I don't buy that the attack on Steam was just some Australian cult activist groups. This isn't one off event anyway. They're just a distraction.
What's urgently needed is payment neutrality, like net neutrality. It's absurd that the net was discussed more heavily and way earlier than cash.
Wasn't Crypto supposed to solve this like a decade ago? Genuinely curious, as a 20 something, software developer who never understood why we don't have decentralized/globally neutral payments/transactions systems like internet.
Though for most of my life internet has been getting more and more centralized. At least everything outside of China is centralized almost entirely in US these days.
Rather sad reality of things, but what can we do heh...
You can hear Steam's experience with bitcoin straight from the horse's mouth here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
> transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year, topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week [...] The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of Bitcoin itself drops dramatically.
> [...] the amount of Bitcoin needed to cover the transaction can change. The amount it can change has been increasing recently to a point where it can be significantly different.
> The normal resolution for this is to either refund the original payment to the user, or ask the user to transfer additional funds to cover the remaining balance. In both these cases, the user is hit with the [$20] Bitcoin network transaction fee again.
no that is at least 5 year old info. with lighting the fees are pennies on the dollar
In practice, Bitcoin transaction fees are much lower nowadays. I've never spent more than $1.00 in fees on relatively large sums.
Besides that, there are other cryptocurrencies (Solana? Stellar?) which have effectively zero fees and are much faster than Bitcoin.
Transaction fees are lower because no one really uses the L1 network for commerce anymore. It goes back to the 2017 block size war.
>Besides that, there are other cryptocurrencies (Solana? Stellar?) which have effectively zero fees and are much faster than Bitcoin.
They are faster because they are not very decentralized. The entry costs for vendors to independently audit and verify payments the blockchain is greater.
Are there currencies you would actually do something with other than it being a way to move $local_currency by means of exchanges? Because I'm not sure it really solves anything when exchanges find themselves with the same regulations as Visa.
Yeah, you have anonymous cryptocurrencies like monero or zcash.
So I suppose you could accept payment in an anonymous cryptocurrency, and then take that to whatever exchange you want.
It's flawed, but I think the end goal is to create a "circular economy" based on anonymous currrency, so you never have to cash out.
Won't that just push KYC onto merchants?
People don't like it when crime pays (easily and well).
Not anymore than with cash.
Isn't it more scalable than cash?
Moving large amounts of cash is risky and hard to hide. It also offers the public a very easy to understand medium of exchange, which is why most consider it worth keeping despite its illicit use.
This year to date, Bitcoin's transaction fees have ranged from $0.76 to $3.80 per transaction. Those are good fees if you're moving $10,000. On a $4 game I buy from my Steam wishlist, those are awful fees compared to the $0.19 that Steam would likely pay to their payment processor.
> Wasn't Crypto supposed to solve this like a decade ago?
In a purely technical "I can send/receive payments without worrying about charge backs or random middleman restrictions", it has solved it. But it hasn't solved the issue of having the vast majority of merchants accepting crypto, the issue of crypto price volatility (or associated risk of stable coins), or the friction/unreliability of turning cash into crypto.
Particularly, the last 2 issues go hand-in-hand as an issue. You can get around cash->crypto friction/unreliability by only having to do it infrequently, but that exposes you to the volatility of the crypto price.
And that's not even getting into the issues of crypto UX as a form of common currency for the average person. It is not a simple process to know how you should create wallets, manage your wallets, what information should you or should you not expose, what networks can/can't you send certain coins over, what coins should you be using, why are there hundreds of different coins, etc, to not fall for scams.
Cryptocurrencies are volatile specifically because they are used as a speculative investment rather than a means of exchange. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
>And that's not even getting into the issues of crypto UX as a form of common currency for the average person.
The conventional banking system is just as complicated and less secure, yet people have adapted to its flaws. What's the difference between FedWire and ACH? Why does it take time for checks to clear, and why does it show that I have a balance immediately? What are money orders? Why are banks only open on weekdays when the entire economy relies on them to function?
Why do banks refuse to clear transactions over a weekend? There's lots of problems with current payment infrastructure, but I'm not convinced that crypto would solve them.
For the thing in the OP though, some kind of crypto rail for these kinds of transactions probably would make a difference. The trouble is that Visa/MC don't just impose these restrictions for moral reasons, it's mostly because of higher charge-back rates and fraud.
