Sex worker-led payment platform shuts down after being cut off by processor | Hacker News Reader

Sex worker-led payment platform shuts down after being cut off by processor

vice.com

288 pointsisaacfrond395 comments

Financial providers shouldn't be issuing moral judgements. It seems to be more common too.

The other day I got a notification that was "FYI we sold your shares in company X (NASDAQ listed)". They've decided they're no longer keen on weed companies and have taken it upon themselves to fix my portfolio to remove such evilness. Left me slightly speechless...I'm paying you to hold shares not be moral police ffs.

edit: this was a self-managed portfolio hence my surprise at getting notified about successful trade

Many consider speech and unfiltered internet access basic rights. But we rarely hear people talk about the right to financial services. Having no way to make transactions and receive payments can bankrupt someone. And they don't just unbank people for moral reasons, there is a long list of individuals, activist groups and companies that have been shut out for political reasons too.

In the current system banks as private businesses can refuse service to whoever they want. We don't own even our dollars in the bank, we're a creditors. If the bank fails anything that's uninsured may be lost, because the vast majority is not held in legal tender, it's book money which no other party will accept as payment.

Your story seems extreme, that would not be legal in my country because stocks are your own property, the bank can't touch them. Either way, none of this should be allowed in the first place. The financial system is completely messed up and the only reason people think it's normal is because they don't know any other way. Money itself should be neutral, it should not be controlled by any single group and people should have free access to basic transactions.

If only there were something like a public bank ledger that belongs to everyone...

There's a difference in many US brokerages between having your stocks held in your name versus having them held in "street name" (i.e., in the brokerage's name).

GP could probably purchase the shares and be issued stock certificates that they could physically own, in which case there would be no chance of a brokerage being able to sell them.

(I'm not disagreeing that the brokerage's action was sucky, mind you)

If you research how companies are actually incorporated, shares are created, and then listed them it's basically just two tiny companies that exist solely to hold shares. They actually own basically all the publicly traded shares in the US, plus a bunch of non publicly traded ones.

You legally can hold shares of any company, but you'd have to spend insane amounts of money. Even when companies are acquired the shares aren't actually transferred to the acquirer. One of the custodial companies just merges the shares into the acquirer.

Almost all shares are held in street name, but as a shareholder you have the option of either having the shares registered directly in your name through the company or their transfer agent or to be issued physical stock certificates (usually for a fee).

As an example, I used to own a couple of shares of both Apple and IBM. My shares were held directly in my name by computershare, which is the transfer agent for both companies.

When I sold them, someone _probably_ bought them through a brokerage, which means that computer share updated the registration to name Cede & co as the registered owner of the stock, and cede updated an entry indicating that the buyers brokerage owned the shares, and the buyers brokerage updated an entry that said that the buyer owned the shares.

> There's a difference in many US brokerages between having your stocks held in your name versus having them held in "street name" (i.e., in the brokerage's name).

This is irrelevant - a US brokerage cannot arbitrarily trade your shares, whether or not your shares are held in street name.

> GP could probably purchase the shares and be issued stock certificates that they could physically own, in which case there would be no chance of a brokerage being able to sell them.

This is equivalent to suggesting someone put their cash in a mattress rather than using a bank. The real solution is to find a better bank.

> This is irrelevant - a US brokerage cannot arbitrarily trade your shares, whether or not your shares are held in street name.

Indeed. It seems most people think the Hypothecation agreement on a Margin account is something brokerages can do without having such an agreement on file. They can't.

There's much ado made over street name vs your name, but the reason margin and hypothecation agreements are so long and you need to sign them to open a margin account is so they can even take steps such as lending out your shares, because unless you have, they can't actually touch them, per your agreements with a cash account. Street name is primarily so that when you go to sell they don't have to go find YOUR shares (adding time and cost) to sell, but can simply find shares of the particular stock that you have in your account which they have a quantity on, to sell. Basically, it maintains fungibility to streamline the process.

But you're right, if you care to not trust that, you do have the ability to either get certificates (if they're issued for the stock in question) or do a direct registration (DRS) so they're held directly in digital form at the Transfer Agent. Just of course bear in mind that if you're NOT intent on holding these shares forever, selling at this point can become a multi-day process, so you become a bit less able to react quickly to market activity.

> If only there were something like a public bank ledger that belongs to everyone...

Feels like proper legislation might also be a solution to the human problem, rather than just throwing technology at things. Maybe both?

Of course, neither may actually be feasible in some places.

> Feels like proper legislation might also be a solution to the human problem, rather than just throwing technology at things. Maybe both?

Possible compromise:

We try the decentralized public ledger. Then, should that fail, we can still attempt to legislate morality for the... well, darn- I've lost count of the failed attempts but maybe it will work next time.

Motherfucker, the entire crypto industry is in the middle of a collapse. It lasted less than a decade at scale and that’s just the 10% that weren’t an out and out scam (I lean toward that number being closer to 0%, but I’ll throw you a bone since you sound like you’re caught up in it).

> Motherfucker, the entire crypto industry is in the middle of a collapse. It lasted less than a decade at scale and that’s just the 10% that weren’t an out and out scam (I lean toward that number being closer to 0%, but I’ll throw you a bone since you sound like you’re caught up in it).

1) Stick to overcollateralized stablecoins (MAI, DAI, FRAX, sUSD, sEUR, etc.) & Layer 2s (Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync). If you're okay with the centralization risks, then USDC & fiat-backed stablecoins can enter into the picture.

2) Account abstraction's an important step in providing the necessary security & recovery features to make it easier to use & secure. One of the parts required was ERC-4337, which has been in the works for some time and was recently publicly announced.

https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-4337.m...

Before the contrarians come in for the quick gotcha and say that it bring in centralization: That's been made painfully aware multiple times over. However, Vitalik's 2021 post on social recovery wallets puts it best:

https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html

> One common response to suggestions to use any form of multisig, social recovery or otherwise, is the idea that this solution goes back to "trusting people", and so is a betrayal of the values of the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. While I understand why one may think this at first glance, I would argue that this criticism stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what crypto should be about.

> To me, the goal of crypto was never to remove the need for all trust. *Rather, the goal of crypto is to give people access to cryptographic and economic building blocks that give people more choice in whom to trust, and furthermore allow people to build more constrained forms of trust*: giving someone the power to do some things on your behalf without giving them the power to do everything. Viewed in this way, *multisig and social recovery are a perfect expression of this principle*: each participant has some influence over the ability to accept or reject transactions, but no one can move funds unilaterally. This more complex logic allows for a setup far more secure than what would be possible if there had to be one person or key that unilaterally controlled the funds.

Legislation hasn't even been able to fix people dying due to daylight savings.

I mean, they did, last year, and we're done changing clocks now, at least in the US, after this last change. At least until what happened last time we tried this (in the 70s) happens, and kids start getting hit by cars while going to the bus in the dark all winter long. Though perhaps the glow of their phones will save them this time around.

Can you elaborate? I’m assuming things go wrong when people don’t get enough sleep but I’m otherwise unaware of the dangers of changing the clocks.

NHTSA stats show increased traffic fatalities following the time change every year

Daylight savings time can affect the heart, according to the American Heart Association[1].

[1]https://www.heart.org/en/news/2018/10/26/can-daylight-saving...

This is why I oppose ESG. It’s being pushed by the financial institutions under the guise of sustainability. But now you have many things unrelated to climate that have been show-horned in.

It’s fine to create regulation that’s voted upon, it’s not okay to use financial firms to push moral or societal change in collusion with governments.

ESG as a concept is fucked. Creating a scale for each of E, S or G is challenging. Adding a mixing methodology on top is insane. How many tonnes of carbon is a separate CEO/chairmanship worth? Is child labor four or five times worse than super-voting stock?

This ship has sailed when Gab creator was cut-off from all payment systems.

People widely applauded Visa et. al move, as this Gab guy is a horrible person that ends each message with dreaded "Jesus is King" quotation. So "the people" was happy.

Now people learn the hard lesson, one day your opinion, business, etc. might irritate the powers that be and you'll be crashed, as those who you helped to crash before.

Let's this be the lesson for everyone.

Trying to point out where it was going was impossible.

“What if your opinions become deemed unacceptable?” “What do you mean? My opinions are acceptable.” “But what if one day they aren’t?” “They are though. Why do you keep saying they aren’t?”

It's like some clamp comes down on the mind and stops critical thinking, where usually they are pretty thoughtful people otherwise. Self preservation instinct I guess.

Those conditional hypotheticals strike again.

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

- Martin Niemöller

I know it is not a popular topic here, but this kind of lack of control over (allegedly) your assets is one of the premises for the existence of Bitcoin.

Self-sovereignty and self-custody prevent third-parties from making decisions for you like this, and the removal of intermediaries (like payment processors) also prevent anyone from restricting you ability to transact with your desired counterparties.

The kind of freedom this enables also has disadvantages of course, but I strongly believe the few real "bad" transactions that gets blocked by the current system are a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of people deprived of access to the system and the millions of others who are included but seriously limited in what they are "allowed" to do on it.

Totally agree, and than you for posting this. You'll probably get a lot of negative comments from haters, but this is the kind of payment censorship that crypto can solve. The worst thing to happen to cryptocurrency in my opinion was fiat exchanges. It created the ability for the legacy banking world and government to have too much of a voice in something that was designed to be the people's exchange of value. We started losing when actual traditional money was exchanged en masse in a way that was tracked. How is that different than any other trackable digital transaction?

There's no difference between someone like visa shutting down processing for porn sites and your bitcoin exchange of choice refusing to pay out cash to porn stars. Porn models gotta eat, and last time I checked Costco doesn't accept bitcoin. Bitcoin can never be "truly free" from US control until it has it's own parallel economy, and that turned out to be a non-starter. And no, "local-bitcoins" is not a solution to that, because the last thing an online personality wants to do is meet up with a stranger who could plausibly discover who they are.

