the Lightning network will become a real payments contender in the porn space.

I like cryptos but LN UX is awful. It makes more sense for some kind L2 that doesn't require to open channels (Arbitrum, Optimism come to mind) and allows to send stablecoins to succeed.

It needs work still but I think it is not bad. Muun, for example, is amazing and non-custodial. CashApp and Strike also have very nice and fool proof custodial options.

Edit: Stablecoins are coming to Lightning soon enough.

Muun is awesome. I have a hard believing anyone who complains about LN has used it.

Can’t speak to Arb, but OPT supports centralized rollbacks. Limited set of key holders impact what contracts get written to L1. LN’s pre-signed checks is a stronger protection but still has so long to go.

Zero control is a bigger problem. How would you stop people profiting from CSAM?

Aggressively pursue and punish producers and distributers through the justice system.

Having providers of financial infrastructure assume the legal risk for its users without due process is not how things should work in a democracy with rule-of-law, because it will adversely affect innocents.

And that’s where I’d agree to disagree. That logic extends to a lot of possibilities with undo our civil contract which has always prioritized certain individual liberties and left it up to law enforcement to deal with the fallout. Changing fundamental aspects of commerce has long been one of those protections until spending went digital. and that’s not a slippery slope argument, it’s the demonstrated regulatory and private sector direction since the patriot act. Such as this article.

Payments aren't where you catch those people anyway. If you know someone is selling child porn, you don't just refuse them from your payment network, you call the cops. Alternatively, if you want to sell child porn, you set up a shop selling t-shirts on Etsy for $50 apiece, and use that as your payment back-channel. Payment providers are only effective in stopping porn when it is sold as porn; they lack the investigational capacity to deal with porn that is sold as something else.

I simply don't think that CC provider restrictions are a good way to deal with CSAM in the first place, basically.

Good old-fashioned police work? Hunt 'em down and lock 'em up without abridging everybody else's civil liberties along the way. Nobody's opsec is perfect (see Ross Ulbricht).

In general, I find people's - especially politicians' - abuse of CSAM / child abusers to push through bad policy to be a bigger problem than actual CSAM / child abuse.

How much harmful policy has been pushed through with the excuse that it will stop CSAM? Often without having any particular effect on the issues it claims to be working against. People who spread or produce CSAM will use encryption and cryptocurrencies, leaving everyone else to be under permanent surveillance.

How do you stop them? By investigating and hitting down hard when you catch them irl, just like we always have. Not by racing to a dystopian surveillance state.

Is anyone even seriously interested in stopping csam on a grand scale, or is it just bluster to get surveillance passed? We just had ghislaine maxwell sentanced to only 20 years for a lifetime spent grooming kids for the elite who remain unpunished

Not just porn. Try getting started in any business on Stripe's (or a similar provider's) list of restricted businesses, which are basically dictated by VISA/Mastercard. No mainstream payment provider will work with you, and the (incredibly shady) ones that specialise in high-risk stuff aren't interested in a startup with tiny volume.

This is why e.g. there are few innovative upstarts in VoIP/telephony.

If only there was a decentralized, permissionless payment network that anyone could participate in...

you still probably need an offramp. If you're cashing in a lot of crypto for fiat someone is going to eventually want to know where it's coming from. Unless we get to the point where you can buy everything without fiat.

We'll eventually get to a future where you can do everything on chain, as it will increase efficiency and I don't know of a single technology that has increased business efficiency and not been adopted.

Which chain are you referring to? If it's bitcoin "increased efficiency" is not a claim I would make.

Bitcoin only increased the efficiency of gold. Ethereum + L2's will eventually process 14M+ TPS in a completely decentralized, permissionless way [0]. It's not hard to see how a faster, cheaper, more scalable system will be adopted by payment companies, especially when you don't have to trust or rely on any other company or government.

0: (https://polynya.medium.com/conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-da...)

Like wire transfers (IBAN)?

Unfortunately people don't want to use them for small transactions, the UX is still often pretty unpleasant with a lot of banks, and recourse against the vendor for non-delivery etc isn't possible / isn't as smooth.

Is there? (Assuming you left easy to use, stable and fast off the requirements list because they're so obvious.)

Not entirely related, but in my personal cache of "I was almost a billionaire" stories, my favorite is when I was approached to build a porn platform that would accept payment in Bitcoin. Who knows if the site would have made money, but we would have purchased a LOT of Bitcoin at under $1.

I think the scarcity is a bad feature for a currency used for payments. It encourages users to hold instead of spend.

I imagine that's a major reason why we don't see many payment-oriented cryptocurrency use-cases. The allure of speculative investment is too great for many.

Stablecoins on crypto rails are the much more likely solution. There's networks like Polygon Nightfall or Aztec Network that are private, cheap, secured by Ethereum, and allow sending stablecoins (so any fiat currency).

I can imagine these being integrated everywhere in the future. Stripe has started to get into Ethereum connectivity lately to make it easy to add them to any website. Many other payment providers and websites will follow because it's permissionless.

I think stablecoins are fundamentally a centralized technology. It betrays the purpose of cryptocurrency in the first place if there's a single point of failure that can be regulated to hell.

There are lots of stablecoins of all different types. You are probably thinking of Tether or USDC which are companies and can be regulated/shut down but there are also stablecoins like DAI which are decentralized and cannot be shut down.

I imagine most people would just use DAI on Aztec when buying porn or drugs.

From what I understand, stablecoins generally fall into two categories:

1. Relies on some central entity to buy/sell it as to peg/back it to another asset.

2. Relies on some central observer to sign exchange rates so that the system can automatically adjust its reward system.

>Ackman realised that payment companies, when they want to, can act decisively. “They have to be de facto regulators of what’s permissible content and what’s not,” he says.

No, they should not? This guy is insane. Yeah, just let the big middlemen monopoly decide the fate of your business on a whim.

Things like these are what makes me hope that cryptocurrency someday becomes the norm. We don't need more parasitic middlemen deciding how we want to spend our money, especially not because of fear of backlash by some activist groups.

This argument reminds me of Taleb's note on Minority rule: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

"The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority"

"The black-and-white character of these societal laws can be explained with the following. Assume that under a certain regime, when you mix white and dark blue in various combinations, you don’t get variations of light blue, but dark blue. Such a regime is vastly more likely to produce dark blue than another rule that allows more shades of blue."

One of the bigger bangers from the chapter:

"Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, as we saw, it will eventually destroy our world."

Remember this the next time someone asks what the point of politically neutral money could possibly be.

Except it doesn't work. There's no technological fix for a political issue. If the government wants to shut down your business and send you to jail, using a workaround is actually helping them in doing so.

If the government follows due process and the court system than that is completely fine. What were avoiding is them having the ability to do a blanket "we don't like this, blacklist everyone who does it" power, because that can and will be abused.

Nobody is talking about preventing the government from shutting them down. I think the government should be able to shut them down. I think that Visa should not be able to shut them down.

Visa and MC (and PSPs) are just covering their asses, they'd happily take your money otherwise. There's no technological fix for overreaching bills like FOSTA-SESTA.

Remember what? That "neutral money" is good for people who want to buy and sell images of rape and sex with minors?

No, that neutral money puts control back where it belongs: politics, not arbitrary infrastructure providers. PornHub is a company. Its principals are known. It's the job of government to regulate them, not payment processors.

OK, so by "neutral money" you mean still USD or EUR currencies but in cash/check/money order form? Are you saying there needs to be a government-run payment processor?

Because to me this term sounds like cryptocurrency, whose boosters constantly talk about how they are beyond governments or any regulation at all.

What I mean includes both a CBDC (or equivalent digital cash issued by federal government, agnostic of how its implemented) and cryptocurrencies. I don't believe private businesses should be able to cut off payments flow like that.

I do also, but separately, not really love the idea of governments being able to block payments either. Obviously there are many cases in which it's good (as there are for private companies blocking them), but I think the bad outweighs the good in the long run for essentially the same reason as speech regulations.

Or a cartoon drawing of a minotaur banging Tinkerbell.

I've suspected that the next place cryptocurrencies will see usage for actual consumer payments will be porn. It makes so much more sense than going through the suffocating mastercard/visa networks, and porn has historically been one of the industries most willing to try new technology.

Are you saying nobody should be regulating it?

Someone should. That someone should not be Visa and Mastercard.

The largest problem may be that doing the actual day-to-day work of regulation (vs. posturing, politicing, and passing poorly-written laws) is a [cough] pretty undesirable job.

A de-facto outsourcing of regulatory enforcement could be less desirable than explicit regulation.

It could be, but it’s not necessarily so. It’s safer to circumvent Mastercard regulation than government, for better and worse.

I wonder if the US Supreme Court might revisit that too

That's not what I'm saying. I'd just rather it be regulated by our democratic institutions rather than by unaccountable payment providers.

