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Comment by unityByFreedom | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it obvious that making crypto payments easier allows devs to circumvent Apple's cut?

I don't think people would accept any percentage taken of crypto exchanges.

Let's not beat around the bush. This is Apple protecting the way it earns money, not trying to levy fines on crypto to make more money. I'm pretty sure they understand that this decision makes them unpopular with some people. Their bet is that it preserves the model where there is still a functional review system for code that runs on your phone.

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Apple doesn’t ask for or take a mandatory cut of in-app money transfer services. They also don’t take a cut of any physical goods sales (e.g. grocery shopping) or physical services (e.g. Uber car rides).

They take a 15% or 30% cut of all in-app experiences (e.g. entertainment, productivity software, content subscriptions). This is levied through the App Store and IAP.

(They take 0.15% of card payments if they are routed through Apple Pay, levied from the regular merchant fee associated with all card payments. However this is not forced on anyone and bank pays anyway, willingly, as the lower rate of fraud means the fee represents good value.)

> Apple doesn’t ask for or take a mandatory cut of in-app money transfer services.

I suppose you mean like when I use Venmo or my bank. Okay, but I can't readily use those to buy other in-app things like subscriptions, right? So it's consistent.

I’m not sure what the point you’re trying to make is.

If you want to try to use Venmo to pay for in-app content, nobody is stopping you. But if the developer accepts the payment and provides the in-app content to you, they have breached their contract with Apple.

> Isn't it obvious that making crypto payments easier allows devs to circumvent Apple's cut?

No, it isn't. Please enlighten us.

It is another form of payment. What's to get?

How exactly would you accept crypto payments in your app in a way that avoids the 30% fee?

That feature wouldn't make it through the review process, just like any other form of payment that skips the fee.

Points/karma acquired in-game that can be exchanged off-app for crypto. Since crypto is so easy to exchange with no verification of buyer/seller needed, you can keep moving around how that works to make Apple's task of reviewing your apps more and more complex until you find a way to do it that they overlooked.

Apple’s 30% tax on IAPs is ultimately a convenience fee on impulse buys. Whereas inherent in the process of sneaking Apple-taxable-purchasable under their nose necessarily requires a very inconvenient process: buying crypto from a retail exchange, then moving it off-exchange to a tumbler, then back again to to buy something from the same (or another) retail exchange is far from convenient - and definitely not instant - so it is not in any appreciable way to circumvent Apple’s IAP tax, because it simply comes down to the fact you can’t make impulse-buys through that system - never mind the txn/gas fees in cryptocurrencies make it very wasteful for microtransactions, or really any transaction below tens-of-dollars.

I’d agree with you provided Bitcoin’s Lightning network worked the way we hoped it would back in the early-2010s, but it doesn’t. Otherwise, your argument reads like is saying Apple should tax every PayPal transaction made through PayPal’s iOS app.

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