The difference is the step at which that shutdown takes place. When visa shuts down processing for your business, they're taking away your ability to conduct transactions at all. When a bitcoin exchange refuses to do business with you, they're only taking away your ability to convert your BTC to USD (at that particular exchange). You can still conduct transactions directly in BTC (or ETH or what have you). The "cash out to USD" step is much less frequent, and usually less ingrained into the way you conduct business.

A closer comparison would be to a bank that doesn't let a you deposit the cash your business earned at the end of the week. It would be an annoyance, but it doesn't actually prevent you from conducting your business.

> The kind of freedom this enables also has disadvantages of course, but I strongly believe the few real "bad" transactions that gets blocked by the current system are a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of people deprived of access to the system and the millions of others who are included but seriously limited in what they are "allowed" to do on it.

Except that, as we have seen, Bitcoin rarely is used for "we need financial freedom" activities and mostly for "buy into my Ponzi scheme" activities.

Someone could have constructed the crypto equivalent of PayPal. Someone still could and maybe right now is even better since the Ponzibros are getting hammered.

Unfortunately, nobody seems to be doing it. That speaks volumes.

You realize this article is about crypto payment processor SpankPay, right?

He's making a point about actual cryptocurrency and smart contracts, and you're trying to refute it by pointing out that the good qualities of crypto do not apply to a random private firm that happened to slap the word "crypto" on its elevator pitch. Many such cases! Someone explains that it's healthy to eat vegetables sometimes, and you respond, "Actually, yesterday I ate a pound of deep-fried broccoli covered in pure corn syrup, and I got diarrhea afterward."

Which is not a third-party *required* to do this kind of transactions.

It is just a convenient way to convert the crypto to fiat that these processor handle for their customers. There are ways to handle this step without a third party (P2P exchanges are one).

Less convenient for sure, but ultimately if you care about your economical freedom you will adopt them... or you will live in a walled garden, at least as long as your activity fits the current agenda/policies of these intermediaries (and your government). As soon as you don't, you get kicked out/cut from the system, even if your activity is not illegal.

I think these kind of shenanigans are byproducts of how regulation in financial services is delivered from the regulating bodies to builders in the space. As opposed to e.g. health where clear guidelines are often the norm, fintech is basically a shit show where regulators expect you to have internal processes to combat fraud, know your customers, do not finance terrorism, money laundering et al. — all without laying out actual precise guidelines of what they really expect want to see from an implementation standpoint, keeping you on your toes all the time. This leads to self-inflicted wounds from financial services providers, anticipating that regulators might not like e.g. stoner stocks and preemptive actions to minimize risk of being shut down.

> Visa could be liable in suit over child sexual abuse material on Pornhub, other sites

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/01/visa-mind...

You're totally right, in this case it's child porn. The lawsuit proves Visa's paranoia isn't entirely unjustified, either. That's the thing that pierces the corporate veil and puts executives in jail. Hence the cut off. I'm not sure how we improve the situation though

I remember when visa rejected my attempt to give money to wikileak, which is legal in my country.

So I donated BTC, and this is when I realized why we need crypto despite all the scams.

IIRC, last time something like this was discussed, the problem of fraudulent chargebacks was brought up as the main reason why these banking institutions keep targetting porn and sex work

Or is it actually due to something like Operation Choke Point.

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

Is it a moral judgement? Or is it an extremely high number of chargebacks making it unprofitable?

I don’t think payment processors care, but they have margins they want to maintain. Dipping their margins for particular companies or industries would be making a moral decision.

For your mutual fund, I expect similar in that weed stocks aren’t performing as well as they once were and aren’t projected to perform as well so they no longer fit the targets of your fund. I’d read the prospectus before assuming some moral aversion to weed.

I have a 0% chargeback rate. I am banned from every US and EU retail bank, brokerage (both crypto and equities), and SEPA, on the basis of my 1st amendment protected behavior. The sites that got me this status are donations-only -- nobody has any incentive to chargeback, we aren't offering merchandise or subscriptions. People who give us money just generally want to give us money. Similar anti-immigration, anti-government, and pro-gun businesses (3d printed firearm toolchain companies have had a hell of a time staying banked) also have very low chargeback rates, lower than the industry average.

Financial institutions should not be allowed to discriminate against law abiding citizens. If a transaction is legal it should be their job to move the money from party A to party B.

That’s super alarming. Where do I read more about your story and how you became exiled from the financial system?

This may be illuminating. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...

Just in case anyone's not aware, this is the account of notorious hacker-cum-racist Weev, an actual, honest-to-goodness, self-admitted neo-nazi, who emerged from jail with a massive swastika tattoo on his chest.

I'll be playing the world's smallest violin for you tonight.

@dang I don't know why you haven't banned this piece of human waste.

edit: I've been flagged for this and yet - the actual neo nazi who supported Anders Breivik killing children continues to post. Is it the official position of Y Combinator that neo nazis who support terrorism are welcome to post here?

Those who are quick to defend neo-nazis, white supremacists, neo-confederates, anti-semites, and the like seem to be welcome here. Why would you think the subjects of that defense wouldn't be as well?

Just for the record, your "first amendment protected behavior" means the government can't prosecute you for said behavior. It doesn't mean anyone else has to tolerate you or your nonsense, including major financial organizations. Or are you saying you want that ebil gummint to impose your will on others?

It is absolutely reasonable to expect that freedom of speech involves the preservation of being able to make basic purchases.

This "freedom of speech isn't freedom of consequences" line is exactly the sort of attitude people take in the countries in which the government does suppress free speech, and they think it's just perfectly fine. You have freedom of speech and every country then, the consequences just going to jail.

There's a limit to this. There should be consequences for you saying things that are wrong, lying to people, spreading hatred, and so on. However, protecting basic human decency in the ability to continue to participate in society is incredibly important to preserving free expression across our nations.

Being able to purchase things, being able to post to the internet, are both aspects of this. It's fine to have this attitude when they're is a strong diversity of companies that allow you to participate and is likely that not all of them can collude with each other.

We have two payment processing companies. Four social media companies, and those four all literally live in the same city.

The patj you tread is a path leading to suppression of speech, and the point of free speech is to ensure that people are able to speak without fear of undue consequence.

Money is inherently interconnected with government. It is the government that issues money. It is government that demand that taxes is paid using their money. It is government that issue regulations for finance, and it is government that enforce laws that protect money and the processes around money. It is governments that generally insures banks.

I am perfectly fine with banks being exempted from first amendment rules if the bank has no relation with governments and when the government do not depend on banks to operate the financial system within the nation. Otherwise the bank is just an extension of the government, indistinguishable from a government department.

The first amendment recognizes a natural right, it doesn’t create it. Granted, its protection of that right is limited, but the right still exists even when it is not legally protected.

Every. Single. Time.

Every time someone mentions that what they are doing is protected free speech, there is someone on HN that feels necessary to make "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of consequences" as an argument.

Sure, at it's most simplistic this is true. However, if exercising a right results in you being homeless when your behavior was legal, and protected as a matter of course by the law, then there is something wrong.

What you are missing, and what everyone who makes this argument is missing, is that Freedom of Speech isn't /just/ a law, it's also a social more, and that social more has shifted, which means speech is now a universally dangerous behavior, regardless of whether or not you will be prosecuted. This isn't just a collective decision of society, it's a consequence of our more interconnected world, the concentration of wealth and power, and how that wealth and power unequally is applied to people based on whether or not they're liked by the wealthy and powerful.

Multi-national corporations, that literally hold charters to sit on the boards of central banks, that are deeply interconnected with the US government, while actively extra-governmentally, do not get to go "muh consequences" when they penalize citizens in life-altering ways for doing legal activities. Banking isn't exactly a right, but you should not be stripped of your ability to bank for doing completely legal things. Being forced to be unbanked, being unable to take payment for your work, and/or being fired from your job are not "muh consequences", they are an attempt by the wealthy and the powerful to utterly suppress speech they don't like, and to oppress the people, the individuals, who dare to utter, write, or share things they disapprove of. In many ways, these are more material than government action.

Anytime someone tells me they care about marginalized communities while also trotting out "muh consequences" has told me that they don't care about marginalized communities. When making this argument you always envision somebody on Twitter you enjoyed being part of the mob to pillory, but those aren't the people who suffer "muh consequences" the most, it's always people at the margins. It's the lady who is forcibly unbanked because she became an online sex worker to pay for her insulin. It's the guy who turned his life around in the legal weed industry, but has to deal with cash accounting and risk of robbery, and is unable to access retirement services, because he's forcibly unbanked. It's the person who runs the local community center but had felonies, and has unsavory prison tattoos they keep covered up, that's forcibly unbanked. Your "muh consequences" destroy people's lives, people who are just trying to survive, and doing so by participating in legal activities in their own communities, and by saying, writing, and sharing things which are legally protected.

You can always justify "muh consequences" when you create a boogeyman to target it at, but the reality is that free speech that is not free from life-altering consequences meted out by global institutions with near unlimited power /isn't free/. Freedom of association for businesses stops when the business is nearly more powerful (or maybe actually is more powerful) than the government. It's still oppression and it's still immoral, even if it's not the government doing it.

To quote GP:

> Financial providers shouldn't be issuing moral judgements. It seems to be more common too.

This is the basic tactic of fascism - government power circumvents the freedom guaranteed by the open market, corporate power circumvents the freedom guaranteed by the constitution.

It may be necessary to revisit the fascist question - we certainly seem to be revisiting the socialist one so horseshoe theory pretty much guarantees we will - but I will not entertain any fascist positions unless the person arguing for it acknowledging that that's what they're doing.

Technically you could just charge higher transaction fees and require additional validation, like a phone call to the card holder to confirm the purchase to reduce charge backs and maintain the margin. As providers continue to drop out, your transaction fee could increase to create a higher margin.