Isn’t the democracy happening now? The majority of people had chosen the institution that create a law that is followed by VISA and Mastercard.

AFAIK, pr0nhub currently only accepts crypto payment.

is the price denominated in dollars, like how does the bitcoin price fluctuation get handled?

Usually the seller takes on short-term price fluctuation risk.

Buyer initiates purchase, and the seller gives them a window of x minutes to send y btc to an address, where the price of the service is denominated in btc as of the trading price at that moment.

If at least 1 transaction doesn't show up on the btc network in the x minutes, that transaction times out.

If at least 1 does, then the seller waits for w confirmations to take place before the payment is recognized as valid, where w is set to their tolerance. I've seen as low as 3 and as high as 7.

At times that bad with the lightning network?

There's a thing called a stablecoin :)

There is no such thing as a decentralized stablecoin

So what? If you want to send someone $10 as crypto a centralized stablecoin works perfectly.

Until it doesn't... which is the topic of the article. If it's centralized, it can and will be regulated

USDC/USDT is centralized as in a central entity is trading it in a way to keep the peg at $1.

It is not centralized as in a central entity needs to approve your transaction.

Explain how Fei is centralised.

I don't know about "Fei" in particular, but stablecoins generally fall into two categories:

1. Relies on some central entity to buy/sell it as to peg/back it to another asset.

2. Relies on some central observer to sign exchange rates so that the system can automatically adjust its reward system.

I'm guessing it's the latter. But feel free to explain to me how it isn't centralized if you think you have a case for it.

It relies on both those things, but both are decentralized. The first is handled by arbitragers who can mint/redeem it for other decentralized assets (it is fully collateralized by a treasury of decentralized assets).

The oracle is handled by Chainlink which is decentralized.

No offense, but I highly doubt that.

>The first is handled by arbitragers who can mint/redeem it for other decentralized assets (it is fully collateralized by a treasury of decentralized assets).

Sure, but the parameters of this mint/reward system are a function of the exchange rate, are they not? Even then, those decentralized assets are either other stablecoins, or non-stablecoins. If it's backed by stablecoins, then it's centralized. If it's backed by non-stablecoins, then it's non-stable.

>The oracle is handled by Chainlink which is decentralized.

You can't have a decentralized oracle in any meaningful way, it is like what truthcoin tried to do. I admittedly have no idea how chain-link works, but I am pretty certain that it is not decentralized. It is almost a truism that members of distributed system cannot verify arbitrary facts about the outside world (for example, exchange rates) without having trusted oracle/oracles. You can try to make the system reliant on many different oracles, but that is similar to classical consensus and there's no distributed way to prevent them from colluding. It is essentially the problem with proof-of-stake.

If you ask me, Fei looks like yet another ponzi system like USDT/LUNA. Why are stablecoin owners always rewarded for merely holding?

You've made a lot of assumptions that aren't true. Highly recommend actually researching them.

You can absolutely have price oracles of crypto assets without any interaction offchain, as you can use uniswap market prices and if they differ from any other exchanges arbitragers will make a profit by fixing that difference. But that is another oracle that is different from chainlink.

Chainlink is decentralized. It could possibly be attacked with enough effort and money to destabilize things but that is a totally different threat vector than the government restricting trading to services it doesn't like or censoring users.

Fei is backed only by decentralized assets.

UST was backed by nothing which is why it collapsed, Fei is over collateralized. You don't get any rewards for holding Fei.

I don't think this addresses my main points.

Uniswap is only between cryptocurrencies. As I said earlier, those cryptocurrencies are either other stablecoins, or non-stablecoins. If it's backed by stablecoins, then it's centralized. If it's backed by non-stablecoins, then it's non-stable.

Chainlink is, from what I understand, a truthcoin-like system where oracles put down collateral. It is fundamentally a broken system because whatever group with the majority of the collateral just wins. What is stopping a government that can censor users and restrict trading from forcing oracles to collude and report false information?

You keep repeating that non-stablecoins make it non-stable but it doesn't actually make any sense. Fei is a stablecoin using non-stable assets, that is stable. All you need is a treasury bigger than outstanding debt. You're going to have to present better evidence than that.

I addressed your comment on Chainlink already, yes it could come under pressure or attack which would destabilize the network. This could be used to break many things, but it's not a vector for censorship / centralization because it has nothing to do with Fei's use as a currency and definitely doesn't make Fei centralised.

If it's backed by bitcoin for example, and you're trying to peg it to USD, then the spending power of your treasury in USD will depend on the price of bitcoin and the peg will just break when the price of bitcoin falls too far.

Fei's reward system is controlled by whichever party controls the oracles. You can outsource the oracles to a proof-of-stake-like system on chainlink, but that doesn't get rid of the fundamental problem.

That seems pretty sketchy if the main thing Mastercard and VISA are doing is ensuring age verification is being done.

Mastercard and Visa won't do business with adult content providers directly. They force them into very high cost low quality payment intermediaries.

These are known as high risk payment processors. They do this because of the outsized risk of chargebacks that occur against payments for porn.

Wife catches a weird pornhub charge on your monthly statement? Whoops! Those hackers are at it again. Call it fraud and charge it off.

The high cc processing rate accommodates the increased risk.

Btc solves this as no chargeback is possible.

There are plenty of other industries which are just as high or higher chargeback risks and aren't forced through hoops. Gyms are a prime example. Food delivery has a high chargeback risk. Gift cards are a go-to for leveraging stolen debit/credit cards. You don't see the industry forcing regulations here, or forcing these industries to go through specific payment processors.

It also doesn't explain why porn actors routinely find their checking accounts closed out on them, or they get blacklisted entirely.

It has nothing to do with risk, and everything to do with Christian fundamentalists in the banking industry exploiting their positions in industries we need, to force their morals on others.

the problem with free market fundementalists is they deny that stereotypes, emotion and plain stupid decision making are often having greater effect than the hand and foot of the market

This just means the door is opened for a competitor that can provide the same or superior service at a lower cost. Free markets can have efficiencies, but they should be arbitraged away in the long run.

They stopped being able to process credit cards because Mastercard and VISA cut them off when there was a public outcry about PH doing such a shitty job of moderating illegal content that everyone got the impression they were supporting it.

PH didn't decide "we are only gonna accept crypto so we can circumvent the system" it was a position forced upon them as a punishment for their shitty behavior. Now they are trying very hard to moderate effectively in order to win back the good graces of the payment processors because they are probably going to eventually go bankrupt if they don't.

Why do you think it is a forced position? If they are shitty they’ve got the consequences.

I might not understand your question. I'm not saying the payment processors were wrong to blacklist them. PH was being genuinely scummy.

Its a forced position because PH very much wanted to continue to accept credit cards, which I suspect was where 99% of their income was from. However, the payment processors blacklisted them so they can't.

Pornhub had a large blogpost claiming that thye are better at filtering illegal content than facebook, and that the latter has many times greater problems with illegal content.

the post claimed that Pornhub has been targeted because of their industry.

i have never verified the veracity of these claims, but they seem plausible

> Pornhub had a large blogpost claiming that thye are better at filtering illegal content than facebook, and that the latter has many times greater problems with illegal content

Facebook is also orders of magnitude larger and has to deal with content that blurs the line between legal and illegal. It's a significantly more difficult task.

> has to deal with content that blurs the line between legal and illegal.

All of Pornhub's content blurs the line between legal and illegal, depending on the jurisdiction. Every single piece of content they deal with.

Go look at some amateur porn featuring a supposed 18 year old. Is she actually 18, or could she be 17 thus making it very illegal child porn?

That's a pretty freaking blurry line.

They removed every single video they don't have a consent form for. You have to upload a consent form for every person in your video. Signing up to Pornhub as a model completely verifies your age.

From what I can tell they actually do more than anyone can expect.

Is there really enough motivation for paying for porn? There’s so much of it out there for free.

Just check the most famous adult content websites' revenue...

Surely that’s based on ads though?

Nah, AFAIK ads pay very little for adult content websites, most websites now have a subscription based model and the possibility to buy additional content once subscribed.

As I understand it Mindgeek (Pornhub) makes about half their money from ads, but they are easily the largest advertiser in the industry. It seems likely that subscriptions/purchases still represent the majority of porn income.

A lot of people pay on OnlyFans, so depending on the value proposition, yes, people are motivated to pay for porn.

And if you're motivated to pay for porn, but not to give a site your driver's license like OnlyFans requires, crypto actually would be better for that.

Yes, but I would be willing to bet my bottom dollar if you actually sat these people down with a licensed clinician, you'd find a lot of mental illness. From what I've seen a lot of these people have some delusion, no matter how 'strong' or 'weak' that delusion is, that they've developed a 'relationship' with the creator, not realizing that almost no woman would ever seriously consider any of these men as a long-term... or frankly, even short-term... partner.

