The main reason why companies don't allow NSFW content is because of puritan payment processors that see that stuff and then go absolute sicko mode and lock people out of the traditional finance system.
such as?
Maybe I’m missing something, but the above comment reminds me of the blockchain naïveté of 10 years ago. I don’t mean to be dismissive; I’m suspending disbelief long enough to ask what you mean in detail.
I think the above is quite wrong (with moderate confidence). Is the above claim consistent with survey data? It is my understanding that:
1. companies care a lot about risk reduction. This includes protection from chargebacks.
2. companies benefit when customers have credit: it enables more spending and can smooth out ups and downs in individual purchasing ability
3. Yes, quick transfers matter, but not in isolation from the above two.
There is, it's a layer-2 on Ethereum called zkSync. It's not totally satisfactory (the company that makes it can steal your money, centralized sequencer, etc), but it's pretty mature and works quite well. To replace Visa you want high throughput and low latency and zk-rollups like zkSync can provide both. (There are other options too, like Starknet, but AFAIK zkSync is the most mature.)
Still faith in magic on HN
But it is a permanent and final transfer, no easy charge backs like with a credit card, or fraud protection from debit cards.
You have to know which account you are paying into (sort code and account number), which is the main part of what Visa/Mastercard do. They are the layer in front of the bank account which means customers don't have to send money directly to an account.
I suppose now everyone has a smart phone it would be easier to hook up something like Faster Payments in a user friendly way with an app and a QR code/NFC reader that the merchant has. But Visa/Mastercard are entrenched obviously.
Someone is going to mention flashbots or something. “See this specific example proves…”
The real way crypto will work or not work is programmable money. If that works that will be huge, if it doesn’t then maybe someone will pick it back up 50 years from now.
The ones that don't (eg Tornado cash) end up being used for money laundering so on/off ramps won't touch them. We'll see what happens with the ZK-based chains, but this seems a systematic problem that is difficult to fix.
The technical necessity is there; for your chase-backed visa card to pull money from chase and deposit it into your shop's citibank, there needs to be some infrastructure. Whether a private company or the government provides this infrastructure is another story.
(Although if the government provided you could argue that there would likely be even more political headaches that prevent what goes across the wire).
It is not just inertia; it is government malice. The government loves that there are effectively only two payment processors, because this lets them exercise policy pressure without the inconvenience of a democratic mandate.
That’s how most law works, actually. There’s a question of how detailed the regulations are, but mostly you don’t go to court, and if you do, whether it looks bad to the judge or jury is going to make a difference.
I’m wondering what you’re expecting from democracy? More oversight from a bitterly divided and dysfunctional Congress? People voting on financial propositions?
If OpenAI has the reputation of serving up porn to whoever asks, there's no way the Walmarts of the world will sign up.
Do you really think the execs at Visa and Mastercard are puritans and not profiteering capitalists that will process payments for NSFW content if they were able to?
Totally agreed. But I am not placing any moral value on either greed or capitalism. I would think, however, that capitalists would not ignore such an obvious profit center as the sex industry. Thus my bafflement.
Because you're conflating capitalism and greed. Capitalism doesn't mean "do anything for money". It means "as much as possible, people get to decide among themselves how to allocate their money and time". Some of them will invest in anything, just as people in non-capitalist countries. Most will only invest in certain things.
In the abstract, perhaps not. The way it exists in the US, though, it means exactly that.
That is a missed opportunity
* Capitalism: A system where who owns resources matters more tan who needs them is a morally bankrupt system. A system where starvation and homelessness is an acceptable outcome
* Greed. Greed is bad for everybody. Concentrates scarce resources where they are not needed, that too is moral bankruptcy
As for greed, I have yet to meet a person more greedy than the ones claiming to know where to direct those scarce resources they did not create, if only we’d give them the power to do so. Such high morals too, unlike those "morally bankrupt" capitalists who greedily built businesses, jobs, countless goods and services to only enslave us and enrich themselves, obviously.
Edit: Quoted from memory of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_(1987_film)
Also getting all bent out of shape at a the image of a nipple, breast or pubic hair while not batting an eye at a person dying in evening TV movies seem a bit unbalanced.
Not a dystopia, but certainly US society has, shall we say, a very strange and complicated relationship with sex and nudity.
https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-porn-block-germany-age-v...
Besides that: 'There is no such thing as society!'
Everything to do with one politician essentially getting their way by targeting a payment processor with legal shit concerning potential enablement of CP/CT. Nobody wants that kind of attention.
Yes, "and"
Pornhub was blocked by Visa and Mastercard after an op-ed in NYT generated a lot of outrage
Better (which I assume is your euphemism for "more") regulation isn't neceesarily the answer, or even particularly the answer. Do you want to force payment processors to do work they don't want to do? Isn't there a word for that?
PayPal is the prime example where it's operating very similar to a bank. You have an account with a balance and can send and receive money, but it doesn't see itself as a bank and in many countries doesn't have a bank license. At least in part this is done to avoid the regulatory work that comes with it.
I absolutely want to force payment processors to do work they don't want to do. For example, banks in Germany are forced to provide you with a basic bank account regardless whether they want to or not. That's because a bank account is simply a must have to take part in modern life. If PayPal decides it doesn't want to do business with you, for whatever arbitrary reason, you are effectively locked out of a lot of online stores that only accept PayPal as a payment method. There is plenty of examples of PayPals really sketchy behaviour online. Every few months you can even see complaints on HN about it.
We might be talking at cross purposes; I'm not sure! How is it like a bank?
If I pay with a credit card, there are processes in place to deal with fraud and charge backs. PayPal is well known to automatically close accounts with little recourse to access the money on those accounts.
They should absolutely be regulated.
But they are nothing like a bank
The feature of a bank is credit creation. Lending more money than they hold.
Unless I missed some news PayPal does not do that
If you are on a scale like Visa and MasterCard you're not just any private company anymore. Just those 2 companies control well over 75% of the US market alone. Not having access to a debit/credit card today will effectively block you from taking part in many aspects of modern life. It's absolutely reasonable to place stipulations on what they can and cannot do.
Regulators love working with large businesses like your card duopoly, I don't think you will see much improvement.
Public utility. That’s what payment processors are at this point, and they should be regulated as such.
that's not going to lead to a whole lot of black market images.
But this seems like the world the “AI-regulators” seem to want.
I certainly think if the parents found out about it and the law wouldn't do anything about it the parents would take the law into their own hands.
I'm sorry if this wasn't phrased very well. I just didn't know how else to make my point with out be very specific.
Now, if they were drawn to resemble specific people and the producer of the "artwork" used them to harass those people, that's harassment. If they used them to groom other kids, that's an existing crime too. But my point was that the production of gross art in isolation, or the possession of it, didn't need to be criminalized. (Actual photographs of the same were criminalized because of the pretty decent assumption that minors were coerced, harmed, exploited. Probably all of the above.)
I actually just migrated away from Hetzner last week (for unrelated reasons) to two new providers to whom I'm paying crypto (no KYC required) based on this list: https://bitcoin-vps.com/
I had paid for my servers with some Litecoin I have that I usually use for small purchases because of the low fees.