> private companies legislating morality
This was one of the problems cryptocurrencies were invented to solve. It shouldn't be up to Visa whether to cut off funding to anyone in particular.
This was one of the problems cryptocurrencies were invented to solve. It shouldn't be up to Visa whether to cut off funding to anyone in particular.
Cryptocurrency doesn't solve this, nor was it really invented to address this issue. Decentralization is a nice side-effect of a low-trust network, but it also completely sabotages any moderation efforts on the platform, and preserves an entire population's porn habits in an openly-availible, transparent ledger. I don't think your average Pornhub visitor will be terribly excited to adopt this radical new technology since it presents a scenario where their purchases could be completely deanonymized.
> It shouldn't be up to Visa whether to cut off funding to anyone in particular.
It's not. Chase Bank or Mastercard are welcome to jump in and take Visa's place if they think the platform is a safe place to make money. It sounds like this is more of a Pornhub issue than a Visa one though, so I wouldn't expect it to get fixed very soon.
They are. If you're a banker, you effectively choose which direction society evolves towards by choosing who gets banking services and especially access to credit. Deny someone banking and credit and they're pretty much done. That's way too much power.
> it also completely sabotages any moderation efforts on the platform
"Moderation" is the job of law enforcement.
> preserves an entire population's porn habits in an openly-availible, transparent ledger
Which is why people should choose privacy cryptocurrency like Monero.
That's why we have fair lending laws. If you're denied private services with a bank on the basis of a protected characteristic, you can take them to court. Deny someone banking and credit, and you get sent to jail. I don't know where you're citing some of this stuff, but some sources might be nice.
> "Moderation" is the job of law enforcement.
That would be a completely new precedent to me and the United States of America. As a platform runner, you are responsible for the data that you host. You can't just make a social media site, have a bunch of people post gore on it, and then tell the judge "but they did it, not me!". They're going to chuckle, force you to testify that you stored the illegal content on your own server, and then lock you up for as long as they'd like.
This has happened many times in the past. Platform owners are not exempt from moderating their own platform. Even 4chan needs moderators, or else they too would get shut down.
> Which is why people should choose privacy cryptocurrency like
So... you're saying that the average person, who fears things like Bored Apes and CryptoPunks, is going to start using the premier currency for human trafficking and the drug trade? No, I don't think they will. My radical prediction is that people will continue to buy porn the same way they have for the past 30 years, because none of the boons of cryptocurrency directly benefit them.
Sex industry is an example. They are frequently cut off by banks and payment processors even when their works feature no actual humans whatsoever. Every now and then I see a thread here about something like that. If I remember correctly, Patreon had trouble with money flow at some point and threatened to censor content.
> As a platform runner, you are responsible for the data that you host. You can't just make a social media site, have a bunch of people post gore on it, and then tell the judge "but they did it, not me!". They're going to chuckle, force you to testify that you stored the illegal content on your own server, and then lock you up for as long as they'd like.
That makes no sense to me. Aren't there safe harbor laws which exempt you from the consequences of your user's actions if you comply with law enforcement? Someone shares a malware github here on HN and the whole site gets prosecuted?
And since when is gore illegal? Obviously if someone creates a snuff film that person will be investigated and hopefully prosecuted for murder, but I don't think it's actually illegal to view that stuff. I remember discussions about sites literally dedicated to gore on this very site around the time liveleak shut down.
If anything, that's yet another example of private corporations legislating morality. Advertisers will cut you off if they think you're offensive. I remember several cases of web sites self-censoring after Google pulled their ads.
> Even 4chan needs moderators, or else they too would get shut down.
4chan complies with law enforcement. I've read transcripts of the former administrator testifying in court. As far as I know, it was never held directly responsible for anything its users did there.
You can moderate by watching the flow of goods instead of money.
... it's a failure. Maybe it blows up in the future... maybe.
Visa states openly that they weren’t aware of the situation at issue, don’t support child pornography, and have taken steps to avoid supporting it. This isn’t a case of cutting off some “industry”; child pornography is already widely and rightly maligned.