If there's one thing that evolutionary psychology has shown, it's that women's psychology for the mating market is not wired that way.

That in no way affects how likely they are to pay, given that (in some volume) they already do.

If you sat any significant amount of people down with a licensed clinician you'd find a lot of mental illness.

Unfortunately based on their numbers, it’s a lot of men

There's so much of it out there for a reason. Never underestimate how horny (some) people are.

The article states that half of PornHub's revenues per year were coming from subscriptions. I would take that as some evidence that people are paying for porn.

In a lot of ways, crypto makes perfect sense for porn payments. The anonymous nature is most likely a value add for most porn subscription holders.

Sure but crypto is an order of magnitude more complicated to get going than using an existing cc. Most people don't already have a form of crypto payment at the ready when one hand is covered in lube and they just need to hit the "confirm subscription" button. I would need to do days of research before I could confidently buy porn with a cryptocurrency.

Do people get credit cards just to pay to watch something online? Of course not.

With crypto is the same. Once you setup a crypto wallet and learn how to use it, you can pay for anything with it.

>Do people get credit cards just to pay to watch something online?

People already have credit/debit cards. That was my point. How else have people been purchasing internet porn for the couple decades prior to crypto taking off?

>With crypto is the same.

No, it's not because most people do not have the slightest clue how to set up a crypto wallet meanwhile are kind of required by society to already know how to use a credit/debit card to make purchases.

That's a very US centric mindset. Many people in Europe don't have credit cards, let alone developing countries. In countries like Argentina there could be more people with crypto wallets.

Also do you not realise this was the exact same argument against credit cards vs cash in the 80s? Do you not realise how technical adoption works?

Fair point, I didn't know that so many people hadn't yet adopted cards / e-banking. I understand that many people live in poverty without access to the internet etc but, surely online shopping is a global phenomenon-- you're telling me using bitcoin for online shopping is the norm in some countries?

No, Bitcoin is rarely ever used except by geeks. Metamask however (a wallet for EVM chains like Ethereum) has 30 million monthly active users.

Actually, I just looked it up and you appear to be wrong about my perception having been US-centric.

https://www.mercuryminds.com/blog/preferred-payment-methods-...

It's from 2017, would be interesting to see if crypto has taken over so significanly since then.

Credit/debit apparently dominate in most parts of the world for online commerce, as well as other non-crypto mobile payment systems, like country-specific e-wallets (for example Yandex.Money in Russia).

30 million users is probably big in the crypto space but when talking about global populations it's not, so yeah, that's only a geeky niche and thus the assumption that the average porn watcher will most likely have a cc# (or equivalent non-crypto mobile payment) and have no idea how to set up a crypto wallet seems totally valid.

Nice link thanks.

Yea 30M is still small now, it's the rate of adoption that matters. Metamask was at 2M users at the start of 2021, hit 10M at the end of August (https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/metamask-surpasses-...) and then 30M in March 2022 (https://decrypt.co/95039/metamask-consensys-30-million-users)

And this is just one crypto wallet, there are a handful of others too. It will probably slow during the crypto bear market, but that's insanely fast growth. I can see it being quite common for people to have either their own crypto wallet or one provided via their bank in the next decade. Having a browser plugin to pay for anything with one click (with 2FA for bigger purchases) is a much better experience than having to enter your credit card onto many different sites.

There's a lot of "mainstream" porn but if you're a furry or have niche interests I imagine you're dealing with a much more limited content market.

1. There's an ethical argument for people that they ought to pay for work.

2. The above is stronger for areas that aren't well-served - women directed producers for example.

3. Parasocial relationships have become a huge driver of revenue for performers - hence OnlyFans and other Patreon-like services.

I think their business model is like a gym - they need people making an effort to cancel, not to renew... Crypto works for one-time payments, but it sucks for recurring transactions. Too much hassle to pay every month, people would just give up.

That's a good point. I think other business models are possible, though, if less lucrative. One example is one-time payments to buy videos, or to tip an artist that you for some reason feel like tipping.

It's a good point but worth noting that the Mullvad VPN (which, like porn, has a strong driver for privacy) recently got rid of susbscription payments altogther.

Their reasoning was that you can't handle recurring payments without holding a lot of personal data.

Perhaps porn sites that want to offer inter-species furry porn should bite the bullet and only accept one-off payments, just so they can make effective use of crypto.

Recurring payments should be initiated on the client side (or at your bank) anyways... Not initiated by the business you are buying from... That's a good way to get screwed.

I can sign 12 transactions with my private key now and automate sending them out every month. If I don't want to be responsible for sending the transactions, a smart contract can do it for me. This can be abstracted away from the user and made as intuitive as any other payment flow.

I think recurring payments are a pretty good use case for smart contracts, you load up a wallet defined in the contract with some cash, similar to a prepaid debit card, then authorize scheduled payments specifying a recipient, a frequency, and an amount.

It’s not ideal for that type of derelict subscription business model (e.g. the gym), but neither are prepaid debit cards or virtual cards with predetermined spending limits, and they probably already contend with those.

> I think their business model is like a gym

With micropayments, the business model becomes (quite literally) pay-per-view.

> it sucks for recurring transactions.

The UX is bad at the moment, but with crypto there is this idea of "streaming payments", which work very well as a substitute for subscriptions. Basically, you make only one initial transaction to set up the "subscription" with a locked deposit. On every block (or on every X seconds if you are doing off-chain), a small transfer is made. You only pay gas if you need to "top-up" the balance or when you want to close the stream.

There might be a smart contract that acts as a hot wallet where you fund once to authorize, and every month the contract owner/operator can withdraw X amount of Ether from your quota. They pay for the gas but if L2 is used and transactions are batched, that's negligible.

If your quota has insufficient Ether or you've deauthorized the contract, your "subscription" will be cancelled automatically.

All on-chain. This should be the way to go.

Yea there's many that do this. https://www.gelato.network is one.

Who even pays for it these days?

This would be a great time to reread the classic "Better Than Free" essay. https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/ By my count, the average OnlyFans account absolutely nails 5 out of the 8 "generative" qualities that Kelly identifies.

I think that's probably true. Cryptocurrency has use cases in paying for drugs or illegal gambling. It will likely also have uses in paying for child pornography and other illegal forms of pornography. As usual, this is bad.

This is maybe a tangent, but: how long before we're allowed to stop calling cryptocurrencies a new technology, and admit that actual usage is not being blocked on early development? Bitcoin itself is 14 years old; if it were a web framework, it would have been "obsoleted" half a dozen times over by now.

Now that the Year of the Linux Desktop might happen for real, I guess we need a new "Year of the X."

> it were a web framework, it would have been "obsoleted" half a dozen times over by now.

So a point for Bitcoin then?

Only if we think "it's better than web development churn" is somehow a positive marker, and not a neutral one at best.

What you're saying clearly makes sense but Bitcoin isn't accepted almost anywhere which is what "new" means. Porn would be an early adopter for potentially mass consumption. It would be new to me certainly as I've never purchased a single thing with Bitcoin and that's almost certainly true for most people.

I don't know. I passed a bitcoin ATM machine (don't ask me what that actually means, please) on the street yesterday. Friends and family members, including (especially?) non-technical ones, have asked me about Bitcoin and how to invest in it. One of my friends recently bought a car with Ethereum.

"New" means "new," it doesn't mean "not widely adopted yet." We don't widely adopt things that fail or have unacceptable side effects; that doesn't make them new again.

How about new in the sense that other currencies have been around for hundreds of years compared to only 14?

The euro is most certainly not hundreds of years old, and isn't that much older than Bitcoin.

The euro is not a new type of currency tech. Its just a new painting on the same type of currency that has existed for hundreds of years (that is it's a new brand of banknote).

I don't buy that. The Euro was conceived in 1992 and constituted a radical shift in international monetary policy; it wasn't fully rolled out until 2002.

That's 10 years compared to Bitcoin's 14, with arguably far more in concrete financial activity (and quality of life) to show for it.

Sure but again let's be a little more nuanced. When the Euro came out, trillions in wealth were automatically converted to it. Pretty apples to oranges comparison. If all USD was converted to BTC, BTC would become useful everywhere as fast as people could change the POS systems. Not a fair comparison at all.

> When the Euro came out, trillions in wealth were automatically converted to it.

This is true, but also misleading: the physical Euro switch took place over months, and involved a coordinated public campaign to encourage millions of Europeans to exchange their physical bills. Digitalization helped with banking, but a significant human and policy effort occurred in parallel.