> In 2022, more Salvadorians had Bitcoin Lightning wallets than bank accounts.
I guess that means they solved the UX problem... but from what I have read, its actual usage in practice is basically a failed experiment at this point.
> But it hasn't solved the issue of having the vast majority of merchants accepting crypto, the issue of crypto price volatility (or associated risk of stable coins), or the friction/unreliability of turning cash into crypto.
The price volatility seems like a red herring. If you're using it as a currency then you're not holding it for significant periods of time and the entire point is to make it an automated process, so you're buying some cryptocurrency for cash and then immediately spending it. How much volatility do you really expect in the timespan of a fraction of a second?
Meanwhile the conversion shouldn't be a hard problem. You have a service that allows you to buy cryptocurrency with a credit card or bank transfer and then an app that uses that service to buy cryptocurrency and transfer it to a merchant that accepts cryptocurrency, and then any merchants being unfairly targeted by the payment networks can do that. And the cash to cryptocurrency service can be operated by a different party than the app so the former can't be assaulted for having the wrong customers and the later isn't directly interacting with the payment networks.
I suspect the real problem is this: The chargeback process for credit cards isn't compatible with anything where the merchant is delivering fungible goods to the customer that they can't feasibly recover if the customer was using a stolen card or issues a fraudulent chargeback, and cryptocurrency is one such thing. So then the service that allows you to buy cryptocurrency with a a credit card gets screwed, because customers issue a chargeback to them or use stolen cards on their service even though they actually provided the cryptocurrency as promised.
Which is a huge existing problem with the payments system. The payment networks dump the cost of fraud onto innocent merchants and then lose the incentive actually prevent it even though they're the only ones in a position to do it, e.g. by issuing chip cards that could be read by any ordinary PC/phone via open standards and therefore enable "card present" transactions to happen over the internet.
And then if you expect cryptocurrency to solve that problem, it can't do that on the side of the transaction where the cryptocurrency is the thing you're buying.
> The price volatility seems like a red herring. If you're using it as a currency then you're not holding it for significant periods of time and the entire point is to make it an automated process, so you're buying some cryptocurrency for cash and then immediately spending it. How much volatility do you really expect in the timespan of a fraction of a second?
Maybe I don't understand how people use bitcoin but I wouldn't call your description that of a currency but more like a payment processor.
I want a currency, e.g. USD to be stable enough that I can comparison shop in it, quote prices to customers in it, and hold some as "cash or cash equivalents" on my balance sheet without undue risk from price fluctuation.
USD achieves this, BTC doesn't, which is assume is why people are using the get-in-get-out model being mentioned here of only holding it for as short as possible.
You shouldn't be using any currency as a long-term store of value. Even if you want to be denominated in USD and minimize risk, the interest rate on cash in a mattress is zero and the interest rate on US treasuries is non-zero.
Meanwhile the historical purpose of holding cash as "spending money" (i.e. liquid assets) is from a time before computers could allow you to keep it as actual investments until the instant you do actually want to spend it.
As for using it for pricing, things are typically priced in USD because it's the world reserve currency, or in the dominant local currency in a given country. That doesn't mean that other currencies aren't currencies. Shops in many countries will often accept both local currency and USD even if prices are only listed in one of those, and so what? Anybody can look up the current exchange rate in real time on the internet. Why is it a problem to list prices in USD and then accept that amount of cryptocurrency (or Euros or Yen) at the current exchange rate?
Because if it worked better then we’d be doing it already. But no amount of cryptobro podcasts are going to fix the shortcomings of digital currencies. And everyone knows this.
My dollar will be worth a dollar tomorrow and will sit in my wallet. My crypto currency is worthless on most of the planet. Do you take payments in LoL skins or vbucks?
> If you're using it as a currency then you're not holding it for significant periods of time and the entire point is to make it an automated process, so you're buying some cryptocurrency for cash and then immediately spending it. How much volatility do you really expect in the timespan of a fraction of a second?
That is the point of me mentioning that points 2 and 3 are linked. If you are only immediately purchasing crypto and then using it for a purchase, your middleman risk has moved from the payment processor to the crypto exchange. Every purchase you make now relies on whether or not you can make the exchange at the moment. Which is point 3.
The alternative is you make larger exchanges of money, which means you need to deal with volatility: point 2.
If the price of crypto was stable (at least about as much as any major currency), you could exchange much of it in bulk, and delays in exchanging it back into cash would be less of an issue. Even less of an issue if more merchants accepted crypto: point 1.