Technically they have different product lines for everything. I think it’s a situation where it’s possible but not profitable so they don’t do it.

What you’re describing is a lot of work, when there are higher margins elsewhere. Why would a payment processor build a special system just for porn? If it’s profitable someone will eventually create a product.

My assumption is that they looked into this and decided it wasn’t worth it.

I remember years ago the issue of chargebacks is due to shame and people in relationships denying that they ever did it to appease partners. So it’s pretty hard to be in a business that has to fix shame and relationship problems to succeed. If they could do that, they need to release it as a psychology tool.

"Why would a payment processor build a special system just for porn?"

But you don't. You just have to extend the current system for calls about hitting a limit, fraud, etc.

"So it’s pretty hard to be in a business that has to fix shame and relationship problems to succeed."

You don't have to fix shame. You just need to pre-approve the transaction so they can't later charge back without a compelling argument for why the person on the phone wasn't really you.

[citation needed] on the chargebacks.

Sex workers get a lot of repeat business and aren’t used for the kind of stolen credit card validation that hits many online businesses.

I have a buddy that used to own a brothel in Arizona. He said he got a lot of chargebacks, but he would dispute them with the physical signatures and generally won.

Do you mean Nevada? When was prostitution last legal in Arizona? 1918 as far as I can tell.

I mean Arizona. He was aware his business was not legal.

I think the chargeback scenario here isn't cards which are actually stolen. It's that someone makes a purchase, their spouse notices it on the credit card statement, and they deny it.

Then in order to sell the lie to their spouse, they call the credit card company and say, "Of course I didn't make those purchases! I would never do such a thing! I'm not some kind of pervert! Remove these charges immediately or I'll close my account!"

And then the credit card company's thought process is like, "Well, you probably did! But we can pretend you didn't, if that's what it takes to keep you as a customer so we can keep making money off you."

[Citation needed] on moral concerns?

Nah, they asserted an “extremely high number of chargebacks” which while the article says it’s “related to sexual businesses.”

It's the same thing. Payment processors often ban sex-related businesses not out of prudishness or brand risk but simple financial risk controls.

The evidence on this is readily available via Google. Just search for high risk industries for payment processors, it will always include sex industry stuff.

The reason they do this is the same reason why visa and MasterCard cut off all ties with these types of companies. The reason is that if they continue to be "complicit" they run the risk of having the federal government attack them legally because of their ongoing involvement and controlled substances.

Wouldn't chargebacks only really impact the merchant, and not the acquirer/payment processor?

>mutual fund

>aren’t projected to perform as well

To be clear in my case this was not a managed portfolio. They literally dumped individual shares I had specifically selected and purchased

That’s interesting. I’ve never encountered a brokerage that restricted what shares I could buy. Usually it’s if the share is traded on an exchange it’s fair game.

What kind of account did this?

What country are you in? What brokerage are you using? I'm wondering how this is even possible.

If you’re willing to share, what broker was that? I’ll avoid.

Wasn't broker, but their upstream provider Euroclear

Interesting. I looked it up and found some more information.

https://thedalesreport.com/cannabis/euroclear-to-stop-suppor...

If they are custodians and not managing your portfolio, that might even be illegal.

Wasn't managed. Hence my surprise.

My first thought was I had gotten hacked (yay lastpast) & someone is trading on my account

But will OP sue, tho?

I won't. A) not worth the hassle and B) I'm sure there will be some bullshit buried in the T&Cs on page 24 in font size 2 allowing this.

I just thought it is very much left field for an own-managed share account

They sold them without your consent? In a cash account? Or margin (and not fully paid)? If the former, I'd be personally looking into recourse, or at least reading any agreements you have on file, because nothing about that sounds remotely above board (though brokerages are known for staying pretty on top of regulations with pretty sizeable legal teams). Asking that you transfer it off the platform is one thing; selling something you custody with them without your permission, on the other hand, exposes you to market risk and ultimately sounds like it's in violation of at least a few rules, given they've not been given discretionary authority in the account.

Some industries get to get away with making a lot of their own decisions there and just shooting themselves in the foot if they feel like it, but with the thick regulations in the capital markets, this sounds like an overreach. They can kick YOU off the platform, but even when doing that, they typically need to leave your securities alone in an account that you still get to choose when to sell.

Alternate take: Companies should have every right to not do business with people they find morally repugnant, but only in industries where there is a "service of last resort". I wouldn't care about visa kicking out perfectly legitimate sex work if they could sign up on, say, the post office's website for a bank account and some basic payment system.

> Financial providers shouldn't be issuing moral judgements.

This isn't a moral judgement so much as it is an attempt to avoid association with high fraud risk transactions, which lead to more chargebacks, potential implication of the bank in criminal activity (e.g., money laundering), and greater government scrutiny under initiatives like Obama's Operation Choke Point.

I thought it was the law[1] that put them on the hook for any sex trafficking that's facilitated by said payment processing, not moral judgments?

[1] FOSTA/SESTA https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=FOSTA-SESTA&usesk...

https://i.redd.it/wrm9icqvgzja1.jpg

A large segment of the population unfortunately have extremely distorted moral compasses, and a disproportionate number of them likely work in conservative industries such as finance.

Americans on average consider pornographic actors to be more immoral than lobbyists, spies, and lawyers, and second only to politicians. I'm not surprised at this chart but it really depresses my spirits.

> Financial providers shouldn't be issuing moral judgements.

Have you considered that this may have been a decision based on “we might get sued for being party to human trafficking” reasons?

That's a circular argument though, the label is also a moral judgement

The public was becoming too liberal, didn't have a strong enough reaction to "prostitution" anymore. Hence they started relabeling most voluntary prostitution disingenuously and even changing laws to make clearly "nothing special" also be "sex trafficking" ... like a man traveling for a weekend getaway to another city with two half-sugar baby half-prostitites.

> That's a circular argument though

No it’s not. Whatever moral judgement the government assigns to a crime is irrelevant to a company who is staring down the barrel of a lawsuit for being party to said crime.

In the end, all it would take is one case of a pimp accepting payment for his underaged prostitutes via this company for the payment processor to be sued into oblivion, so they made the rational decision to not open themselves to this risk any longer.

Hardly a realistic risk there.

Payment processors are really hard to sue unless they are directly involved in fraud. Which is why person to person payment processors like Venmo can operate.

> Hardly a realistic risk there.

What? No it's not. Here's an example of a payment processor that got sued for being the payment processor used by a debt settlement firm that merely "overcharged consumers, took untimely fees, misrepresented the value of its services, and failed to make critical disclosures about consumer harms."[0]

> Payment processors are really hard to sue unless they are directly involved in fraud.

All of that is merely a question of the scale of the activity and how badly the government wants to stop it. Same reason cryptocurrency escaped taxing/reporting requirements for many years -- the scale and the ire of the government just wasn't there yet.

Relevant to this discussion, the payment processor in question is associated with a company that makes no bones about providing services for people engaged in work that is illegal in many jurisdictions! If you don't think that would eventually land both companies in the government's crosshairs, I don't know what to tell you. Take "fair" out of the equation, if you're a business owner it's not about "fair", it's about saving your ass. It's not a moral judgement for a company to voluntarily disassociate themselves from another company engaged in illegal behavior.

> Which is why person to person payment processors like Venmo can operate.

Venmo's TOS has named restrictions on what customers can do (and "at our discretion" clauses), and they absolutely will ban users for violating them if it either Venmo can prove it or if they government starts threatening them over it.

0: https://www.mass.gov/news/ags-office-reaches-settlement-with...

What makes you assume it’s a moral judgment and not a liability/risk-driven business decision? I’ve almost never observed large businesses, including banks, passing up a chance to make money because of their moral scruples.

> The other day I got a notification that was "FYI we sold your shares in company X (NASDAQ listed)". They've decided they're no longer keen on weed companies and have taken it upon themselves to fix my portfolio to remove such evilness.

You are aware that cannabis is still federally illegal, right?

> What makes you assume it’s a moral judgment and not a liability/risk-driven business decision? I’ve almost never observed large businesses, including banks, passing up a chance to make money because of their moral scruples.

Amazon's firearm accessory rules seem to contain plausible examples of such. Permitted accessories include:

Vise blocks designed to hold firearms, except for those intended for "assault weapons."

Magazine loaders, except for those which can accommodate the following common rifle calibers: .223/5.56; 7.62x51; 308; 7.62x39; 5.45x39

Armorer's wrenches, except those specifically for assault weapons, particularly AR pattern rifles.

Hand gun grips, but not "assault weapon grips".

Implicitly permitted are jig kits except those for ARs specifically (no mention of other assault rifles/weapons. It bans "AR-specific jig kits")

Source with many more examples, many of them sensible restrictions likely motivated by state laws, but many of them perplexingly specific: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external... Is there any state in this union in which restricts sale or possession of vise blocks designed to hold ARs? Not as far as I'm aware.

They also restrict "Offensive and Controversial Materials", saying:

> We maintain these policies to ensure a welcoming environment for our global customers and sellers to do business while offering the widest selection of items on earth. We promote trust and respect, as well as adherence to the law.

> We exercise judgment in allowing or prohibiting listings and we keep our global community of customers and cultural differences and sensitivities in mind when reviewing and making a decision on products.

One of the examples of products they ban is "Products that promote intolerance based on race, religion, and sexual orientation.", which interpreted in an impartial manner would obviously ban the Bible and many other religious texts, but in fact Amazon doesn't actually ban those. They're exercising a lot of judgement in the application of these rules and many apparent contradictions can be found. For instance they claim they won't sell products which promote or glorify terrorism, yet they sell the Unibomber's Manifesto and t-shirts of Che.

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...

It's not just a moral judgement.

The illegal sex industry is a big one, and if you have a scalable and available online platform that illegal transactions can be hidden from the authorities that is a problem.