And there's another problem: it's really not clear what it would mean for "all USD to be converted to BTC." BTC has already been issued, and will continue to be algorithmically issued. The Euro switch could not be economically triaged per se, because it was an in-kind transition. No such transition is possible for cryptocurrencies, unless we allow a central authority into the mix.

I wrote about this subject here, if you're interested: https://chadnauseam.com/coding/cryptocurrency/a-hackers-case...

The TL;DR is that blockchain scaling is a very difficult problem. There are scaling layers like ZKSync that are only possible because of cryptographic primitives that literally didn't exist in a usable form 14 years ago.

And I somewhat disagree with your premise – cryptocurrencies are actually used in the real world today. Most of the usage is to get around regulation, like when you want to send remittances or buy drugs, or bet on betting markets. But on the whole I do agree, it's disappointing that the technology is still so immature.

Disclosure: I work in the cryptocurrency industry

I think it's both acceptance and time. The internet was more than 20 years old in 1999 but still had low usage

25% of UK adults had internet access in 1999. Low compared to today (93%), but still pretty high.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/275999/household-interne...

25% of UK adults had internet access in 1999. Low compared to today (~95%), but still pretty high.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/275999/household-interne...

New is pretty context dependent. Money is literally older than history. That sets up a lot of context by itself, and further the fact that it's so important means people, governments and institutions are pretty conservative (in the slow to adopt change sense) about it. Banks have only recently reached infrastructure status in that context - and only in well developed nations. Credit cards are still new in that context (and it shows). The 14 years of bitcoin is basically embryonic in terms of "money tech".

This is a reasonable point, but it demands that we ignore the parabolic trend in every other aspect of human development. We've gone from horse-drawn carriages to moon landings and instantaneous global communication in the last 125 years; why does Bitcoin get over 10% of that time to do what I can already do with the piece of plastic in my wallet?

Are you sure this tech isn't "parabolic"?

Depending how you define personal credit, its been around ~100 years (or more!), with the card format being adopted in the 60s. It's only been the last 15 years or so that not carrying cash has become a reasonable approach to day-to-day life.

So for bitcoin to become as big as it has as a brand new technology in only 14 years seems accelerated.

This is analysis complicated a bit by the fact that bitcoin is not a top-down tech like credit, there's no centralized group deciding who gets to use it. On the other side of that though - the tech infrastructure build-out that made credit cards ubiquitous also benefits and accelerates the potential adoption of bitcoin.

It's parabolic with respect to middlemen, but none of the other properties I care about. That isn't to say there are no advancements (I think privacy-preserving finance is an important frontier), but they don't stack up well, to say the least.

> Money is literally older than history.

Standardized weights of specie are older than history; you can find different perspectives on how much they count as "money".

But history begins at a time when the role of money in society is still very much up for debate; Hammurabi's code (~1000 years after the beginning of history, give or take) includes a provision specifying that, if you run a bar, you can't require customers to pay in silver but must also accept grain.

Grain as currency continues across the world for a few thousand years after that, but grain is a terrible currency because it spoils very quickly. (Counting things like "rats got into the grain" as a form of spoilage.)

Huh, super interesting! Do you know some good resources where I can learn more about the (pre) history of money?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but my guess is there is probably little overlap in the Venn diagram of people paying for porn subscriptions and people capable of managing a crypto wallet.

Alas, it's probably hard to pull the cap off of your hardware wallet with only one hand. But isn't that what we're told Coinbase is for?

At this point, the fact that cryptocurrencies haven't successfully captured this markets tell us that they never will.

14 years ago the argument was "you just wait!"

Today, everyone in the US knows what "crypto" is, far more than know what "cryptography" is based on my casual conversations. The fact that porn hasn't moved to entirely crypto means that crypto has not survived the test of time.

There are plenty of other examples as well, the fact that Russian oligarchs (or even just regular old wealthy Russians) aren't creating massive demand for crypto to thwart sanctions is another example that crypto will never become an alternate, super-legal, currency.

It's honestly a shame that it doesn't work because, during the first wave of crypto hype, I rather liked the libertarian visions of an unregulated underground economy. I thought crypto enthusiasts were wrong then, but I at least hoped they were right.

Cryptocurrencies were a thing for internet payments already in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash

Not sure. People watch pr0n on their Oculus Quest all the time, fully aware that Meta is watching them watch ...

Satoshi about porn: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=671.msg13844#msg1384...

> I've suspected that the next place cryptocurrencies will see usage for actual consumer payments will be porn.

If cryptocurrencies were useful for this problem, they'd have been adopted already. It's an sector whose businesses and workers are very savvy about anything that helps them evade repression.

> the next place

is there a current place they're commonly used ?

I know of at least one sex-related forum that now supposedly requires btc to join. (This said, the related statement on the homepage mentions an absurdly high amount, probably set years ago and promptly forgotten...)

> I've suspected that the next place cryptocurrencies will see usage for actual consumer payments will be porn.

It's been done, to various levels of success; it has it's humble beginnings with cam girls via BTC (look up Girls gone Bitcoin), and then as alts got traction post 2017 things like CUM (Cryptographic Ultra Money) [0] try to make headway but failed miserably as most alts usually do.

After Onlyfans threatened to take down all the adult content it had a real chance of making itself a MVP in this ecosystem, unfortunately these projects live and die based on short-term price swings and as you can see the value has made it essentially unfavorable for anyone but pump and dumpers.

I'd argue that BTC can and has shown more promise for sex workers, I've gone into detail about my first hand experience when in the early stage of my startup I interacted with the 'ladies of backpage' when Visa and MC shutoff access to purchasing ads on Backpage on here before. I just think that sex workers have enough on their plates that it shouldn't be this hard to just to solve something so trivial which many pay for, espcially if either Visa or MC want to be puritanical it.

0: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/cumrocket/

cumrocket

Mastercard and Visa aren't regulating porn due to some moral or religious reasons. Believe me they would love to take your money, no matter what line of business it was from.

Ultimately they have to comply with a whole bunch of federal laws regarding sale of illegal goods, money laundering, human trafficking, child pornography and more. So if you want to blame regulation, point your fingers at the people writing those laws (aka your elected representatives).

As far as I know there is nothing illegal about drawn furry pornography and no requirement on the part of Visa/Mastercard to restrict access to that content. We even saw Mastercard reverse their decision on OnlyFans recently due to major backlash, so they obviously have the power to do so.

This isn't about legal compliance.

> Out of curiosity, about five years ago Stoya contacted CCBill, one of the biggest payment companies specialising in porn. Rather than the “acceptable use” policy on its website, she asked if she could see their full guidance. The detailed list. The one that precisely laid out the limits of what CCBill believed Visa and Mastercard would tolerate.

> The four pages of rules shared with her are written in a lawyerly tone and are, in parts, totally bizarre. A section on furries, an online subculture interested in anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities, reads “content that depicts furries and humans engaged in sexual acts are not permitted across the board. Content that depicts furry engaged in sexual acts with another furry is acceptable across the board.” Lest that leave any room for misinterpretation: “Please note, per Visa regulations a furry that contains human-like characteristics is not permitted.” So, no half-man, half-furry.

90% of the people defending this stuff never bothered to read the article.

There is something even more disturbing. I have a friend who caters to the LGBTQ community. She does parties, party busses, promotions with famous artists at clubs, etc. She once told me that many of the credit card processors wouldn’t do business with her. This was a decade ago. I don’t know if she still has the same issue.

I don't find that more disturbing than cutting off furries, I find it equally disturbing.

Pornhub was definitely hosting some illegal (child porn) and nonconsensual (revenge porn) content. My friend was doing nothing illegal or non consensual and she had never been accused of doing either.

> It would be nice to be able to say — ‘It’s because I have my period’— but I cannot,” she says. “It is a banned word.” She cannot type “period” into the chatbox of her porn platform.

Why is this exactly? I mean, I know there’s a widespread social taboo around it, especially in certain cultures, but we’re talking about porn here, isn’t being transgressive the whole point?

Far more distasteful things like manipulating and consuming human feces is well known to appear in pornography, but apparently menstruation fetishism is completely unheard of.

Not remotely limited to porn - they are also arbiters on the range of allowed political thought:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/mastercard-activists-...

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/biggest-blacklist-a...

not sure why this is being downvoted when it's a true statement related to—but not touched upon in—the article. plus it's a counterpoint to some of the other comments here saying that this is all solely due to these companies' proverbial hands being tied by federal regulations.

Because, they will argue, those bans are justified. And because they are justified, we should pay no attention to them. We should not even know they exist.

these people would be happy to be tyranically opressed so long as the opressor is registered as a private corporation.

So just to move this into a recent topic (and please have a civil conversation - or I'll just delete this thread), given that this will soon be a grey area in many of the U.S. states, would it behoove Visa and Mastercard to regulate purchases of the "Morning After Pill" or "Plan B" to avoid future litigation or moral outrage, if they are also going to take such "moral high ground" stances against a rather banal item as pornography?