>The price volatility seems like a red herring. If you're using it as a currency then you're not holding it for significant periods of time and the entire point is to make it an automated process, so you're buying some cryptocurrency for cash and then immediately spending it. How much volatility do you really expect in the timespan of a fraction of a second?
Steam used to accept Bitcoin, but they shut it down because volatility in combination with long transaction processing times lead to a payment shortfall, requiring you to send more money. In times of high transaction fees this meant that you would have to pay $20 in transaction fees to cover a $2 shortfall and if you didn't, steam would have refunded the bitcoin and deducted the transaction cost anyway. It was an incredibly poor experience so they shut it down.
http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/...
If you can get crypto currency, maybe yes in some cases. Currently available currencies are not anonymous, but pseudonymous. You can track who transacts with whom.
To help with that new laws were passed.
If you want to buy crypto for fiat currency legally, like on some well known crypto exchange, newest laws require naming recipient of crypto you are sending and if that wallet is self hosted or exchange hosted (and which exchange). You either need to provide full name of person or company, or confirm it’s your other account you are sending crypto to.
There is one actually private crypto, it’s monero, but - surprise - it’s nor available on legal crypto exchanges so you cannot buy it by any official means.
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It was supposed to be a decentralized digital cash, but we collectively turned it into some weird abomination. Nowadays, if you say "crypto" people will think of investments, scams, transfers that sidestep various sanctions and regulations, risks - anything but a decent payment method. It's sad, but that's what happened.
Crypto was always a stupid name anyway because people confuse it with cryptography. Come up with a different name for the thing where you use it as a digital payments system instead of a speculative bubble machine.
cryptocurrencies involve cryptography
To begin with, no they don't. They use hashing and signatures, which are mathematically related to cryptography and often packaged in the same libraries or used together to construct cryptographic protocols, but cryptography (literally "secret writing") is specifically about making information indecipherable, which is the thing cryptocurrency typically doesn't do.
More to the point, it's still misleading to call a ship the water.
This is an absurd definition of cryptography. Are you going to say that zero-knowlege proofs are not cryptography? Are pedersen commitments not cryptography? Are ring signatures not cryptography (they use symmetric cryptography internally)?
Asymmetric key cryptography is all the same thing. Digital signatures are cryptography. The "secret" being obscured cryptographicially is the information needed to produce a verifiable message.
Your definition of cryptography might make sense to someone more than a century ago, but the state of the art has advanced greatly since then.
The reason why you define cryptography like this, is I think political. For example, I am not sure you would extend the same logic to cryptographic voting schemes. Cryptocurrency is just another application of cryptography to solve coordination problems.
> The "secret" being obscured cryptographicially is the information needed to produce a verifiable message.
That's the key, not the message.
> For example, I am not sure you would extend the same logic to cryptographic voting schemes.
Isn't the purpose of a cryptographic voting system to keep your vote secret?
> The reason why you define cryptography like this, is I think political.
Yes, it's because people don't want things like end-to-end encryption associated with scams, and they're not wrong.
A "signature" is literally just encrypting a message with your private key.
It's signing a message with your private key. The message itself, unless separately encrypted (and which in practice would be under a different key), is still plaintext.
You claim this but signatures in many cases work by encrypting the hash so that it can be decrypted by the public key (and therefore if the decrypted hash matches the plaintext's hash, it's considered a valid signature).
There's lots of schemes of course but that's the basic concept. (And of course I don't think anybody would seriously consider ECC signatures (which don't use encryption) as "not cryptography")
Signatures are cryptography. Signatures work because of cryptography.
And even ignoring that of course your whole "cryptocurrency isn't cryptography" stance completely falls apart for all of the many projects that are built on zero knowledge cryptography.
"Signing" usually means `cat FILE | md5sum | openssl enc >> FILE`, of which the `enc` part uses cryptography.
That's how RSA works, but not how ECDSA works.
> never understood why we don't have decentralized/globally neutral payments/transactions systems
BTCPay Server[0] seems to be the most popular way to accept crypto payments on self-hosted hardware with no third party processors.
Transaction throughput is nonexistent for cryptos. The money arrives when it arrives. Some frameworks within crypto solves it by trusting known signatures skipping the oft mentioned consensus building, I suppose that has its downsides considering they're not so popular.