It is a problem if your payment processor is taking payments for nonconsensual sex, rape and payments to have sex with children. Not just a moral panic issue.

Edit: seems like I have some views that are unpopular with the cowards who downvote comments without engaging in discussion.

> Edit: seems like I have some views that are unpopular with the cowards who downvote comments without engaging in discussion.

Downvotes are to be expected on that topic as soon as one says something mildly against the prostitution "business"...

"Sex consumers" don't want to take responsibility for the damages they cause or the crimes they participate in, for them it's a "simple commercial transaction" between "consenting adults", forgetting all the coercive tactics pimps have been using for ages, the grooming, the drug addiction...

Of course it's a legal risk for any payment processor involved in that kind of "business".

Don't worry about the downvotes, your arguments are completely reasonable and nobody can silence you no matter how hard they try.

I'm not worried about downvotes, I just want the cowards to understands there is a difference between supporting the industry of people that agree to work in it, and people (sometimes children) who are manipulated, and forced with violence and drug addiction to do things they don't want to.

There are sex slaves in America, and anyone that covers for that is worse than a coward.

Some of us just reflexively downvote when we see off-topic complaints about downvotes.

I don't like this trend of financial providers issuing moral judgement, de-banking people, and more either.

I'm pro-BLM but learning Silicon Valley Bank gave BLM millions of dollars before it collapsed rubs me the wrong way.

I need my banks and financial institutions to do their primary job first and foremost. I'm getting to the point where DIE marketing is become a signal of poor upper management trying to hide failures.

There is an interesting investigation into that claim written up on Talking Points Memo - https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-quick-look-at-the-lyi...

Basically the Claremont Institute tallied up announcements of corporate charity that went to anything related to racial minorities, and called that "giving to BLM and supporting riots."

The core point still stands, why are they giving ANY money to charity at all ?

Why does anyone give money to charity? Usually because they want to support the cause.

Giving money to charity while your business fails doesn't make sense

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-silicon-valley-bank-did...

> Financial providers shouldn't be issuing moral judgements. It seems to be more common too.

Nothing to do with "morals", everything to do with the risks associated with prostitution. Same thing with Cannabis businesses, which payment processors tend to not do business with.

These companies have very little morals, but their executives don't want to be thrown in jail for being digital pimps.

It's a circular argument. Businesses don't do business with Business X, so it's too risky for us to do business with Business X.

Yet we have figured out how to let 16-year old kids drive 5,000-pound blocks of metal in public.

The distinguishing element of the two cases is morality. (Substitute porn for prostitution to sidestep the question of legality; the result is the same.)

I don't want the government to legislate morality. Everyone in a free society should have the choice to be moral or immoral; otherwise there is no morality. But if the U.S. government wants to effectively eliminate cash through post-9/11 KYC/AML laws, structuring laws, increasingly strict service-industry cash-transaction reporting requirements, and so on, then either the government needs to establish a genuinely amoral and private electronic-payment system that allows disgusting, vile, reprehensible, but legal transactions. Or the government must actively affirm the obligation of private payment processors like Visa and Mastercard to support transactions that conflict with their moral preferences.

Our freedoms of speech and association are being swept aside as the government shunts nearly all financial activity through private enterprises. What good is the Bill of Rights if you can't do anything without a debit card?

> It's a circular argument. Businesses don't do business with Business X, so it's too risky for us to do business with Business X.

It isn't a circular argument, running a business is all about risks management, choosing not to do business with people that could be link to sex trafficking mafia is very much effective risk management, that platform can go take their business elsewhere.

This isn't even a partisan issue, prostitution is frowned upon by most payement processors for very objective reasons. It's a non story.

You’ll have a hard time establishing a right to financial plumbing for illegal activity. Denial of financial services is a pretty good crime-fighting tool, in that it both scales better and avoids the violence of policing/incarceration.

Who did you get that notification from?

>Financial providers shouldn't be issuing moral judgements

That ship has long sailed, my friend. We spent the past 7-10 years intentionally drawing corporate America into politics. I mean, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter. Apparently people want it this way, so here we are. This time it's a left-leaning cause that gets screwed.

Why shouldn't they?

What broker was that?

Pretty much all the payment processors cut off Wikileaks without even the government asking them to. And all they did is publish evidence of war crimes.

Societies should not gain leverage over lower classes and then buy their morally broken bodies when they have little else.

Of course society should indeed profess the meagerest moral rights and humanity for all and protect that.

We completely privatized payments without realizing it. Credit cards are no longer some extra benefit on top of your bank account, it's how basically almost all commerce is required now. Private companies collect basically a tax on almost all transactions in our economy.

I don't know how we let them get away with this. Facilitating commerce should 100% be a government operation and be free. To accept cash I pay paying the US government a fraction of a percent I'm taxes compared to credit card fees.

The fact that, on top of all this, they are essentially policing what can and cannot be sold and bought should be outrageous to people. It's a complete conflict of interest that companies can shut down payments to and from competitors to their investments.

People can say "oh just don't use or accept visa etc" but good luck staying in business or buying anything online.

We absolutely need some kind of government backed digital payment system in my opinion. Credit card rewards should also be illegal they are nothing but hidden fees passed to you by charging the business more.

> Private companies collect basically a tax on almost all transactions in our economy.

Forget transactions, they collect a tax on almost all money in the economy. Something like 97% of money in circulation is simply bank loans (like mortgages) that haven't been paid back yet.

I encourage anyone to walk around a financial district somewhere and really think about what it's all for. On the inside of some of those buildings there might be people, but they aren't doing much. On the inside of many there aren't even any people.

Finance definitely has value, but is it really that much? It's a fraction of what they take.

How they get away with it is the interesting part. There's just something about money. There will always be a very large part of the population who just don't get it. Then there are some who excel with it. It brings out the worst in many and it downright scares the rest. All that's clear is we need to get a grip on it. Bitcoin was the latest attempt.

I can't recommend enough the book Other People's Money by John Kay.

I have a feeling that a government run payment system would also forbid illegal activity (eg laundering, etc). I agree that a private payments network is not ideal but the question at hand is how should transactions facilitating illegal activity be handled?

To be clear I’m not passing a moral judgement on sex work - just pointing out the fact that it’s presently illegal in many forms and jurisdictions and that fact is relevant.

The problem isn't that laws are being enforced. The problem is private institutions are enforcing extra-legal penalties on legal activity.

Well Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover combined have almost a $1.5T market cap - so if you think the government is going to put them out of business - you must have a different perception of what the government does than I do...

> is going to put them out of business

Going to put them out? Probably not. Can they? Absolutely.

A dystopian digital currency as CBDC will come after FedNow.

I met Ameen (CEO) and the SpankChain team back in 2018. Our teams spent a whole day together talking about life, payment strategies, and the future.

Ameen is definitely 1 standard deviation smarter than me. The clock speed of his brain made me feel like an outdated CPU.

They were kind people. They really cared about vulnerable people getting reliable income.

I hope all of them the best.

If you're in a position to hire anybody from their team, strongly consider reaching out to them.

Crypto payment processor SpankPay announced on Monday that it would shut down because of financial discrimination

Interesting phrase, "financial discrimination" (and "banking discrimination" later in the article), curious to see it here considering Vice's (and similar media outlets) lack of interest or ra ra attitude to deplatforming when seeing it applied to services and people they disapprove of in the past.

Seems a valid phrase to use though if a platform is powerful and ubiquitous enough to cause existential issues to legal entities it doesn't like or have bad PR.

I believe it's considered deplatforming when it happens in response to political opinions, and with the expectation that it is in relation to communication media. Banking and other critical services would be extreme cases of deplatforming.

While on the other hand discrimination implies characteristics that a person can't (reasonably be expected to) change, in this case a profession.

On the other hand, I'd consider "deplatforming" as an appropriate term if and only if the action literally removes the platform used for expressing opinion and communication.

E.g. If someone gets kicked off and kept out of some social media platform or gets denied the opportunity to speak at some public event, or interviewers boycott them even when their role normally would get interviewed, gets kicked out of a job which gives them public outreach (e.g. journalism or university) or some venue refuses to rent them facilities for a talk - to me, all of that is deplatforming no matter if it's because of political opinion or innate characteristics like the color of their skin or religion or whatever. If all the media agree to not show or discuss red-haired people, that's obviously deplatforming red-haired people.

And on the opposite side, if someone gets hurt in other ways that don't change "the platform" - their landlord kicks them out, they get fired by an employer that "only" provides money but not a platform for outreach, their customers drop them - all of that isn't deplatforming but ordinary discrimination, again no matter if it's because of political opinion or innate characteristics like the color of their skin or religion or whatever (that would only affect whether that's prohibited discrimination).

There are plenty of examples of people getting deplatformed by banks (or EG paypal) due to their political beliefs.

But this is about the language used to describe the action, not the action itself. I don't think “being unable to open a bank account” is what most people mean when they say “so-and-so shouldn't be given a platform by the NYT”.

It's the end result, and they certainly don't _oppose_ it

That's how Hatreon etc came to be

I wish we would be more explicit here. What political beliefs are they being de-platformed for? Is it the lower taxes? Deregulation? Immigration policy? Which specific political belief is getting them kicked off of platforms?

Does it matter? Do you have some political beliefs for which you think de-banking is acceptable? What are those?

It is the lowest rung on the ladder of moral systems, "If I do it it is ok, if you do it it is wrong". You can stand on that, but it's very low.

"It's good when bad things happen to bad people and bad when bad things happen to good people" seems to be a fairly universal sentiment regardless of one's personal stance on who/what good and bad are.

It's not at all universal. It's just much harder for media to be consistent about than individuals, because unless a media outlet has very strict editorial policies, it is comprised of many people with many beliefs and will end up being inconsistent by default. Especially an outlet like Vice, which is entertainment-focused and doesn't make much of an effort to distinguish opinion pieces from reporting. If a "news" site doesn't have a separate tab that says "opinion", you're gonna get opinion all over everything.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/08/the-slate-star-codex-p...

