sudokent

Fair enough. Thanks!

What merchants are those? I've read through many acceptable use policies and haven't seen "No Adult Content" yet.

Thanks!

edit:s/man/many/

That makes two of us! Porn en masse shouldn't be, but it is.

As for Stripe's size, they are a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket compared to the world markets. Heck compared to a U.S based hedge fund they'd be tiny. I'm guessing they have very little leverage.

They are not, anything classified as "High Risk" cannot be serviced by Stripe, Balanced, Braintree, etc.

Again, from my research, it is because the partner banks will not allow them to.

I don't believe that BTC has enough market penetration to solve her problem. When I've interviewed potential users concerning my product, the response has been

"Isn't Bitcoin a scam? I saw on the news it is a scam" "I want to just use my CC" "What is Bitcoin?"

That said, I still will launch with BTC support. Because I believed the hype and coded the solution before doing interviews...sigh

Hi Pc,

Do you think BTC or Stellar will help put downward pressure on the pricing model that Banks currently use for "High Risk" Merchants? My rate is essentially 15% because I'm a startup and my volume is so low.

As someone who is trying to a create a new, unique, non-janky, adult website I have learned a lot in the last 10 months. And I have never worked in this industry so it has been a serious learning experience.

The biggest issue for me has been the banks. My assumption is that Stripe and other players would be "ok" accepting payments from "High Risk" merchants. But they cannot, their partner bank will not allow it.

I later found an article by Cindy Gallop raging against this.

http://www.inc.com/welcome.html?destination=http://www.inc.c...

"A whole range of banks turned us down, including the startup banks, Silicon Valley Bank, Square 1 Bank. We finally got a banking account at CHASE, and we were extremely relieved, thrilled to get a check book that said Make Love Not Porn on it. And so, when... I began encountering enormous problems putting a payments infrastructure into place, because we are what the world deems adult content, we couldn't work with PayPal, couldn't work with Amazon, couldn't work with Google Checkout, couldn't work with any of the main merchant partner gateways. So, we thought, let's go back to CHASE, we have a business banking account there, let's apply for a commercial account. Unfortunately, that application surfaced the nature of our business within higher levels at CHASE. And it resulted in a meeting with a more senior guy, who essentially said to us, not only can we not give you a commercial account, but you now need to close your business bank account and take your business away, because we can't handle it."

I had a conversation about this over on Reddit that was fairly interesting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/2co0r6/anyone...