You can engage with Crypto and to some degree it's been normalized as a weird investment, but the minute you try to justify usage in a more "normal" setting, to the public eye, you're placing yourself alongside money laundering, drug trafficking and Ponzi Schemes
Crypto's been associated with illegality almost since inception, and that associations lends the power that be carte blanche in ignoring or even blacklisting anything surrounding it
The future is not evenly distributed. I invite you to install Primal (a social network app), and send a 50 cent payment to Jack Dorsey just because you can.
Can you let me know in this thread how it goes and what are your thoughts after doing it?
why we don't have neutral transaction has many reasons. tech might not be there to scale millions of transactions without central server.
other reasons are heavy payment regulations, human habits, fraud, network effects and more. tech does not fully solve it.
> Wasn't Crypto supposed to solve this like a decade ago? Genuinely curious, as a 20 something, software developer who never understood why we don't have decentralized/globally neutral payments/transactions systems like internet.
because people like having the ability to dispute charges when they get scammed. they also like the ability to access their account by speaking to someone at the bank when they forget their credentials. (the dude that lost his bitcoin hard drive in a dumpster only recently gave up is search of landfills) if you see all these crypto companies end up creating layers that create shittier banks with extra steps.
that's also the reason payment processors don't like certain fields like nsfw/sex work, gambling , etc because a lot of fraud happens in them and therefore they cost more for them, At least that what their stance is, and I have no reason not to believe them because if you try to take online payment that's what you will see with time when your platform get targeted by shady individuals.
also governments like control. how do you freeze crypto like you freeze a bank account ? their wet dreams is people to stop using cash and only use electronic payments, that way they can freeze your whole life with a single order. (the official stance is to stop criminals, but they decide who get designated as such. said something they don't like ? welcome to the list)
to make thing worse, crypto has been almost exclusively used for shady things like gangs money laundering, scams, etc.
and in the end the blockchain does not solve any real problem. it's a technical solution in search of a problem.
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Cryptocoins are primarily a solution to avoiding taxation of wealth and arrest by government authorities for illegal purchases/transfers; otherwise Visa/MC would simply have lobbied for regulations that electronic payments must be operated as purpose-neutral platforms, which would significantly increase their revenue (and shielded them against the puritans demanding they prohibit porn) while neutralizing a potential competitor’s value to electronic payments. The stored-value bubble hinges on this as well; if cryptocoins weren’t effective for evading taxation and arrest, then generating and spending them would have compelled tax payments out of one’s currency reserves and arrests for black market purchases and cross-border transfers.
That they provide what resembles a neutral payment platform is a side effect of those goals, and that neutrality hinges on regulated banks being willing to provide accounts to those excluded by Visa/MC in order to convert cryptocoins to legal tender. Banks are largely just as unwilling as payment processors, for the same regulatory and political reasons as payment processors, which is why this is ultimately a problem of neutrality regulation rather than of crypto.
I assume you're referring to this[0]. I had to go searching.
I do buy it. Collective Shout, Mad Fucking Witches and others have all been trying to cancel media personalities and companies for years by appealing to the advertisers, especially effective in traditional media where they money is drying up. They're hardly a fly by night group, and it's not their first time appealing to payment processors.
0. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/400-vi...
All we need is fast ACH (seconds, even low minutes will do) with no charge back. From there you can develop single-charge ephemeral accounts and you're good to go. Sadly crypto will get us there faster. It just speaks volumes that a pseudo decentralized solution will beat the logical and easier centralized solution because of misaligned incentives
We already have that in many countries. It doesn't change much, because the vast majority of consumers prefer to use a payment method that does have chargebacks and various other consumer protections. As long as you have a majority of customers who want to pay via Visa or Mastercard, then the vast majority of merchants will need to accept those payments and play by their rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payment_System_(United_...
The premise is that the thing consumers want is "chargebacks and various other consumer protections" but in practice the problem is that those things are really hidden costs, i.e. merchants have to pass on the cost of chargebacks and fraud to honest customers. In a normal market this would result in the merchants passing on those costs to the customers who require a payment method that incurs them, i.e. there would be a 5-10% discount for using a different payment method, or more than that for industries with a high rate of customer chargeback fraud.