For what it counts, Vice does have a fairly strict editorial policy, which more or less is "we want David vs. Goliath stories". It becomes very obvious after a while that this is how Vice wants the world to be seen.

Everyone is either "The Man" and therefore evil, or is sticking it to "The Man" and is therefore heroic. I've been friends with people that have been interviewed by Vice - this is the single most annoying thing about them. Most of them are hobbyists (Nintendo-console related, both modding and emulation) who do what they do "because it's cool and fun to do".

Then Vice barges in, interviews them and/or their team members and suddenly the angle under which the coverage is presented becomes how these awesome, super cool hackers are doing it because they want to stick it to the Big Evil Nintendo which is just... not at all the motive. None of those people are/were out to be a David taking up the sword against the Goliath that is Nintendo. They just wanted to tinker with a console because of curiosity.

Vice is (alongside to a lesser degree Kotaku) responsible for basically ruining any conversation about homebrew, console modding and emulation by putting the "it's good to pirate actually" motivation front and center for hacking and modifying consoles. Like... fucking talk to these people. Almost every single one hates having their work associated with piracy since it can cause serious reputational harm (and is often inaccurate to boot), yet Vice doesn't give a single flying shit about that since Nintendo is "The Man" and that means that any action that can be construed as being against them is morally justified.

Probably one of the worst outlets to ever link (and for what it counts, what they cover usually has better coverage elsewhere so... yeah, avoid them if you can). Strongly also recommend to avoid ever talking to them if you can help it, they will slant the conversation to further that editorial policy if they can.

> unless a media outlet has very strict editorial policies, it is comprised of many people with many beliefs

You mean there are people with conservative beliefs writing for VICE?

".. and we can easily tell who is good and who is bad" - is the unsaid part of that sentiment, and the reason why it doesn't really work.

"Sex work" used to be called prostitution and considered morally bad by most people until about 5 minutes ago. That's why principles matter, otherwise you are at the mercy of the mob of people who will decide for you what to think.

A stripper is not a prostitute but is a sex worker. Same thing with the porn

Prostitution is a subset of sex work.

I don’t think it is fundamentally wrong to say that sex work is okay but agitating for a fascist society is not.

While you're right on the fascist society point, I'm not sure how that is at all relevant in this situation. Do you think any moral bounds on society are fascistic? Do you know what fascism is at all?

I didn't either, it's a view point you can have it's just a very low moral argument.

"Sex work is ok because I agree with it, and agitating for a fascist society is not, because I disagree with it" - when someone could as easily say "Sex work is bad, because I disagree with it, and agitating for a fascist society is good, because I agree with it". It's a moral standpoint based on your beliefs (My beliefs are right).

You can climb the moral ladder if you base the same argument ("sex" vs. "fascism") on some common ground, E.g. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

(I would wish that people would not throw "fascist" aka. everyone who disagrees with me, around as easily and read some fascism theory - E.g. Sternhell - before and distingiush it from Dictatorships, Nationalsocialism, Authoritarianism etc.)

"Sex work is fine and fascism is not" remains an incredibly sound moral position sorry. I think you're enjoying these convolutions though so that will be my only contribution to this project!

"I think you're enjoying these convolutions"

If nothing works, try ad hominem arguments. It is still an argument, but a very weak (the weakest?) one.

"You are wrong because it's you" has the same problems as "The things I think are ok, are ok, and the things I think are bad, are bad", it doesn't try to be universal and revolves around oneself. Also these kind of arguments have the tendency to lead to an echo chamber with no progress on understanding.

PS: You might be right, I've studied Philosophical Computer Science, but it doesn't strengthen your argument. It's like saying "You're wrong because you wear a blue hat, when I wear a blue hat".

It's not sound though. In no objective sense is it sound. On the fascism part I think we can all agree, but every society that's ever existed across the globe has criminalized or at least made sex work taboo for good reason. Do you think your moral authority is greater than the sum total of humans that have existed across all cultures?

Hint: it's not. So the burden of proof is on you.

Why exactly do you think sex work is ok and tolerable in society?

It’s fundamentally wrong to not believe force is only justified in response to force.

Did they announce that they shutdown because of pink elephants? No they announced they are shutting down with "...SpankPay being discriminated against due to the nature of our business...". It makes sense to report it as such when that's what they said

If you paint yourself as the "good" guy it's ok for you to be biased, prejudice, use double standards, discriminate.

"The end justifies the means!" as Machiavelli put it.

It's ok to take actions based on the fact that a bad thing is bad. That's not prejudice it's judgement.

May as well get ahead of this, every time someone is yoinked from a platform:

"If you don't like it, build your own <piece of underlying infrastructure>". [repeat recursively].

More productive comment: protocols > platforms.

This is true in many situations, but setting up full self-maintained payment processing isn't really a feasible option for small or even larger development teams. Payment processing is heavily regulated with many legal requirements, not to mention the countless security threats.

Would be feasible with crypto though.

"Crypto payment processor SpankPay announced on Monday that it would shut down because of financial discrimination"

They were using crypto. Didn't help.

The first half of paying for the services maybe. But you’ve just pushed the problem of converting from crypto to $DOLLAR to the service provider.

I don’t think Coinbase for example would knowingly allow a prostitute, whose inbound source of tokens is coming from a digital pimping service, to convert them to USD and then ACH the cash to her local bank.

No it wouldn't, because that's just kicking the can down the road to the exchange provider.

This didn't seem to bother anyone when people were told to EG create their own facebook or Twitter.

Those are not regulated. I think you missed the point.

...and then the people who were pissed at Facebook and Twitter went off and made their own Facebook and Twitter because making a website has very little in the way of barriers to entry.

Financial services is a very different arena.

If you don't like it, go build your own universe.

Elon Musk is going to colonize his own planet, but that may turn out not to be enough.

The barrier of entry is high in the payments market. You have to follow a lot of regulations, get other payment providers to accept you, and most importantly have enough liquidity. If you are missing even a single one of these factors, then you're only playing around with Monopoly money.

government > protocols

I think payment services really come under 'utilities' or 'essential services', if not quite 'human rights'.

And thus processors should be required by law to provide service to everyone unless they are clearly doing something illegal, and even then, it's a matter for the police and courts, not private corporations or individuals.

UN lists [1] the right to work as a human right. Payment services are irreplaceable for all kinds of businesses, so a blanket denial of payment services is arguably already a violation of human rights.

[1]: https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/human-rights

This is already probably happening because of a law. FOSTA-SESTA.

It's really a bad law.

There's a clear difference between 'aiding and abetting', and the much vaguer 'facilitating', 'supporting', which could be true of phone, or electricity companies for example.

But I believe those companies are required to provide service, as they are 'utilities'.

Selling ass is illegal in the USA though (even though it shouldn't be)

Not in some parts, as I understand.

And I think this is also targeted at pornography? I'm not sure where USA is in the pornography rankings, but I'm fairly sure it's nowhere near the bottom (sorry).

But the point is, even if it were all illegal, that's probably a matter for the police, not for private interests to deny an essential service 'just in case', or because 'we don't want to do business with those people' , etc.

This is going to increasingly be a problem. We don’t need a National digital currency for there to be control in our finances. As long as everything flows through 3-4 “private” entities, and those entities owe their existence to gov’t bailouts, they’ll be quasi-govt organizations.

> We don’t need a National digital currency for there to be control in our finances.

> everything flows through 3-4 “private” entities

Brilliant separation of concerns isn't it. -- The government says we can have all the porn we want (1st amendment) -- The cc processors say "we won't let you pay for it" (google: bill ackman )

Now find me a pollution who wants to pass some sort of pro porn bill to make the CC processors allow for these payments.

European here, sorry if I misunderstood, but I always thought the "free speech" protected by the first amendment only protects your right to e.g. voice your political opinion without being punished for your particular views, not your preferences in porn (or the distribution and even existence of it)? As an extreme counterexample the government banned CSAM and one couldn't weasel their way out of such a case by pleading first amendment, right?

That's a so complicated case, that it's an increasingly bad example.

CSAM is basically evidence of a crime, so it's treated as such, private entities are pressured to monitor for it, detect it, quarantine it, etc.

Which in some abstract sense is okay. (We have data on rising child abuse, including sexual, also data on rising CSAM on the internet and so on, so some very effective interest groups are trying to "do something".) Now, of course, it might not come as a complete surprise to you here on HN that the pragmatic concerns about the approach, proposals, implementation, lawcraft and whatnot involved are far outweigh even the wildest claims of benefits, the whole enterprise is very counter-productive, at best security-theater, but in reality it's just a fucking public interest disaster (FOSTA/SESTA, basically War on Sex Work, yet another highly acclaimed installment of the War On series!), an in a convenient secondary effect it's a "free moat" for the incumbents.

The obvious legal issue is that it's "impossible" to say what it CSAM and what is something that looks like that. For example, what if, there's a machine that generates pictures that look like CSAM? You might advertise it, but likely in no time the DoJ and a bunch of other federal and state entities would sue (and of course arrest, raid, detain) you arguing that somewhere there's actual CSAM in the process, it's distribution, etc.

And even if simple plain "aliens in a vacuum" reading of the law indicates that eventually the government would lose these cases, it's very realistic that the courts themselves would just make new law that in effect criminalizes this even more victimless version too.

But, all in all, with enough advocacy it's possible, just there are very few people who want to spend their life on this.

If AI generated CSAM is poisoned by actual CSAM in the process, wouldn't that extend to AI generated art being poisoned by copyrighted work in the process?

It wasn’t that long ago that porn was banned in the US, and ‘obscene’ material still technically is. It’s generally allowed under a 1st amendment exception.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_objections_to_pornogra...]