Can someone explain to me why there hasn't been a crypto payments use case that solves this? Of all the fields that crypto should be able to gain adoption in, one where people don't want their standard accounts and credit reports to reflect they subscribed to any porn, however bland, seems like the ideal (legal) use case.

The volatility is the elephant in the room. In my opinion, vol slowly smooths out as adoption increases, happens with most currencies. But this slowly might be a long time.

You are one of the few comments ITT that bring this up though. On one hand, it shows how the tech’s real purpose hasn’t really permeated the general or tech public yet. On the other, it is literally the only digitally native payment solution that offers cash-but-online and solves the specific risk of payment censorship . There might be other innovations down the road though, but for now caring about these events means caring about cryptocurrency, if you care about solving the problem with today’s tech vs what’s still to come.

But if transactions settle immediately with crypto shouldn't you be able to just convert to fiat or a stablecoin to avoid the volatility? Or do you mean volatility for a consumer that holds the currencies beforehand? It's just surprising it hasn't been adopted somewhere yet as this isn't a new problem facing the industry and I wonder if there are bigger barriers I'm not seeing. I think Coinbase had a payments function similar to a Stripe integration but maybe they also don't allow such use cases? https://commerce.coinbase.com/ - I'll dig into their TOS out of morbid curiousity

Edit w/update: It is indeed not allowed in their TOS, "Adult Content and Services: Pornography (including literature, imagery and other media); sites offering any sexually-related services such as prostitution, escorts, pay-per view, or adult live chat features." is under the 'Prohibited' section

Without an easy way to interact economically with the currency beyond one time use cases, it’s more like a gift card that is very volatile with heavy compliance requirements.

I could spend all my money via gift cards, but the process of buying gift cards constantly is annoying. Using crypto for one time uses is like this, but with the added requirement of compliance teams evaluating what you’ve used the giftcard for (the crypto to fiat swapping process).

However, where there exists consistent market worth staying in crypto, you do see adoption. Unfortunately, this is darknet markets so not great for marketing further adoption. But good proof of concept.

The number of people interested in paying for content not permitted by Visa/MC and who can actually figure out how to use crypto for anything other than trading on an exchange is tiny.

Not surprisingly the only resources online about porn payments and cryptocurrency are a variety of high profile CSAM stories.

Yet another of one of the many problems with crypto adoption - it’s so frequently used/cited/associated with illicit activity that (again other than gambling on an exchange) many (most?) law abiding people associate it with criminals outside of the Disneyworld playpen that is Coinbase.

> Can someone explain to me why there hasn't been a crypto payments use case that solves this?

There has - most porn sites accept payment in bitcoin.

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-pay-for-porn-with-crypto-and-w...

They are also the regulators of guns and accessories. Operation Choke point for example. Apple is the purity police too.

They are not the porn regulator. The porn space is much more than pornhub and actually most websites have learnt to live with border legal financing options for a long time. The ceo had probably always wanted to cut out pornhub and this was the perfect moment to deliver his agenda.

Porn is everywhere and there is no way to prevent that.

This article doesn't seem to mention it, but this is only a half truth.

There was a legal liability change around payment providers and accidental support of sex trafficking that changed the calculus around risk for supporting these services.

As a result many of the payment providers backed out.

They're not really the "de facto" regulators - they're responding directly to incentives placed on them by government regulators.

Write up on this law here: https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-controversial-new-sex-traf...

The issue is not MC or Visa protecting sex trafficking victims or kids. It's purely a moral code.

I'm just bemused by the world I find around me.

We seem to have completely lost our grasp on differentiating "real things" and "made up things"

And so if you want to control (regulate / protest) pornography start with the Mastercard AGM.

It is interesting to note that Mastercard and other "reluctant content moderators" are starting the slow process of identifying the minimum globally acceptable standards. What is legal in one place may be illegal elsewhere but some global common level / trade off is being sought.

Hey look, a legitimate use for a digital currency.

> Mastercard and visa are the de facto regulators of porn

This doesn't have to be the case. There is infrastructure in place for these adult content providers to switch to crypto. It seems to be rather trivial for them to setup fiat on/off ramps for their customers.

So then the exchanges would be the regulators? Also now you have a nice public ledger of what porn everyone is buying lol

Can't you use something like

https://www.getcreditcardinfo.com/generatevisacreditcard.php

or do they actually check it on all websites?

2023-2025 wide rollout https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....

Seems like Bitcoin or other crypto would have filled this usecase

I feel like the only thing worst than Visa or Mastercard regulating this would be the US government.

If you cared about "cancel culture" and platforms having too much leverage, you'd be a lot more concerned about this duopoly than whether Twitter lets Nazis speak.

They're not the government. They've no obligation to platform anyone at all, whatever sort of extremist they are. Get used to it, examine why the world will be a better place, move on.

I don't think that the town squares and forums of the internet should be controlled and paid for by advertising companies. Nazis are not banned on any moral or political basis: It's purely a buisness decision. It sounds fine but when you begin spouting some unprofitable ideas they're not going to hesitate to ban you too.

> They've no obligation to platform anyone at all

That's just objectively false we have a long history of forcing companies to take customers from Utilities, Americans with Disabilities Act, anti trust laws, forcing companies to license technology, and a whole bunch of other ones when needed; This is no different.

We are talking about it because we find the current state with Visa and MasterCard as unacceptable.

any internally consistent application of civil liberties means caring about both.

Curious why FT articles always seem to only show up on HN about 5 days after they're published

As they told parler: “build your own international financial institutes and cloud services”

This is the value add in crypto. They should have simply embraced this from the get go.

They did. Porn was one of the very first industries that embraced it, and aside from VPN services, they're one of the biggest industries still accepting payments in it.

For those confused by the title, here's what's going on ...

Mastercard/Visa are required by law to not knowingly allow the purchase of illegal goods/services (they can't facilitate the payment of illegal activites).

As such, they require such websites (merchants) to prove that individuals in such videos are of legal age (no minors in the videos, because if so - that's illegal and horrible).

This seems totally fair, commendable and hard to disagree with - if you ask me.

Identity and age verification is a very important tool against revenge porn and exploitation so I personally welcome it, whoever pushes for it.

How would this stop that? This would only stop the sale of known revenge porn. I don't think most of it makes it way on the internet through sale. It gets posted anonymously on porn sites.

Revenge porn is already illegal. If someone were to sell it, the problem with that scenario is not that those people were able to exchange currency, and I don't like the idea of setting up more barriers on the ability to give someone money.

> I don't think most of it makes it way on the internet through sale. It gets posted anonymously on porn sites.

Yes, and as far as I know you can't do that on websites like OF or PH, due to them requiring you to verify the identity of everyone involved in the video.

Thus, it's impossible now to upload content without the consent of everyone involved, at least on those 2 (major) websites.

> at least on those 2 (major) websites

So... you didn't stop it. You only stopped it on a couple websites by making all content creators to provide identity verification

The only way to actually stop it is completely remove anonymity from the internet. Which is a nightmare scenario for many reasons. But it seems to be the current direction we're going.

Revenge porn and exploitation are already a nightmare scenario. Only maybe it doesn't involve you, so you don't think it's a problem?

I never said it wasn't a problem.

But destroying the internet by ending all concepts of privacy and anonymity isn't a solution though. It's what every government wants, and they'll give you whatever sob story is necessary to trick people into thinking it's for their own good. It's not.

Uhm, if a company directly engages in illegal activities it should be shut down by the government. The idea that it should be simply cut off from payment networks makes no sense. I don’t see that as fair.

But that's not the point is it? The point is that Mastercard and Visa are facilitating the transfer of money for illegal transactions. In the same way you can't start a bank to facilitate money laundering, Mastercard and Visa cannot knowingly facilitate the transfer of money for illegal goods.

The problem is they are going beyond what’s illegal and cutting off usage/content they just don’t like for whatever reason—see the vampire porn example in another comment, wikileaks, etc.

Do we want unaccountable monopolies making decisions about who can access the financial system and who can’t based on their own subjective values?

I mean there are certainly alternatives to Visa and Mastercard. Credit cards aren't the only way to pay for goods and services. PayPal and Crypto being the most common. For personal transfers there's also Wise (which you can do person-to-person instantly), and if you live in some countries there's stuff like Interac E-Transfer for making personal payments. If worse comes to worse there's bank transfers and ACH, which are accessible from virtually any bank.

I see Visa and Mastercard like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and they seem to have the right to refuse service to anyone they want to.

Yet they do

https://news.bitcoin.com/5-major-banks-exposed-for-moving-tr...