But then the payment networks prohibit merchants from providing the full value of the discount to people not insisting on payment methods that impose those costs, which ought to be an antitrust violation because it's obviously uncompetitive to prevent an alternative with lower costs from actually passing those lower costs on to the customer. And then fraud is rampant, costs billions of dollars, makes certain types of services non-viable, but gets folded into the price of ordinary goods and services to keep ordinary people from realizing that they're still paying it.
Could not agree more.
Have never used a chargeback and wouldn't want that ability in the vast majority of transactions. If I'm buying something on steam I know what I'm getting and they already have a robust refund capability regardless. If there was a good alternative to CC I'd happily use that.
I use cards because they're the defacto standard for online payment, but that's the only reason.
(side note: This issue becomes more obvious with the addition of the afterpays of the world, which charge iirc 7% fees to the merchant but forbid them from surcharging the difference)
> because the vast majority of consumers prefer to use a payment method that does have chargebacks
Do they? Or are they "forced" into it by intentionally hidden fees?
If consumers were given an explicit option to save x% and forego chargeback protection, I think most would.
And then you can have untrackable and irreversible scams, money laundering and ransomware without the crypto? Yay?
"Transaction is irreversible via automated system" and "transaction is irreversible via court order" are two different things. The first is a problem when you have merchants that legitimately provided a service (e.g. adult content, buying fungible commodities that themselves can't be clawed back) because customers issue chargebacks against merchants that didn't scam them, e.g. because the spouse disputes a charge for adult content that the person who made the purchase doesn't want to admit to buying. But the second is the thing you need to prevent scams and ransomware.
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You already have all of that now without the benefits for regular use
Sorry, but you are incorrect. Most payment systems today can be tracked and reversed.
Crypto will too, after it becomes well regulated, and then it will lose its appeal and crash. No one wants to mess with some convoluted cryptography based money system if they don't have to.
> Most
So do criminals use only the "Most" or also.the other ones that can't be reversed?
... and which ones are the ones that can't be reversed?
Why not? The celebrated it as their own success.
There are also a lot of religious anti-pornography folks in America, and with views on sexuality they are eager to impose on others. I doubt the pressure came from Australia alone.
And there's a long history of people taking credit for things they were barely involved with.
It would be an awful shame if free-speech-loving Americans' anger at the action American payment processors towards an American game distributor were diverted to some unreachable, unaccountable group on the other side of the world.
Who is saying that it was AUS alone? The signatories are majority Australian then UK and one or two US depending on how you count (UK working in the US).
The majority of the world censors or bans pornography, not just America. In Vietnam, China, Russia, Ukraine, just to name examples, you can go to literal prison for possession, not just pay a fine. Ukraine considers possession alone grounds for up to 3 years. This is despite Vietnam and China all-but-requiring atheism to run for positions.
I think this is sufficient to show there are plenty of non-religious reasons to refuse involvement. Framing pornography as a purely religious issue is a misdirection.
That's an interesting and useful observation (and now I'm curious about the origin in Vietnam and China). But it does not follow from that that US credit card providers' position is not grounded in religion.
I always wondered how it was like to live in 70s with bombs going off in random corners of utopias and random backwater fundamentalist groups claiming responsibilities. That journey of mine is now over.
In the world of propaganda, every success is your success.
> What's urgently needed is payment neutrality, like net neutrality.
I thought the EU was working on digital cash? What is the status of that?
From what I heard It's a scaleup of Dutch IDEAL, which is a wrapper around SEPA. End user scans a QR code generated by a merchant with their bank app and everything magically works, including sharing the address. Bank app shows the amount and merchant name on the screen before approving and merchant gets the confirmation right away. I having used VISA/Mastercard network that much for years because IDEAL exists.
Haven't heard about the EU version of it being anywhere in the works and I work in places where I should hear it.
Sharing the address? With the merchant? Does that mean that every random shop i buy in has now my home address?
Nightmare.
Merchants have to deliver their stuff somewhere and put something in the invoice, so of course. Literally what pay pal was doing since forever too, just more federated and standard-based.
Since it's EU with it's data minimization principles and privacy boner, of course they though about a checkbox to not share the address when not needed and argued about the default behavior in various committees for about half a year at least.
No.
Democracy is endangered by the fact that the government likes to use payment processors to stomp on stuff near the edges.
The dogs on the right rallies around when the government tries to pressure gunmakers, the cats on the left don't rally around such threats very well.
We just had a thread on this; probably don't need to recycle 2024 stories for it.