CSAM is not in violation of the first amendment because the supreme court decided that obscenity isn't protected speech. It isn't specifically that the first amendment only protects political speech, like with abortion, obscenity limitations - particularly related to children - are just something the court made up which no one really openly disagrees with (for obvious reasons).

In a way it shows that the first amendment isn't really all that absolute. Say something that enough powerful people find gross and they'll just make it out to be an unstated exception.

It is actually freedom of expression, which covers speech, art, religion, etc. Porn/sex work can be any and all of those.

From what I understand, it even covers campaign contributions.

It's worse than that; actual government regulation has oversight, constitutional protections, appeals processes and the like. But by doing it indirectly through the payment system they can sidestep all of that.

My friend, you’re talking to a lawyer who makes his living suing banks for violating consumer rights. Suffice it to say, all of these concerns are very very well Justified.

It will happen: with national digital currencies the control will happen and as soon there is some real threat, people WILL be cut from the possibilities to make payments!

> and as soon there is some real threat

No, the threat won't need to be anywhere close to real. It will be abused politically against whoever is disagreeing with the government, like it was against the truckers demoing in Canada.

The banking system is actually already weaponized case when stakes are high. In my own nominally democratic country, access to loans for the presidential campaign is already refused by national banks to the party that ranked second the last two times. The leader then had to ask for Russian funding...

Those "protesters" started having their banking denied once they started advocating for overthrowing the government. They were not just protesting, they were planning and requesting the government to be overthrown and guns were found. So at this point, it is possible that yes, the government will take exceptionally high measures to counter an attack against the state.

Tons of people have been protesting about the Canadian government and COVID measures outside of that blockade (up to this day), and their bank account is still fine.

I think that national digital currencies have less risk than the current private providers. While in both cases some people will be (I mean, already are) cut from the possibility to make payments, these aren't the same people and the impact is different.

Government-run payment systems have to have explicit legal grounds to make decisions, and their ability to make discriminatory decisions is curtailed by constitutional requirements for fair and equal treatments. A government-run payment system can and will block payments which are for a purpose which the general society through their elected representatives has decided to be criminal, and if the society changes their mind (as it has on many things) they can legalize that stuff, and it will also become legal in the payment system.

On the other hand, the current privately-run system can (and already does!) block payments which are for a purpose which a few unelected rich dudes have unilaterally decided do be undesirable; and if the society decides to legalize that stuff, they can ignore it as that's their arbitrary private choice and they can't be held accountable.

> the current privately-run system can (and already does!) block payments which are for a purpose which a few unelected rich dudes have unilaterally decided do be undesirable; and if the society decides to legalize that stuff, they can ignore it as that's their arbitrary private choice and they can't be held accountable

People are obsessed eith the idea that censorship can only come from government, they are completely blind to the idea of that rich individuals have agendas and power to advance them.

What's more is that if government run and managed money comes around with this supreme court, you can rest easy knowing you can pay for pretty much anything other than an abortion with it.

Anonymous payments are required for things to work, and will be taxed.

Only issue is that "I want to oppose the Federal Regulators' stated goal of increasing the safety and soundness of your bank"[1] doesn't go over well even in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. It's the new "high-risk".

[1]https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/02/07/2023-02...

> As long as everything flows through 3-4 “private” entities, and those entities owe their existence to gov’t bailouts, they’ll be quasi-govt organizations.

You are so fixated on Government, you miss the forest for the trees.

If these 3 organisations are run by similar people with similar agendas, you can have universal censorship.

No need for government. Tyrany has been privatized

private companies are tyrannical by default

Traditionally, legally, when a private businesses monopolizes and aspect of life, they take on some obligations of government, like "town squares" inside shopping malls.

Go find a shopping mall that can't kick you out at will. I'll wait.

Worse than government organizations. Government organizations have to follow all sorts of pesky rules about what they can do e.g. the first amendment. Corps can do whatever, so the government loves to use them as puppets to do what they want when the rules don't allow them to it themselves e.g. banning porn and banning people talking about the COVID lab leak.

A good and entertaining piece on who Rules the online Porn industy is the podcast " Hot Money: porn, power and profit" [1] from The Financial Times

In the end it is the credit card industry who dictacte what is and is not allowed to be paid using their system. If they shut you off you are basically fucked..

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3...

While the feature of these stories are always "independent sex workers" and students struggling to pay their college, the main users of adult payment services are very exploitative businesses that are not owned by the performers, operate in a dirty and unregulated market and are directly responsible for a large part of human trafficking in recent years.

I know it doesn't invalidate the point made and I support the freedom of adult individuals to do whatever they want with consenting parties, but it's an important piece of information to consider for understanding the whole issue. We cannot simply turn a blind eye at the massive damage the porn and prostitution industries are doing to society.

Making prostitution illegal is what drives a huge part of that human trafficking. With no legal oversight, the pimps have free reign, and when their work is illegal, the prostitutes have no recourse. The dynamics are very similar to drugs, and for both legalization is the best way to reduce harm.

> Making prostitution illegal is what drives a huge part of that human trafficking.

There is absolutely no empirical evidence for this - as it happens, a live social experiment is taking place in Europe. The trafficking networks in the East kicked into overdrive to supply the needs of the German and Belgian legal or gray brothels.

There is only one policy that works, demand minimization by outlawing payment for sex. This is what Sweden has done and, far from empowering pimps, it has largely solved the issue of trafficking, while the "Legalize it" group of countries saw it explode. The data speaks for itself.

Sweden's "Nordic Model" is absolutely not backed my empirical evidence either. One crucial flaw discovered was that it has simply cut off one primary reporting mechanism for discovering trafficking: the customers!

Now, customers can't admit to having been there at all, and so won't report their perception or what they were explicitly told by the sex worker.

This is ironic as your belief is based on the issue of trafficking being solved because you don't hear the reports or the stats dropped.

> The data speaks for itself.

Hysterical. It should be criminal that even sex work advocates in the US are attempting to recreate Sweden's model based on this flawed view. The unsaid reality is that people just aren't comfortable with how normal the consumers of sex work are, and don't want to find out that it isn't an antisocial "other".

Sex work is a labor rights issue. Sex trafficking is a labor rights issue just like labor trafficking is a labor rights issue. One that has nothing to do with punitive or criminal measures of the laborers or consumers, only the traffickers. Normalizing both the supply and the demand side in conjunction with increased avenues for labor assistance is the most holistic solution.

AFAIK the group that allegedly gets protected by the Swedish system - the Swedish sex-workers - are overwhelmingly against that system.

> "This is what Sweden has done and, far from empowering pimps, it has largely solved the issue of trafficking"

The (local government) departments that work with helping sex workers should be very glad to hear this since they have been quite overworked since covid. If the issue is largely solved they can move workers away from that and focus on other forms of trafficking.

But I do not believe the claim that Sweden has largely solved the issue of trafficking. Looking at the most recent published information from BRÅ (the government department for research and development within the judicial system), the amount of prostitution has increased significant and reached the highest ever peak last year (https://bra.se/download/18.146acb6517fd55784012735/165580083... page 30). The problem seem to have significant grown and is continuing growing.

Feel free to overlay statistics from Germany or Belgium if you want to provide evidence that their model is somehow worse. The complains I hear from Belgium is mostly about how the housing situation around the red street districts has become too expensive, and that people who lives there are tired of the tourism.

"Demand minimizaton" ia a fancy term for "restricting human rights"

That "solution" may help with trafficking, but hasn't solved the issues of:

* right to pursue a living wage wity honest work

* right to pursue sexual health

Farming and manufacturing also have trafficking problems. Should it be illegal to pay for cars and food?

Sweden has all the wrong solutions to society's problems which they export world wide as the "Swedish Model".

Even in countries where sex-work is legal you can find similar dynamics. Unfortunately it's not that easy.

To elaborate for people unfamiliar with these situations...

In many countries the work itself is legal, but you find such fun twists as:

"You have to operate using cash because banks won't work with you because its legal in Your City/State but not at a State/Federal/National level above that",

"You're not allowed to register as a business and subject to substantial tax penalties",

"Individuals are allowed to do it, but its illegal for a multiple people to organise and work together as a business",

"Your allowed to do it, but only inside your own property, as its illegal for rented commercial or residential property to knowingly provide you such a premises"

... Generally speaking its more common that you find its a case of "It's legal for you the human individual to get paid to have sex, but... not legal to X, Y, or Z" which is how for every step forward, people in this line of work continue to face persecution. Its also sadly one of the ways this the progress gets made, by wheeling and dealing in politics, so they get the legalising change done, but had to trade away any measures that protect worker rights, or changes to decriminalise working as a business together, or to operate a dedicated premises... there's usually one or more catches left over by all the compromise needed to get any movement on the core issue... and so people look at it and go "what's the problem, its legal isn't it?"... to which the response is "well yes... but..." ... And most people have already tuned out before they finish the word "but".

I think we'll need to define what "human trafficking" means in order to have a productive conversation about it. It doesn't need to be defined the same way for every context, just for the one we're talking about in each case.

So in this particular case, what do you mean by "human trafficking?"

In some other countries prostitution is legal, but brothels and pimping are not.

Legalisation of pimping isn't necessary.

There is a big difference between actions being done in the dark versus actions being done in the open and with full endorsement and legal support.

The purpose of law is to tame commercial activities for protection of its commerce and prosperity. By legalizing something that is a net social harm, giving it guiderails so that it can lead to more stability and profit, you have incentivized that harm to reproduce maliciously. It is like offering subsidies to fossil fuels. No, it is like putting regulations on fossil fuels and giving them legitimacy.

Some industries should stay in the dark unprotected always looking over their shoulder for when they might get caught.

> No, it is like putting regulations on fossil fuels and giving them legitimacy.

We put regulation on fossil fuels as a practical matter of recognizing the reality in which we operate, and the harms that will come to real people if we outlawed it without a viable solution to the rest of the problems that would create.