There should be something like a safe harbour / common carrier provision. We recognised that this was vital for postal and telephone networks, that the benefits of a neutral network outweighed the costs of carrying crime sometimes. It should be the same for money transmission.

That's three different entities:

Whoever is supplying content to PornHub has to uphold the law. They do that by providing evidence that there are no minors in the adult content (easy for a legit business) and that they hold copyright (somehow this gets forgotten).

PornHub has to uphold the law. They do this by keeping records supplied by the content producers about verification of actor's ages; when there's a problem, they need to remove the content. If there's a recurring problem, they need to bar the source.

MasterCard has to uphold the law. They do that by investigating complaints, and if they find illegal content, they send PornHub a warning. If PornHub doesn't act, either by showing that the content is legal or by removing it, MC has to drop PH.

Mastwrcard doesn't find illegal content - they find somwthing they Think is illegal, and they could be wrong.

I mean…risk vs reward here. I think I’d rather a bunch of “above board” pornography be accidentally banned so that even just one child getting raped/molested/assaulted doesn’t become digitalized and consumed by people.

Question:

Would it be better for the abuse to happen but not be digitalized and distributed such that there was some hope of said child being rescued by authotities after an investigation is kicked off by someone reporting it?

You have to think through things completely. Out of sight, out of mind doesn't mean that child doesn't get abused. It just means you don't see it.

What you're championing is really "I'm fine if a everyone else's ability to see content I don't care about is jeopardized in order to ensure I never ever see this type of content I do care about."

Which is counterproductive fundamentally, as I assume the welfare of the child is more important than the taboo'd digital artifact, correct? If you can't find it, you can't do anything about it, or pass it along to someone who can.

There is no "the law", laws are local things. If a teen uploads their sex tape that may be legal where they are.

The idea is that MC and Visa are themselves at risk of being shut down by the government if they knowingly allow payments for illegal activity. Companies being what they are, to avoid the risk of impropriety they forbid more than what the law technically does.

> Visa are themselves at risk of being shut down by the government if they knowingly allow payments for illegal activity.

surely this is a joke. when was the last time government has shut down a major financial institution? From 2008 securities fraud to HSBC being involved in laundering drug money, this never happens

Governments shutdown financial institutions or threaten to pretty regularly.

India suspended mastercard for failing to adhere to their new data privacy laws in 2018 (https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/mastercard-shifts-f...).

Read as "heavily fine."

> The idea is that MC and Visa are themselves at risk of being shut down by the government if they knowingly allow payments for illegal activity.

Operative word being knowingly. Demanding every customer prove every part of their business is legal activity != "not knowingly allow illegal activity."

Also, the notion that MC or Visa would be shut down over this sort of thing is absurd.

This is fine. But they also use their weight to punish sex workers.

There was a case recently that forced PH to delete a shit ton of content. Some of it was not even porn (just random gaming videos).

No due process. Just visa/mc threatening to no longer process their transactions

I'm confused... Where does due process come into play in a contractual relationship between two companies? It's applicable to governmental entities in criminal law. Contract disputes both do not involve the government outside of a request by the parties for litigation, and are civil and not criminal law.

Because the credit companies are acting under the guise of the law. "I don't want to end business with you, but the law compels me to do this!" If you haven't broken the law, there's no way to appeal this decision they've made as they do not have a route for that.

That aside, the ability to pay a service is pretty much fundamental to its existence. Being able to at-will terminate any company you want, even ones that are provably innocent, with no way for them to so much as appeal against your decision is a worrying amount of power for a company to hold. I don't think that even the government can do something like that (at least not legally).

The law tells them who they can do business with, and they comply. That's not really a guise, unless me driving the speed limit is also a guise... If there's any challenge here, it's that such law restricts card networks' freedom of association. Which the US only has as an extension to freedom of speech... So I'm not sure that challenge would work, when the entire point is that certain forms of speech are what's being limited.

It's a guise when the law is not actually what motivates their decisions. Like if you used the speed limit as an excuse not to go to a particular grocery store, or something.

So am I understanding correctly that your assertion is that the card networks actually don't want to do business with these companies, and they use the law as an excuse?

I find it the claim that they would rather not do business with entire multi-billion-dollar markets pretty exceptional.

Mostly yes, my claim is that they don't want to do business in many cases, largely because of widespread taboo and because of worry it will make them look bad. Companies are made of people, and the latter does have financial consequences.

But my claim isn't that they want to avoid the entire industry. It's that they want to cut certain segments and use their control to make things as 'tame' as possible. So that actually doesn't cost them very much.

It's probably more correct to say that the whole system exploits sex workers. No intention to punish is necessary--MC & Visa are happy to make as much money as possible while ultimately dumping all risk onto the individuals making the content.

Pornhub execs can go to jail if they don't remove stuff that is illegal and prevent sex trafficking on their site. Facilitating and distribution itself is a crime. PH isn't a government prosecutor they have error on the side of caution and due process is right you have with the government not a private business.

> prevent sex trafficking on their site.

How exactly does an electronic video platform stop the forced movement of physical people?

Women in the videos that Pornhub is profiting off of could be sex trafficking victims. They have taken steps to stop sex trafficking but that was more of the government threatening to shut them down and/or jail their execs.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/amid-scandal-por...

Here's a good article on Pornhub

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/20/the-fight-to-h...

Mastercard and Visa are not a court system. There is no due process. There is no appeals process.

What, exactly is the alternative? The system might not be perfect or even good, but as far as I can see there is no alternative to this kind of issue. Even if there were a million different credit card companies (and god help us if that ever happens), they would still be bound by the same requirements.

The alternative would be that payment processors don’t deny anyone unless a government regulator tells them to, and then it’s the regulator’s responsibility to draw the line.

It certainly wouldn’t be perfect either, but at least there would be some measure of legislative/electoral accountability.

This of course runs into the problem that the government doesn't have a regulator for the Internet. The FCC could maybe be pressed into the role, but it's not entirely clear what mandate they could have over what is effectively a giant privately held network. The government doesn't run the root nodes nor any of the nodes between you and the porn. They do run large networks, but those are merely attached to the internet, not integral to it.

There is the other issue that people are rightfully concerned about the creation of morality police, as they have a long and sordid history of suppressing minority communities for reasons that aren't in the public good. Everyone agrees that child porn videos should be banned/prosecuted, but after that it gets down to where to draw the line and that's an endless source of conflict. Some people will claim that homosexual content is just as damaging as child exploitation while others will say that banning homosexual content is damaging to the community. They will not find a working compromise.

I know the current Supreme Court of the US is grossly biased in their decisions on such questions so it’s not clear what organization in the US would actually be capable of enforcing this fairly.

These are good points. But the problem, as discussed in this article and the comments, is we already have defacto morality police: the credit card monopolies.

Given we’re going to have content police in some form (we clearly do need them to an extent), shouldn’t they be as transparent and accountable as possible?

We should have the equivalent of bodycam footage when a decision is made—a paper trail showing who signed off and what the rationale was. There should be a process for appeals. Decisions shouldn’t be political or religiously motivated.

Being cut off from the financial system is as much an imposition on a person’s rights as being fined or arrested by the government. Sure, it needs to happen sometimes, but there should be protection against being targeted in an arbitrary or abusive way.

Also: which government? I also don't want US regulators controlling UK content because historical accident has put payment oligopolies under US jurisdiction.

> This of course runs into the problem that the government doesn't have a regulator for the Internet.

The thing needed here is a regulator for payment services, not one for the internet. That's a much narrower scope.

> Everyone agrees that child porn videos should be banned/prosecuted

What? No.

That particular crusade has caused very real harms for very nebulous gains. Everyone may agree that funding child porn videos should be banned, but it isn't even clear that stopping the free distribution of the videos themselves is a net positive (e.g. theories about said videos being an outlet for pedophiles, reducing their risk).

There is no competition in the duopoly that is MasterCard / Visa, and so there will be no improvement in service. They don't have to build things customers want to not go out of business.

The solution is something like Section 230 but for CC vendors. If Visa processes an illegal payment and the government finds out, Visa is off the hook, and the merchant gets a letter from the government. The payment processor has a duty to report, and that's it.

One such possibility is for the USPS to open a non-profit banking system at every post office in the country. That would allow the now-unbanked to get an account.

And the USPS has strict regulations on when they can and cant deal with, especially in packages. I could see similar on banking regs too.

Naturally, Visa/Mastercard/Amex/Discover really dont like this.

More banks and wire transfer companies like Wells Fargo and Western Union, as well as the mega-banks like BoA that make their money off poor people getting hit with fees...less credit card companies.

> What, exactly is the alternative?

A simple solution is to let the government do the blacklisting, and payment providers only need to (1) comply with the blacklist, (2) report suspicious activity, same as today. It would be a serious offense for companies to keep their own moral blacklists.

