Are there no regulatory requirements to force VISA/master card to accept payments as long as the business is not illegal?
Does anyone remember when donations to Wiki leaks got frozen?
I don't want my government to strongarm credit companies into refusing to process payments for politically troublesome customers. But I also don't want my government to strongarm those same companies into processing those payments.
If anything, this is just a wakeup call that the credit duopoly have more power than we realized.
Kim Dotcom is nothing if not resilient. It is morally and ethically complicated to root for him in every aspect, but I fully expect him to come up with a clever solution to bypass this duopoly in a way that the average user can accept. I don't know if there's any question for which Bitcoin is an unqualified right answer, but this may be as close as I've seen it come.
Most industries are regulated to some extent to prevent collusion and abuse of various forms. Do you disagree with regulation in general, or what makes you think payment processors in particular should not be forced to accept all lawful transactions?
So explain to me how any grandma is supposed to work with a system that even techies constantly get burned by it?
I haven't heard anything about outright bitcoin thefts from privately owned wallets with a password protecting them, but then again I don't follow bitcoin too closely. The typical drama I hear is an exchange shutting down (why would the elderly have their btc on an exchange when their bank account funds aren't on an exchange?) and occasionally someone's unencrypted wallet backup on a compromised server being taken. There was also the issue with the android wallets a while back generating insecure keys. I'm not convinced the elderly would lose any more than they already do on average given they're using bitcoin (which I think they're fully capable of using if they're already using online payment systems). Anyway this is kind of a fruitless discussion for this instance. Grandmas don't use MEGA.
And if there's no market pressure, it never will be.
We desperately need a digital currency standard that offers security and user-friendliness without being centralized in a cabal of shadowy clearinghouses, and without ridiculous technical limitations that keep it from being more than an overpromoted academic exercise.
Should Bitcoin become more widely adopted, I don't like how I would have no say in its operation or design decisions.
Paper currency, I get to vote on the people who appoint those decision-makers every couple of years. Bitcoin? Not so much.
(edited to fix a typo)
From the bitcoin FAQ:
Bitcoin is a distributed network, so any changes implemented to the system must be accepted by all users. Someone trying to change the way Bitcoins are generated would have to convince every user to download and use their software – so the only changes that would go through are those that would be equally benefit all users.
And thus, it is more or less impossible for anyone to change the function of Bitcoin to their advantage. If users don't like the changes, they won't adopt them, whereas if users do like them, then these will help everyone equally. Of course, one can conceive of a situation where someone manages to get a change pushed through that provides them with an advantage that no one notices, but given that Bitcoin is structurally relatively simple, it is unlikely that any major changes will go through without someone noticing first.
The fact that such changes are so difficult to make testifies to the fully distributed nature of Bitcoin. Any centrally controlled currency can be modified by its central agency without the consent of its adherents. Bitcoin has no central authority, so it changes only at the behest of the whole community. Bitcoins development represents a kind of collective evolution; the first of its kind among currencies.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Could_miners_collude_to_give_...
I'm struggling to see how "any changes implemented to the system must be accepted by all users" is democratic, or gives any decision-making authority to the people.
I do think that sets an extraordinarily high barrier to making any changes; far higher than a citizenship test or a poll tax, two other things that have been discarded as antithetical to a democratic right to vote.
edit: In addition to down voting me zaroth, would you mind including examples of how common carrier doesn't work for the examples I provided? I'm genuinely interested.
Umm... and FYI, I pretty much always upvote replies to my comments regardless of content. I would not down vote your reply even if I could.
Again, sincere apology.
While I 100% agree in principal in reality there are so few options to accepting payments online that if a couple of the big guys block you then you're completely out of business. When you have an industry controlled by just a couple of companies that everyone in the world has to essentially use, there is a big concern there.
Not sure what the right answer is here.
So VISA and Mastercard should be allowed to reject customers at will?
If they are allowed, how is the criteria selected? Are you(payment industry) going to stop payments for the following:
Atheist groups? Islamic non-terrorist groups? Foreign countries you don't 'like'? Libertarians/Greens/Socialists/Communists? Non profits you don't like? Church of Satan donations?
They have a monopoly over the bulk of commerce, as does PayPal. And they act as a cartel, de-facto banning whatever they disapprove of. In other words, having them strongarm businesses is killing their connection to the market.
They're still playing the game "if it's an internet technology, the Constitution doesn't really apply".. So to see if they could wrap their heads around an internet based currency is pretty much a joke.
And then I think, how did the FCC decision pass? Bureaucracy. It's not the Legislative/Executive/Judicial.
In English, that means any company that routes money around is criminally liable for any crimes committed by their clients - even if they didn't know about them or believed the activity was legal.
In effect, every banker and money transmitter in the world can face a 20 year jail sentence and/or crippling fines if ANY of their clients are themselves considered to be or merely suspected of being, criminals. No trial needed.
This is why you keep reading about banks being involved in money laundering. It's impossible to move money and not be considered a money launderer by the US government these days.
So this puts VISA/MC/PayPal in an impossible bind. They can look at Mega and say, well, this seems like a legal business. There's no law obviously being broken. But the guy is being charged over a previous business, accused of being a criminal. If they give him financial services and then years later this new Mega is also suspected of being criminal (note: suspected not proved) then VISA/MC can find headlines like "Visa found guilty of money laundering".
They have lots of clients, so from their perspective, eliminating all the politically risky ones is a no brainer.
Same thing for Wikileaks, CAGE (UK civil rights group), the entire nation of Somalia etc ... they all lose banking services because they are politically unpopular and therefore expose bankers to AML violations.
According to this analysis, that amounts to about 5 weeks of HSBC's income, to say nothing of total reserves/worth: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2012/12/13/Too-Big-to-...
As far as I understand it, the new revelations coming out about HSBC are indeed more Europe-oriented, but are not limited to Europe in scope.
Is it only me, or does that phrase make no sense?
Things that serve all people without choice are utilities, and should be left to the government (either directly or through strict regulation).
There are no such requirements. They are allowed to refuse processing for businesses they deem a high risk for fraud, for instance.
Given Dotcom's past, any business he is running should set off all kind of alarms in the fraud prevention department of the credit card companies.
Often they deal with such a situation by charging higher processing fees, and holding back larger amounts of your money as a reserve to cover refunds and chargebacks if you do turn out to be a fraudulent business, but at the scale Dotcom is trying to operate the credit card companies might feel that this is not enough to protect them.