> Some industries should stay in the dark unprotected always looking over their shoulder for when they might get caught.

This sounds nice, but the practical implications are that already disadvantaged people are further abused and taken advantage of. No one should want that type of system.

Thank you for a sane answer.

When you are in a field where no legitimate actor wants to do business with you, of course there will be crime and exploitation.

If I refuse to serve black customers because they are more likely to be criminals, I am going to get a well deserved anti-discrimination lawsuit. That's because we understand that discriminating against black people will only make the problem worse. But discriminating against sex workers is fine, and indeed, it makes the problem worse.

For other jobs, the government protects its workers. For example, by making sure workshops comply with safety regulations. For sex workers, the law essentially says "you can't open a workshop", which is all but helpful as it just put these "workshops" in the hands of criminals, and leave sex workers with no protection.

the main users of adult payment services are very exploitative businesses that are not owned by the performers, operate in a dirty and unregulated market and are directly responsible for a large part of human trafficking in recent years

And you know that how? Because it's the mantra some interested parties repeat?

Those very exploitative business have a ton of money and can always find ways to launder money. The only ones hurted by these bans are the actual independent sex workers, who cannot afford to find alternatives because <gasp> they are independent so they don't have the resources.

Stop trying to save the world. All your good will will only hurt the small ones.

That's exactly the point, denying them access to a payment system the consumers can easily access, hence, limiting the profit motive and the resulting massive human damage.

By your very limited logic, denying drug traffickers access to the banking system hurts poor coca farmers in Bolivia. Well yes, it does, any policy choice involves compromises.

Stop repeating the mantra. Prostitution has existed for millennia. It's not going to change.

You can help to democratize it (i. e. independent sex workers) or you can help the big bad guys (by denying independent sex workers access to a payment system they can easily access). Using your very limited non-logic, you have decided you want to help the big guys. Congratulations.

This isn't the real problem for payment processors. The problem for payment processors is fraud and chargebacks. The porn industry is an absolute magnet for attempts at using fake or stolen credit cards, either for just plain theft, or from caught spouse's filing fraud claims when the bill is found, or any other of dozens of similar sorts of issues.

It's a great way to launder money for example: the goods are transient, frequently cross national borders, but are only video streams and pictures, and easily explainable at huge purchase rates.

The problem is that for payment processors, the business simply attracts problems through a myriad of historical social factors which are well beyond their control.

>a large part of human trafficking in recent years.

Citation needed. The idea that human trafficking is a thing and that it has been increasing "in recent years" is a delusion. It is not backed up by the criminal processing data. And in fact the special "human trafficking" courts set up in the USA in the 20-teens were shut down a couple years later due to a lack of any cases to process.

Human trafficking being a thing to worry about is entirely a news media infotainment story.

I wouldn't say entirely, but I would agree that the public policy approach is completely misguided.

A general labor rights approach would allow more independents to exist and controlled persons have more reporting options and people to confide in. Node based, like the concept of herd immunity.

Looking at the recent Andrew Tate drama, one definitely gets the impression that a huge part of that industry is extremely shady.

I worry though that forcing participants to use obscure payment methods will obscure evidence of human trafficking and rights abuse even more.

Note that Andrew Tate specific operation was quite small.

That does not reduce the harm inflicted. But also it is worth keeping in mind that having an independent stream of income allows SW in the porn industry to better negotiate good working conditions.

And re going for obscure stuff generating problems. It is already the case and we have good case studies following SESTA/FOSTA..

What does "human trafficking" even mean in this context? Because I've seen it used to describe facilitating the movement of consenting adults seeking to work in the sex industry.

If sex workers where allowed to control their own destiny then the exploitation would decrease. Here you have their payment system shut down, now a woman has to get her money via cash which requires protection. You also have websites that allowed sex workers to vet customers shut down because of fake child porn concerns by conservatives (ironically a big user base of sex work).

Relevant context here: It's cryptocurrency not a "normal" payment platform

    Allie Eve Knox, a sex worker and advisor to SpankPay.

    Knox has been banned from every mainstream payment app available today, including PayPal, Square, Circle, Cashapp, and Venmo, and uses crypto as a way to continue to live and pay the bills.

    Sex workers face near-constant deplatforming, loss of income, and instability in their work as a result of discriminatory financial institutions and laws.

   In December, Knox and Ameen Soleimani, co-founder of Spankchain, joined adult industry advocacy group The Free Speech Coalition on Congressional visits to discuss financial discrimination against sex workers with legislators.

It's across all payment platforms, it's targeted against sex workers, and they're seeking federal intervention in the US to attain fair access.

> Allie Eve Knox has been banned from every mainstream payment app available today, including PayPal, Square, Circle, Cashapp, and Venmo, and uses crypto as a way to continue to live and pay the bills.

This seeems to cross over from 'we dont want your business' into purposefully targetting and harrasing activists.

Maybe their should be investigation to make sure these provideds aren't conspiring?

Activist? She's a prostitute.

> Wyre Payments, the company’s upstream payment processor, terminated SpankPay’s account because Wyre’s new payment processor, Checkout.com, doesn’t allow processing for payments related to sexual businesses, SpankPay said.

Sounds like it would end the same if they were a "normal" sex work payment platform.

Not that relevant, this happens to a lot of sex-work oriented platforms. Payment processors often discriminate or demand heavy censorship/arbitrary rules from these platforms.

Different industries have different fraud rates and different legal difficulties around the globe. It might not be a good enough reason from your perspective to blanket ban them, but exclusion based on different legal overhead or risk profile is not the same as arbitrary rules or censorship.

I wonder if there is anything to the trope, that when the adult video payment eventually shows up on a married couple’s credit card bill, the spouse who signed up for a heftily expensive subscription will claim that their credit card must have been stolen.

Thus they will demand the charge to be reverted and thus, many charges being disputed simply because of people’s prudishness. And then porn site operators have high fraud rates. I wonder if they are also more liable to become victims of card testing.

This has little to do with fraud, and everything to do with political pressure

they apply the same rules to e.g. nudism

The article and comments are missing important context. There might be some kind of moral discrimination at play here, but the article doesn't actually show this. Risk discrimination, on the other hand, is central to the existence of the upstream processors, and risk can be determined somewhat objectively based on current and historical data. The priority for the processors is money, they're not going to turn money down unless the risk is unsustainable.

Long time reader, first time commenter. Career sex worker with many years experience from online work to in person, including service provider or companion. I also happen to have written my undergrad thesis on the topic of international sex trafficking.

FOSTA-SESTA became US law in 2018, a day after Backpage was taken down from the web. Because of the wide and vague net that it casts, it has harmful effects on both online and in person workers. Under the guise of spearheading anti-sex-trafficking sentiments, it essentially kneecaps internet platforms by logistically forcing them to not only censor types of content and users, it also ripples into the financial sector. This compounds when considering factors like cash being preferred but extremely difficult to do anything with it without raising flags, while at the same time the every day average client is not using crypto as payment and cash related or payment processor apps have long since also capitulated to F-S. Additionally, the only ad site I use to advertise my business has also dropped the ability to pay with anything except BTC of all things.

An insidious problem inherent in FOSTA-SESTA related policies or behaviors that I can veritably confirm is that it conflates all forms of sex work with sex trafficking -- insinuating that like trafficking, it is inherently exploitative. This cements stigma but also removes the agency I have as someone who chooses the industry that I do and my lived experience as someone who has used both online and in person sex work to help save my own life, get out of abusive living situations, establish financial independence, and also put myself through more school. I have watched how the internet and society at large have become more hostile and paternalistic to people with stories like mine since I started many years ago, long before OF was even a thing, and I think even some earlier comments that have since vanished here are a good example of that.

This is not to say that sex trafficking shouldn't or can't be dealt with - it certainly should. But I don't think a lot of people realize that the reality of sex trafficking usually starts at home, for instance, not between two consenting adults in a hotel room. Not only that, but FOSTA-SESTA actually helps to make conditions that lead to being further marginalized (and potentially trafficked) to increase.

Hacking//Hustling has an insightful online survey discussing the above more: https://hackinghustling.org/erased-the-impact-of-fosta-sesta...

COnfused. It was a bitcoin platform? Isn't the whole point of that stuff, to allow anonymous payments? How can this issue even be a thing?

I'm guessing, because bitcoin never worked. Never provided the anonymity it promised. Became just another currency, regulated by whatever random public exchange you signed up for.

The moment you try to cash out your tokens into money with established bank is the moment you run into KYC requirements.

The company receiving the payment needs to convert the BTC to fiat if they want to pay their employees, infrastructure costs, etc.

At a small scale, there are a lot of options to go around it and also avoid KYC, but it's not really a viable solution for a company. They have to work with a bank or another payment processor to convert the crypto and/or manage whatever traditional currency the crypto is converted to. A few years ago, there was a wave of large company accepting crypto (eg. tesla), but most of them have backed down from it.

It's like accepting gold coins as a payment for your company. You can't pay your taxes or wages with those even if they have a stable value.

Its very strange, when more prude cultures like the us project this prudishness upon other parts of the world.

When its viewed through the eyes of abroad the cultural perversion of it all pops out like a hologram.

Its totally a human right/free speech to have the tools necessary to end a human life. Its totally evil/harassment worthy to document/publish the creation process of a human life.

What is the origin for this puritan fervor by those engaging in virtual interest wankery all day? "If I have no life, none shall have it? NaneShallActBare."

I'm not really sure this view of things is accurate. If anything, prostitution is far less accepted elsewhere around the world, unless maybe you're talking about Canada or Europe. East Asia, India, SEA, Middle East, Africa? Don't think so.

"Why do you care about the aggregate mental health of the society you live in? How does that affect you?".