> Even if there were a million different credit card companies [...], they would still be bound by the same requirements.

Under monopolistic market conditions, there's way less incentive to saturate all corners of the market. Just because it didn't pass VISAs risk/reward calculation doesn't mean that other companies would come to the same conclusion. It's hard to give an exact prediction, but generally when monopolies/oligopolies go away the market situation improves for all other parties.

> What, exactly is the alternative? A simple solution is to let the government do the blacklisting, and payment providers only need to (1) comply with the blacklist, (2) report suspicious activity, same as today. It would be a serious offense for companies to keep their own moral blacklists.

It would be for the government to do it as well. Your solution is for the government to re-enact McCarthy Era tactics without due process of the law. What makes you think that this blacklist will just be limited to the "bad hombres"?

> Under monopolistic market conditions, there's way less incentive to saturate all corners of the market. Just because it didn't pass VISAs risk/reward calculation doesn't mean that other companies would come to the same conclusion. It's hard to give an exact prediction, but generally when monopolies/oligopolies go away the market situation improves for all other parties.

Your monopolistic analysis is entirely irrelevant as it fails to account the big elephant in the room. It's no longer a free market if the government makes the way people get payed unworkable. By making porn a third rail, the government has imposed a ceiling on growth in the traditional credit card sector. It's regulation that's created a zero-sum game.

e.g. Mastercard and Visa could be required to report suspected violations to a regulatory body, to which the incriminated party could appeal.

That would help separate denial of service derived from regulation and denial of service derived from corporate policy. It's a big step in terms of transparency of the impact public policies have.

What if we tried to make a distributed system? One where you could make a transaction and nobody could block it from being processed, because no one entity is in control. Something like Bittorrent, but for money.

Bitcoin, Monero, or Peercoin.

Alternative: unregulated curency like we used to have before the last few decades. Like cryptocurrencies.

It's also worth pointing out that it was only after a peice in the NYT that Visa/Mastercard really actually paid attention to the fact that Pornhub really was only paying lipservice to these laws. It's not like Visa have been going around on some moral crusade, they were brought to this through bad press after close to a decade of not really doing their job.

> As such, they require such websites (merchants) to prove that individuals in such videos are of legal age (no minors in the videos, because if so - that's illegal and horrible). > > This seems totally fair, commendable and hard to disagree with - if you ask me.

Indeed! Though it's important to note that it's more than just that (as important as age verification of performers is!).

Mastercard and Visa are also acting as de facto controllers of what is acceptable content. In other words, not just who is participating, but what is being done.

For example, "… blood is banned, even blood obviously made of ketchup. This is a disaster for vampire porn, which is akin to a forbidden good on the internet." That's not my thing, but I also don't think Mastercard and Visa should be the ones who regulate that.

Yep. The problem is that the credit card issuers' regulations go way beyond determining that the content being purchased is legal, and well into judging the morality of that content. Credit card processors go even further; many of them forbid sales of adult products and services entirely.

I don't believe that. These companies want to make money and would love to make more. They also don't want to lose money, so they find ways to decrease risk. Their lawyers probably tell them what's risky and draw the line there. If you don't want them making these judgements then voters should tell their regulator exactly what is and isn't ok.

> then voters should tell their regulator exactly what is and isn't ok.

like what, a list of allowed porn Ganres? thats not making any sence.

And neither does regulation preventing purchasing porn either. But be explicit about what’s ok and what’s not if you’re going to regulate it. Otherwise companies decide for themselves and we end up here.

Yes, OP also misses the fact that Visa and MC can gate-keep legal activities as well. Selling smoking accessories is legal under US law, but good luck getting a payment processor that'll let you sell those goods online. You can get a high risk processor, but they hold your funds for longer, charge a higher rate, and you can lose processing ability at any time.

If you're established, Visa and MC will make exceptions, but who decided to make Visa and MC the deciders on what people can and cannot sell. That's what US laws are for. In my opinion, this is the only use case for crypto that I can see playing out, decentralized payments. Sure fees maybe higher, but at least a private company can't restrict what you can sell online while whitelisting some competitors.

> Sure fees maybe higher, but at least a private company can't restrict what you can sell online while whitelisting some competitors.

Until exchanges turn around and do the same thing as Visa/Mastercard once they have enough market share...and they aren't subject to anywhere near as many regulations.

Sure that could happen, but I'd hope there's enough competition in crypto payment processing that keeps them honest. Visa and MC have too big of a strong hold right now.

> OP also misses the fact that Visa and MC can gate-keep legal activities as well. Selling smoking accessories is legal under US law, but good luck getting a payment processor that'll let you sell those goods online

Visa & MC are not processors.

Yes, but Stripe or Paypal adhere to their rules. Visa and MC are the reason those processors don't allow high risk businesses.

For example, OnlyFans last year nearly banned adult content because their processor was going to drop them. Visa/MC were blamed for that, but they ended up making an exception. If you go out to build an OnlyFans alternative, you won't get a processor.

So are you suggesting Visa/MC shouldn’t comply with laws & regulation?

Visa/MC aren’t the “bad guys” here. They are just trying to adhere to the required laws & regulations impose on them.

EDIT: I can’t reply to your comment below, so I’m going to reply here.

> If selling adult services or goods is "illegal," then the US law should codify it, not leave it up Visa/MC/processors to decide.

This is where I think you’re confusing matters. Visa/MC aren’t “deciding”. They are simply asking a merchant to prove if unknown activity is NOT illegal.

If the merchant can’t prove its not illegal, then correct - that merchant can’t continue to transact.

But they aren’t deciding. And that’s the big difference.

EDIT2:

> Now, it’s within Visa and MC’s prerogative to operate how they see fit. A government-backed or decentralized network would bring some needed competition.

The merchant doesn’t have to accept those card networks. They could accept cash, check, ACH, bitcoin, bank transfer, PayPal, WePay, Zelle, etc.

>> So are you suggesting Visa/MC shouldn’t comply with laws & regulation?

Of course Visa/MC should stop payments for illegal activities, but they go after legal activities as well. That's the issue. If selling adult services or goods is "illegal," then the US law should codify it, not leave it up Visa/MC/processors to decide. And it Visa/MC straight up banned these sort of payments, it wouldn't be an issue, but they play favoritism for some companies and ban others out right. Not to mention, many legal businesses lose payment processing ability without even a reason. They claim that even giving a reason will give violators too much information about their internal security.

The EU is actually building their own payment system to combat this [0] and I really think the US should as well.

0. https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/payment-services-psd-2-directi...

>> This is where I think you’re confusing matters. Visa/MC aren’t “deciding”. They are simply asking a merchant to prove if unknown activity is NOT illegal.

This is the fundamental difference. Why is the burden of proof on the merchant of wrongdoing? And in reality, payment processors don’t ask for proof, they ban without recourse. Just google getting banned on PayPal and you’ll see thousands of merchants selling legal non-adult goods getting banned.

Now, it’s within Visa and MC’s prerogative to operate how they see fit. A government-backed or decentralized network would bring some needed competition.

"Can't prove a negative." Law is too vague and extensive to work this way.

They're going after all kinds of random nonsense, not just legality.

Yes they're the "bad guys". They are not just trying to adhere to laws.

Why hasn't crypto made inroads into this world yet? Porn is historically an early adopting industry (online payments, thumbnail play w/scroll, VR, etc.) and this seems like a theoretically optimal use case where someone would desire some level of anonymity or at least some obfuscation as to their identity

I was very excited about Solana Pay[0] when it dropped last year, but it doesn't seem to have gotten much traction.

0. https://solanapay.com/

Interesting, will they have a TOS similar to Coinbase Commerce (which bans porn as a business category) https://commerce.coinbase.com/legal/terms-of-service/

Hmmmm, maybe because both of them allow people to pay with credit card and send crypto. True decentralized payments would be crypto to crypto but that would force users to hold that crypto in a wallet.

Solana still regularly goes down because it has little rate limiting or DDoS protection. Until that is fixed it's unlikely many will adopt it for payments.

> Why hasn't crypto made inroads into this world yet?

Why do you assume it hasn't? If I try to purchase premium on PornHub[1], it ONLY shows cryptocurrency as an option, and says: "Unfortunately we are unable to accept credit cards at this moment"

(Maybe in other regions it's different)

And I'm sure almost all porn websites accept crypto.

Also 4chan pass[2], can ONLY be purchased with crypto as well.

[1] Not linked in case it violates HN guidelines

[2] https://www.4channel.org/pass

Hey, what do you know! I've never actually clicked through to subscribe on any of these sites, I just assumed from the article and all the comments that there was no alternative to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. Thoughts on why it hasn't achieved much adoption?

> Thoughts on why it hasn't achieved much adoption?

You mean crypto for porn payments, or crypto in general?