What if people find an endless source of intellectual nourishment in the proxy wars between chargeback ("pay-neutral") culture and puritan culture
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44621081
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44629685
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44629982
https://old.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/1caxsmc/japan...
A handful of US companies take a cut from nearly every payment on the planet, and now they’re caving to pressure from Twitter mobs and puritan lobbies, censoring global content just to avoid upsetting shareholders.
Visa and Mastercard haven’t brought anything new in years. Their infrastructure still dominates out of habit, not merit. Meanwhile, alternatives like stablecoins and European systems like EPI or the digital euro are gaining ground.
Their boldness is honestly surprising, especially now that real competition is finally emerging.
You will have better luck getting people to adopt Monero than to get legislatures to pass payment neutrality. Same with enforcement. The trend in Western democracies is less freedom, more control, more surveillance etc.
Mind you, both odds are negligible.
Each country central bank should have its own national payment processing system. Why is this not a thing? Spain has Bizum, for example.
FedNow is relatively new for the US in 2024.
One thing to note is that by design, the US banking system is very decentralized and that makes any sort of migration or mandate like herding cats. There are 141 banks in Spain and 4135 in the US.
US banks are generally not allowed to exceed 10% of deposits through mergers and there are only three passing that threshold; JPMorgan Chase at 15%, BofA at 14%, and Wells Fargo at 11%.
The EU has already figured this out with the recently passed instant payments regulation [0]. As of 2024 are 5,304 banks in the EU [1], so the number of banks really isn’t an excuse. The US banking system lags the rest of world by a mile, because there is no will to force modernization.
[0] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_pa...
The regulation passed in 2024 which is the same year as FedNow. Am I missing something?
FedNow is a technological solution for instant payments, not a regulation. It’s a voluntary system for the banks to join. Further, banks are not required to offer instant payment services to their customers. The analogous technological solution in the EU is TIPS [0], which has been operational since 2018.
The IPR is a regulation that requires banks to support instant payments and offer them to customers.
[0]: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/target/tips/html/index.en.htm...
Bizum is for P2P instant payments and it’s operated by a consortium of Spanish banks, not Banco de España.
Bizum can be used for B2C payments, and there're gateways for online purchases.
Totally agree. I wish we have something like Pix in Japan.
Their transaction fee is quite cheap, so small businesses earn more money and reinvest their revenue, rather than having it taken by Visa or Mastercards.
Other's have said this but it isn't a moral crusade by the payment processors', but rather their capitulation to various moralizing advocacy groups.
The only thing that endangers freedom here is the fact that there are centralized payment processors in the first place.
There's an existing cure for that particular disease: Bitcoin.
Putting aside the question of whether Bitcoin is even useful for transactions or if it’s just ‘number go up’ technology, Bitcoin processors don’t let Businesses accept Bitcoin for adult content either.
See e.g. https://support.bitpay.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003105543-Ca...
You don't need payment processors to exchange Bitcoin, or rather, the processors are P2P'd and compensated by code enforced transaction fee. I guess those can be banned by manually correlating wallet addresses with known "terrorist" groups, but we haven't reached that stage yet.
The downside of not using commercial "off-chain" processors for Bitcoin or most true decentralized cryptocurrencies is that latency of a proper, classic, fully secure, "on-chain" transaction is something like up to 15 minutes. At least it was that much last time I looked at it.
Why would one possibly need a SaaS payment processor for crypto? Unlike with traditional banking, running your own crypto node and processing network transactions is not some huge investment that one may want to offload to a third party.
To offload dealing with problems (technical and legal) and risks to the processor. Like everything SAAS basically. If they get hacked, it's not your money being lost for example.
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And on the other side of the equation, exchanges observe where their customers' coins are going, and may blacklist customers who transact with suspicious counterparties (like coin mixers).
The cure is worse than the disease
Really? Feel like specifying so in an informed and rational way?
I mean, you claim a system of voluntary, consensual payments that people can decide or not to use vs. formal channels depending on their need for avoiding politically charged bullshittery and financial censorship of all sorts is somehow worse than... the long arm of major governments and their corporate partners to restrict whatever they please for whatever political reasons they please at any time?
Truly, the irrational crypto hatred by some on this site is the stuff of idiot parody.
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Much evidence contradicts your theory.
Tell me you know nothing about transaction overhead without telling me you know nothing about transaction overhead. All the blockchain currencies require orders of magnitude more power to process a transaction compared to a debit or credit transaction. Bitcoin is primarily used by governments (like NK), hacker groups, and organized crime to launder money.
