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Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

The point is that by manufacturing Tide, that was in some sense also "facilitating transactions". Where the line is drawn is pretty arbitrary and vague.

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It isn't that vague, P&G isn't buying Tide, no questions asked, from anyone who wants to sell it to them.

And in fact, if you read the article about Tide, the people who are buying Tide, no questions asked, from anyone who wants to sell it to them are committing felonies and are tracked down in sting operations.

But regular people do buy Tide without asking questions, don't they? They just walk into some shop they found on the street and hand over the money.

Yeah sure. I'm not sure what the difficulty is, when I say "facilitate a transaction" I mean that there is a party with minority interest in the transaction (it ends up with just a fee) and that it does business with 2 (or more) other parties (that are presumably transferring an amount greater than the fee).

That is a pretty normal use of the word facilitate (involving an action in the middle of the other parties).

In the case of Proctor and Gamble, they end up with whatever price they charge for the Tide when they first sell it and (AFAIK) don't buy any of it. They do business only as a seller and keep their profits.

So sure, the existence of bottles of Tide does in fact make it possible to use bottles of Tide to transfer value. It does not however implicate Proctor and Gamble as a party to each of those transactions. In the case of a company that makes a business out of receiving value from one party and transferring it to another, they are naturally implicated in every single transaction that they participate in.

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