If crypto is not only accepted on basically all porn websites, but also the only option in many of them, then I'd say adoption is quite good. If PornHub accepts only crypto, and (someone on this post claimed) that half of their income comes from subscribers, then a significant amount of people must be using crypto to pay for porn.

We probably just don't hear about it because people are ashamed of spending money on porn.

A lot of these sites also prefer to pay their content providers in crypto.

For me it shows bank transfer and bitcoin as payment options. I'm in the US.

Vampire fetish stuff seems harmless to me, but I'm not surprised Visa and Mastercard don't want to get into the weeds of determining the difference between special effects and actual self-harm / mutilation. There is a whole lot of gray area in between there (piercing fetish, etc), but they probably feel compelled to draw a line somewhere. Whether or not the video seems to show blood (real or fake) seems like a criteria that can be judged with reasonable objectivity, and errors on the side of caution.

this is not fair because they don't do this consistently in other industries.

Visa and mastercard can do anything they want as long as they want to do it. They just don't want to deal with porn by choice

Really? You think a company that likes money says "You know what, we don't need to make any more.". Given that they like money, they're probably afraid of losing money from lawsuits due to breaking regulation.

Plenty of other reasons they might decide not to deal with it besides regulation, such as the large chargeback issue the industry has or pressure from fundamentalist groups that hate pornography on principle.

It also isn’t actually that uncommon for companies to make decisions for moral reasons, for all that we talk of corporations as money-hungry husks they are ultimately made up of people and have their own internal culture. Traditionally they’d eventually be outcompeted by a company who doesn’t have an issue with the action, but given the stranglehold Visa/MasterCard have on the industry that seems unlikely in this case.

a comoany doesn't have a brain, people do. And people have personal agendas.

that is literally not what's going on given the content of the article. As the article points out the self imposed regulations do not only concern minors or illegal content, but an entire plethora of sexual content. From furries, to 'vampire porn', to depiction of aliens, any mention of blood (a livecammer giving the example of not even being able to mention the word 'period') and so on.

The topic is not mastercard/visa indirectly enforcing the law, it's a private institution pushing their own sexual morality on others, by virtue of controlling the payments industry.

It's not their business.

When payment processors are literally dictating what colour of sex toy a merchant is allowed to sell, don't you think that crosses the line?

> Mastercard/Visa are required by law to not knowingly allow the purchase of illegal goods/services (they can't facilitate the payment of illegal activites).

> This seems totally fair, commendable and hard to disagree with - if you ask me.

This goes a few steps further than that, which is what makes it scary.

Pornhub's customers pay subscriptions which enable access to exclusive content. The illegal content in question was user-posted and made available for free without a subscription. So Mastercard and Visa were not "knowingly allowing the purchase of illegal goods/services." Instead, they took action against one of their customers because that customer was unintentionally guilty of unrelated illegal activty. That sets a pretty scary precedent IMO and demonstrates the frightening power of modern payment processors.

That's not what the article says.

The article criticizes that they block things even when they're legal.

What's even the point of this? If I take money from someone, should I do a background check on them, in case the money was stolen? No, if it was stolen, the victim should report it and the authorities should handle it. Then, if a porn website is reported to have some illegal content, shouldn't it also be the authorities dealing with it?

> For those confused by the title, here's what's going on ...

Didn't read the article huh?

That's very much not what it outlines.

This is just as it should be. Let the markets decide!

Isn't this exactly what crypto is for?

> Mastercard and visa are the de facto regulators of porn

TBH i'm sure that the C{E,I,T}Os of Mastercard and Visa can recomend us some good sites.

cxo works as shorter placeholder.

At least for companies that don't have a Chief eXperience Officer.

Apple is too.

It's not just that "Mastercard and visa are the de facto regulators of porn". It's that one billionaire called up a ~10s-100s millionaire and said "stop this because I read a NY Times article that made me really angry", and the response was "On it."

More rule-by-oligarchy, as usual.

That may be true and I'm not arguing that it isn't, but at least where I've come to learn about it more concretely happening, it's always been the result of things like Operation Choke Point[1] or Redlining[2] which were pressure campaigns by the governments who regulate the banks. In the case of the former, it was Elizabeth Warren and the CFPB, while the latter was the FHA working through the FHLBB.

Banks are so inherently risk averse that even the most stalwart of them is likely to submit to even regulatory-coercive overtones, which effectively makes them arms of the government, but with enough "by proxy" to leap around constitutional hurdles.

[1] - Operation Choke Point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

[2] - Redlining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

> Banks are so inherently risk averse

... that 2008 never happened.

Banks are risk-averse when it suits them to be so.

Risk for a bank is having the government crawl up their various orifices, not losing money.

Thanks for this, especially the link about Operation Choke Point.

But I think the details around Operation Choke Point give me confidence, not wariness. Yes, Operation Choke Point was government overreach, but when the truth came out:

1. US Congressional reps proposed laws to stop the practice.

2. The FDIC Inspector General and the DoJ investigated the operation.

3. The FDIC issued a letter "effectively ending the practice" in early 2015.

4. The government officially ended the practice in 2017.

That is, IMO, government worked here: overzealousness came to light relatively quickly, was debated publicly, and was terminated.

This is a false article. The largest porn site in the world doesn’t take visa and mastercard. Sounds to me like they aren’t being regulated by them at all.

It may be worth point to the NYT article [1] that Ackman was reading and tweeted [2] about.

While this is about Child Pronography. And we should have zero tolerance. I do think Visa and Master overstep and took the action to be basically against porn. The case against porn only got backlash when Onlyfans were hit with similar issues.

I could have rant about American companies like Visa and Master policing thoughts again, but both of them have been somewhat respectful in most cases. Their challenge to the EU court have been thoughtful and well reasoned even though you might disagree with them. Compare them to Silicon Valley Big Tech, which somehow all became social justice companies and full of self righteousness.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...

[2] https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1335244143950442496

And they should be doing much more. Age verification should require a credit card. The idea that hardcore porn should be freely accessible to anyone (including children) on an anonymous basis needs to be put to rest.

And they shall support more guns. Every child is entitled to its own gun, to defend itself.

I don't know about ... but as a child my access to porn was rather ... limited ( to not say restricted ).

Requiring a credit card for age verification before getting access to otherwise free porn (like on pornhub) will likely just leave paper trails for millions of men accessing porn, cause embarrassment, lead to privacy issues, blackmail, and wreck relationships.

It will also probably lead more men to pay for porn, since the companies running these websites will then make it one click.

Systems like Mozilla Persona would solve this on a technical basis, and was way ahead of its time, but there's no political incentive to standardise on something like this.

That sounds like a problem for those men. If your partner is against you consuming porn perhaps that's something for you and your partner to resolve. Exposing children to hardcore pornography in order to save dishonest men some inconvenience seems a poor trade.

It's not for you or I to dictate how much people should share within their personal relationships.

Maybe telling your partner that something isn't any of their bloody business is a perfectly valid thing to do, and an acceptable answer, even after, say, 50 years of marriage? It's a relationship, you are not a single conscienceness.

Personally, I'd argue having secrets from your partner doesn't necessarily make you dishonest. Lying to your partner makes you dishonest.

Anyway, my broader concern is I still wouldn't want my credit card company knowing my sexual preferences anymore than I'd want an ad company like Google knowing my medical status.

If you conceal information from your partner that they care about then that does make you fundamentally dishonest. If you conceal the fact that you are cheating on your partner, does that make you dishonest? I mean, isn't it just a secret you're keeping from your partner?

You write that neither you nor I should dictate what people share with their partners. I agree. I don't care what people share with their partners - that's between them and their partners. I don't think it's good for children to have 24/7 trivial access to hardcore pornography though and so I think we should restrict that and if that restriction changes the balance of what adults disclose with their partners that is up to those adults and their partners to handle. You seem to be advocating for policy based on allowing romantic deception - which is odd.

Finally, regarding your credit card company knowing your sexual preferences - I agree that it is a trade off but I don't think your, and others, addiction to pornography necessitates making pornography trivially available to children. If you have a better idea for how to age-restrict pornography I'd be open to it, but the defense that it would make acquiring pornography awkward for adults strikes me as pretty weak.

I'm not opposed to giving parents the tools to shelter their children from whatever they consider inappropriate content, I'm just saying I don't think forcing age verification via credit cards is the way to go.

>That sounds like a problem for those men. If your partner is against you consuming porn perhaps that's something for you and your partner to resolve.

That may be a sound argument if it's one's partner who's bothered.

But what if it's your parents? If it's your boss? If it's your neighbours? If it's the local politician that you need to approve your planning application?

Why do those people have access to my credit card records?

Have we lost our minds. If you're worried about your kid seeing porn don't let them on the internet.

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