The solution is not blockchain currencies. European credit card transaction costs are a fraction of what they are in the US because US regulators just sat back and allowed Mastercard and VISA to establish a duopoly.
In much of the rest of the world it's also possible to near-instantly wire-transfer funds to pay for things, at negligible cost. In the US, everything is forced to go through the federal reserve, is expensive, and slow.
We are the laughing stock of the rest of the world. The banks have tried to set up alternatives. Zelle is a good example, but Zelle's most annoying problem is that you can only have one account per phone number or email address.
> everything is forced to go through the federal reserve, is expensive, and slow.
This isn't entirely accurate, there is a private clearing house that supports instant payments in the United States.
https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/CHIPS https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp
People seem to forget that most countries aren’t down with “adult content.” Japan famously has censorship; while it’s outright illegal and censored online in India, Russia, China, and no shortage of other countries. It’s illegal on both sides of conflicts - like Russia and Ukraine (possession in Ukraine by itself is grounds for up to 3 years in prison). Some countries like Australia permit it, but “extreme” content (aka anything not “vanilla”) is technically illegal regardless of the age of the viewer. This is also not necessarily based on religion: China is officially atheist, Vietnam is as well, but both will put you in prison for importing it. Ironically, it is post-Christian countries that are most tolerant.
From the global stage, America is not some overly puritanical country while everyone else goes along without religious purity concerns. The big view is that the majority of countries censor it or ban it, even democratic ones, with no religious motive required. The Western world is the exception, but that’s changing in the UK, Australia, and now the US with age gating, payment processor refusal, or other restrictions.
India’s ban wasn’t legislative, it was done by the supreme court.
It has one of the most weirdest and also defacto the most powerful supreme court globally by authority.
It can pursue its own laws, legislate them, overturn even laws passed by supermajority in parliament if it doesn’t agree with it and thinks it’s not what original constitution makers would’ve wanted.
The Court can take up cases on its own (suo motu) without any petition being filed. This allows it to respond to media reports, letters, or social issues — an almost unheard-of power in most democracies.
I don’t think indian society or gov should be blamed for banning adult content, supreme court by itself passed the law and gov didn’t wanna contest it as they didn’t feel the point to spend political capital to reverse it.
India is the origin of kamasutra texts after all and isn’t that sex negative as you might think ( it has the highest population for a reason)
Pakistan also has had an extremely powerful supreme court - though mostly acting on the behest of the military establishment. It has the same suo moto powers. It has over time effectively rewritten parts of the constitution, deposed prime ministers on the shoddiest base, forced the parliament to reverse parts of a constitutional amendment after it had passed almost unanimously. One supreme court justice raided a hospital at one point, to talk about acting like an executive. Though that might be over now after a recent constitutional amendment.
I am no legal historian, but I would assume this has something to do with how the British set up the courts.
Nope it’s not just power that builds decent stabilizing systems but how people/their culture use that power. India’s unusual supreme court stabilises it from executive overreach or other risks because its court judges control their own elections and are far more liberal than indian society or its politicians so it tends to use its extra powers to stabilize rather than compromise the system.
I do agree what you said shows the risk of such systems and powerful courts if created in a vacuum without considering who’ll control it.
Pakistan uses those powers to do the exact opposite of what indian courts would ever do. Also it’s also because in pakistan military is an independent political actor that serves its own interest unlike in India where military is toothless and just operates on politicians diktats often literally at times instead of following intent.
Indian courts also cannot execute on its laws or fund its own budgets or laws. So even if it creates laws it only does ones it knows that parliament wouldn’t resist too heavily and will actually enforce it for them to avoid a constitutional crisis . Indian courts are deeply afraid of ruling parties especially if they have more authoritative leanings or are more organised.
In pakistan the military helps courts finance and execute on stuff superseding the parliament which is why it’s a corrupting force. In India , parliament under union home minister strongly controls over internal security matters and the police forces with prime minister and his cabinet controlling the military.
it’s not because of british court system, british never had such courts nor is it even a republic the british system is more similar to a constitutional monarchy with a powerful parliament.