Of course we all have a stake in what drug are illegal, what gambling can be done, what prostitution is acceptable - because I don't want to live in a society of drug addicted, gambling addicted, hooker addicted people. Do you think we're just atomized individuals who shouldn't care if your neighbor is caught in self-destructive behaviors they can hardly escape due to addiction? Do you think that doesn't affect you? Do you not care about your community and how healthy your community is?

This libertarian idea that "it doesn't matter if others are engaged in the most unhealthy behaviors because its not you!" needs to die, because the end result is a shittier society we're ALL forced to live it.

So you would describe a social violent, abstinent monastry in the desert as a healthy society? As in, a society is the sum of artifacts & progress it produces, not the well being of its members?

No of course not. Except there's not much push for that - so I don't feel the need to say anything against it.

On the other hand: there is a push to legalize and promote prostitution, decriminalize hard drugs, normalize sexual content towards minors, and so on all under the guise of "how does it affect YOU what other people do?". My point is that: regardless of the unhealthy behavior, if enough individuals are partaking, eventually it DOES affect me.

I don't care if you want to pay a prostitute, I just don't want it normalized (because then it affects me). I don't care if you want to do hard drugs safely, I just don't want it normalized (because then it affects me). I don't care if you want to follow fundamentalist religious doctrine, I just don't want it normalized (because then it affects me). Some things should just stay taboo.

Corporations, especially banks, have been co-opted by the government and used for enforcing their whims. This is one example of that.

Would the upstream processor really care what their customers' business is - probably not. But are they afraid of political and legal issues that would outweigh the benefit of working with sex (or marijuana, etc) businesses? Yes, certainly.

>Corporations, especially banks, have been co-opted by the government and used for enforcing their whims. This is one example of that.

I think it's the opposite way around really. Banks aren't allowed to fail thanks to their pet government since 2008 at least.

I don't understand this, if pornhub and a million other porn sites can operate, why can't this one?

Porn is, for all intents, legal in the US.

Prostitution is, for the majority of places illegal.

Is a stripper a sex worker (I guess so), but they don't have to avail themselves of this sort of service in most places because their work is legal.

Let's say you live in a place where gambling is illegal. Lets say that you open a blackjack and slots room in your garage. If your local bank manager finds out that the piles of cash you bring in are from an illegal source, they are likely to show you the door because they want nothing to do with you.

Google around and you will find articles from the early days of medical weed, and how hard banking was for those providers! Hell this got resolved but the fact that it happened should make your eyes pop: https://ij.org/press-release/federal-government-will-return-...

> if pornhub and a million other porn sites can operate

All owned by one company, and when the government (or worse, some random quango) says jump, they say how high. Content on the no-no list disappears overnight (e.g. ever wondered why you never see breathplay in online porn?).

  Wyre Payments, the company’s upstream payment
  processor, terminated SpankPay’s account because
  Wyre’s new payment processor, Checkout.com
  doesn’t allow processing for payments related
  to sexual businesses

Pornhub and co wasn't using Wyre Payments, nor had their upstream payment processors company change recently to one that doesn't handle sexual businesses.

Well follow the leader then. Porn has always been the biggest industry online, Onlyfans does it, pornhub does it, just follow the leaders and do it right.

PornHub being in troubles times and times again (sure, some of it is 100% their fault, but not all of it) and Onlyfans trying so hard to have a foot on safer business doesn't feel inspiring.

I'm really not sure there is any business doing porn money processing in a way that is safe from getting the rug pulled below them at any moment.

> Porn has always been the biggest industry online

Umm. Do you think Pornhub is bigger than Google or Amazon, or even Netflix?

I read a cartoon once of two people talking (technically, one person and one teddy bear, but that's not relevant here).

Panel 1: A: So let's go over this again. If I take a woman out for drinks and dinner, hoping this will influence her decision to have sex with me, this is legal? B: Correct.

Panel 2: A: But if instead of taking her out, I offer her the same amount of money in cash form to have sex with me, that's illegal? B: Correct.

Panel 3: A: But if I pay a woman to have sex with me, hire a camera crew to film it, and sell the results for profit, that's legal again? B: Correct.

Panel 4: A: Sorry, can we go through that one more time?

In other countries all of those are legal.

Also there's a very obvious difference between the 1st one and the 2nd one.

Try telling a random woman, that you matched on Tinder or whatever, that you'll pay for sex. You'd get called a disgusting pervert and blocked. Can you figure out why?

PornHub is currently operating with crypto payments on only. They were cut off from banking and cards some years ago.

Pornhub is definitely operating with normal banking.

https://help.pornhub.com/hc/en-us/articles/4419872101139-Ear...

Misleading title. "Crypto" is as much a factor as "sex work", and "sex work" (like "crypto") is not clearly described -- there are both legal and illegal forms.

Also no comment on the fraud/chargeback rate in Spank's transaction flow.

Take care of people via universal basic income to guarantee that sex-work is a legitimate choice and not someone's last ploy. And vet in public the people who talk a lot about sex-work being work. These people are suspicious to me and I don't trust them, insofar as I've seen in person the types of people (which is limited data indeed) who really care about this type of thing much.

I want be sure that it's actually a choice born of free will, not a lifestyle someone is forced into because of not being able to provide for themself or because of being roped into it by an Andrew Tate or other megalomaniac who cannot otherwise obtain love or sex.

how is it "sex worker led". Is Ameen Soleimani a sex worker?

Oh Ameen is also working on Tornado Cash, https://twitter.com/ameensol is that part of his sex work?

Instant wire transfers such as the ones availible in Europe and the ones coming to the US with FedWNow will finally solve the chargeback problem.

That is you cannot chargeback the wire once it's sent so better make it a worthwile wank.

Remember when this happened to Wikileaks?

    Wyre Payments, the company’s upstream payment
    processor, terminated SpankPay’s account because
    Wyre’s new payment processor, Checkout.com
    doesn’t allow processing for payments related
    to sexual businesses

SpankPay, Wyre, Checkoutcom ... How does this all work? What does the person who wants to pay a sex worker via SpankPay do? Do they use their usual Visa credit card or is the process different?

you change the laws in banking so the risk is much lower to financial companies. Sex work intertwined with trafficking and no company wants to take financial risk. Chase is in the headlines for getting sued for facilitating trafficking.

> "Crypto payment processor SpankPay announced on Monday that it would shut down because of financial discrimination"

That's hard to convert from real money -> random crypto -> real money. There are lots of legal and trust issues.

I wonder why they didn't use a more established crypto like bitcoin or ethereum and invented their own instead.

"Sex worker" is a little weird phrasing it like that and unspecific too. Onlyfans and truckstop discount prostitute is not the same field of work.

It's like calling a software architect and help desk guy both "Tech worker". Or a janitor "property management".

I wonder if they could go direct to Wyre’s old payment processor?

Does anyone know what’s the difference between them and whatever provider OnlyFans uses?

Why would a sex worker want to get paid in crypto currency and then pay a shit ton of fees to convert it to local fiat currency to pay for basic living expenses (rent, health, food, credit card bills).

I thought cash is king in the sex worker world.

Because this is for digital transactions for digital product. They want you to be able to click a button and then watch a video.

To be crass, you can't beat the person unconscious and then steal their crypto. You can do that if they're holding large amounts of cash.

The easiest way to steal crypto involves complicated computer shenanigans. The easiest way to steal cash involves a gun.

If they can cut payment services for this they can cut it for you.

Imagine if banks cut off access to MAGA, or the GOP, or scientology, or Greenpeace?

More regulation needed

Many people would consider cutting off access for those a very good thing. Political polarisation sucks.

Perhaps the inability to fundraise through donations pushes all political discourse into the hands of people who already had money.

Not a very helpful comment from my side in terms of proposing a solution for this, but: I bet people complaining against cancel culture will not complain about this.

Well, yeah, "Cancel culture" is a pejorative - i.e. When people I don't like do it, it's nasty cancel culture. When I do it, it's noble boycotting.

Cancel culture is just excommunication for heresy with better PR.

The converse is also true, of course. Those cheering on previous cancellations will complain now that it has happened to someone they approve of.

I don't disagree. But my conclusion is that cancel culture is nothing new. The novelty is that those that used to get cancelled are now cancelling others.

> But my conclusion is that cancel culture is nothing new.

Probably as old as time.

Definitely not a new thing, it always amazed me that people genuinely believe so, but I bet there are more witch-hunts thanks to the internet than ever and that is what makes it feel like it's a new phenomena. There's more, spreads way faster, always someone new to "cancel" or "protect".

Big parts of the internet are like constant reality tv dramas.

I think it's become a case of "Don't hate the player, hate the game."

It used to be called excommunication for heresy, but the behavior is identical.

we libertarians actually exist, you know. aren't just a legend.

Do you though? What's your opinion on abortion? Because every libertarian I've met is pro state-enforced pregnancies.

Really? US libertarians are a bit weird.

Here in Europe we don't even have a dispute - it's legal up to a point, and we don't see much benefit to fight over when exactly this point happens. It's usually ok for practical purposes.

Imagine what they'll do with a CBDC.

Democracy in action. Companies are against any support for this kind of industry. And so get pushback from any and all kinds of services. I'm just waiting for some schmuck to argue a human rights argument and force vendors to service them.

I said "Democracy in action" and liberals here are downvoting. Hypocrisy.

That seems like a leap. How do you know who is downvoting or why?

I did not downvote, but my opinion of your comment is at best it doesn't add to the discussion. At worst, it's flame-bait. I mention this only because these are potential reasons for downvote as well.

It's all speculation though, because I too have no knowledge of who is downvoting you and why.

Good counter. I have observed posts with denunciation of porn industry and its relevant activities get downvoted often. Whereas posts that celebrate its freedom and openness, get upvoted, and they all have a left leaning or libertarian bias.

That is where the speculation comes in. My hypothesis: HN crowd is more centered towards innovation and new ideas, and frown upon anything that mimics old regulations. I guess the porn industry is a ground of innovation and new ideas right now.

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