I suspect the company will be operating more conservatively policywise for the foreseeable future.
However, as for crypto and banks, I don't really blame them they don't want to have anything to do with these. Its really easy to scam people, lose money and so on. Who is to blame then? With crypto, you have nobody to blame. Except if there is a terminal, in this case a bank. They become a scapegoat for everyone, including lawmakers. So they decided not to play the game. Want to cash out crypto? Deal with the ones that are willing to accept the risk.
That's not why they do it. The reasons are regulatory compliance and risk. Processors would be in big trouble if they facilitate payments when they shouldn't, or broke due to rampant fraud in certain sectors.
I get that you might not like it, but take it up with the US government. The processors would be happy to move as much money as possible to make as much money as possible.
The legal structure has changed, but the boards of both are still primarily comprised of executives from other major financial services institutions.
Risk averse and sensitive to regulatory pressure by nature, the issue isn’t with Visa and MasterCard directly. They’re just operating in a space.
Somewhat ironically, Hock's "chaordic" management philosophy has strong parallels with ethos of decentralization held by some crypto idealists.
Mastercard and Visa don't block companies from processing because of morals, they block them because they lose them money. They will happily process your payments for all kinds of shady schemes that are - to them - low risk.
There are already laws (from actual governments) against human trafficking and illegal transactions. The issue is not about credit card companies obeying the law.
Once in a while I think this, and then I remember what a disaster cryptocurrency became
When buying a pizza today can cost you a house in 10 years, you have a failed currency.
Seems like bad currency, but maybe you're aware of something meaningful that crypto contributes.
Visa and co are a cartel, a lot of the pressure Civitai is facing is unreasonable, but even a broken clock is right twice a day: and they had a lot of problematic content.
Even if they turn to crypto, this is a change they shouldn't walk back, or other providers are probably going to turn on them too.
Also they are using a ridiculous definition of "NSFW" to achieve the correlation they want to find. They are putting the prompt (not the image) into ChatGPT and applying an arbitrary metric of NSFW-ness sentiment analysis that returns false positives. Actually NSFW content of real people was always banned on CivitAI.
And it was just in April (less than a month ago) that they stepped up moderation of celebrity NSFW content: the study is from June of 2024.
The study was an attempt to avoid someone immediately trying to argue about a really obvious truth, but some people will still try to argue about the study about the really obvious truth.
I'm sure some people do generate porn with celebrity LoRAs, but there are also plenty of legitimate uses such as parody, criticism, transformative art, etc. If people do post inappropriate content, there are civil remedies and now also federal criminal remedies via the TAKE IT DOWN Act. CivitAI is fully legally compliant, but they are being held hostage by an unelected, unaccountable payment processor cartel.
Yep
Well humans are regulated so I dont know what you are driving at here.
>Traceable
The core concept was built on traceability. Privacy coins are the aberration. Like crypto was developed by people who want provable auditing of banks online.
Actually if you compare Bitcoin to later standards, Bitcoins biggest weakness is that it wants to track coins individually instead of just balances. Literally invented by goldbugs.
>Slower
Depends on both parties. I can go Crypto -> Crypto -> Fiat in like 15 minutes. Osko can be faster.
>History can and has been rewritten
Thats a fail state but its done rather less than traditional currency
>Seems like bad currency, but maybe you're aware of something meaningful that crypto contributes.
My fondest memory was watching a whole bunch of libertarian crypto guys using it to donate to Venezuelans who would pop up in crypto spaces to talk about how hard their lives were and how bad government had screwed up their lives. I liked to think the libertarians were getting scammed but it didnt really matter, because there werent many other onramps into VZ at the time.
Really its best feature is that its largely unpreventable. Sure you can police the on and off ramps to an extent. But if I need to evade financial censorship, I can. Mostly I see people against crypto throw up a big smokescreen but at the end of the day they tend to be in favor of the financial censorship that crypto is avoiding at the moment. Be that donations to wikileaks, purchasing services without a credit card or what have you.
I'm aware of a site that was blocked by credit card companies due to some controversial content, but survived and kept growing with a high rate of paying members.
The payments space is now a bit more compilcated than just credit cards. There's alot of country/region specific methods i.e. SEPA in Europe, PayID in Australia, QR payments in Thailand and of course crypto. Many of these options are just as easy or easier to use than credit cards.
Basically, the site started accepting lots of these different payment methods, you see different options depending on your country. Free members kept upgrading to paid members using these new options. This was more than 6 years ago and they still are blocked from taking credit cards.
the credit card companies executives like money, this isn't originating with them.
It originated in the US federal government. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point )
It works quite similar to the great firewall in China. ISPs are not so much told what they are to block, they're told Do Not Embarrass the Party or Else.
So even as the pressure has come off in this administration, the memory of the or Else remains, and processors will continue to swat random shit in the hopes of appeasing an uncommunicative but clearly spiteful god.
Porn isn't the only worry; there's also getting sued by the estates of dead celebrities, being misused for misinformation purposes.
Things are going to become increasingly restrictive until it is not worth using unless you're a corporation or a state actor. But for hobbiests? Resources are going to become thin on the ground and no, that is not a good thing.