India is a republic UK is a democratic constitutional monarchy hence it’s called a kingdom Pakistan is just run by the military most of the time and by elected leaders some of the time. so it’s a system that oscillates between dictatorship and majoritarian democracy (not a republic)
but yea supreme court cannot depose prime ministers in india. india set its own checks and balances out of pure fear of the consequences of what happened in pakistan. it still doesn’t fully trust its military to this day. out of fear of pakistan’s case and intentionally keeps regional ethnic regiments to avoid the military from ever unifying or working together.
> India is the origin of kamasutra texts after all and isn’t that sex negative as you might think ( it has the highest population for a reason)
I think you’re making a mistake here. It is completely possible to be appreciative of sex, and hate pornography. Even in the US, “Feminists Fighting Pornography” was a powerful cultural force for almost 2 decades.
Only in the Western world is “pro sex” = “pro pornography” in most people’s minds. Everywhere else, these are separate issues, with pornography bans actually being from a pro-sex cultural position (I.e. it shouldn’t be commoditized online).
I know for a fact they don’t hate pornography, i’ve been around their culture. They banned it because the judges felt like it.
There were no major protests to ban it, no government ongoing policy, nothing. It was just done because the court felt like it.
People were indifferent after that too, gov didn’t even comment, praise or shun the court. Life just went on and people just used vpns, gov doesn’t even care and doesn’t even enforce the ban outside of the 100 major urls and domain the supreme court itself decided and never revisited it.
India’s supreme court is extremely unusual compared to other countries, it’s as powerful as the executive branch if not more, the legislative branch have no say in electing supreme court judges the previous judges elect the next ones.
it just uses its power very sparingly out of fear that the legislative branch might come after their powers if they use them too much.
banning a few major porn sites, banning electoral bonds (india’s version of superpac), creating new right to privacy laws without consulting the parliament (because the court feared gov isn’t taking digital privacy seriously enough), legalise lgbt rights without any parliament input as it felt it needed to protect those citizens freedoms and rights to self identify and form their own families with legal protection.
are some places where the court has used its ultimate powers
I personally like India’s supreme courts, they are partially the reason why india is relatively stable compared to other south asian nations. Overall they use their super powers extremely responsibly and sparingly. Accounting for both political environment and balancing it against the long term interest of the nation’s citizens
Only in your mind is "pornography" not a part of "sex". "Pro sex" doesn't mean "only the plainest sex imaginable", any more than "human rights" mean "to those people whom I like".
> Only in the Western world is “pro sex” = “pro pornography” in most people’s minds. Everywhere else, these are separate issues, with pornography bans actually being from a pro-sex cultural position (I.e. it shouldn’t be commoditized online).
The general problem is that when pornography bans are passed, they're characterized as being against for-profit hardcore pornography, but then they're worded broadly enough to also cover everything from sex education to medical depictions of human anatomy to actual human beings flirting with each other on the public internet with no profit motive, and then enforced against any of those things according to the whims of government officials.
Or worse, the law is written in such a way that it puts liability on third parties who then aggressively ban those things to avoid potential liability whether or not the law should or would have been enforced against them.
No, the general problem is the government interfering in a natural right of humans. If someone wishes to pursue happiness in some way that doesn't meaningfully harm others, they should be able to.
Moreover, there may be positive social benefits from it; more permissive pornography laws are associated with lower sexual violence in the population.
> Some countries like Australia permit it, but “extreme” content (aka anything not “vanilla”) is technically illegal regardless of the age of the viewer.
As a curious case, South Park: The Stick of Truth had a scene that was censored in a few countries (Australia and Germany among others) due to it's BDSM content...
I will also note the odd case back in the day of Germany having such strict rules with violence/etc that many of the Command and Conquer games had humans replaced with robots. [0]
Or even names of things. FF8 had 'nunchaku' changed to 'shinobu' because nunchucks are illegal in the UK [1] and "Castlevania: Bloodlines" for the Genesis/Mega Drive was named "Castlevania: The New Generation" in europe (although that also had a lot of blood removed).
> UK, Australia, and now the US with age gating, payment processor refusal, or other restrictions.
But also, I should note that Australia has had fairly strict laws on the book for quite some time and has a long history of using Refused Classification when they get the itch, hell the Re-release of Westwood's Blade Runner is RC. And unlike the UK (at least for now) there's not the digital/import loophole [2].
[0] - My Austrian friend on IRC said that at least the voices were really cool.
[1] - Perhaps someone assumed the whole world of FF8 was a British Colony?
[2] - My understanding is that somehow downloads and 'importing' never got covered in the law.
>Japan famously has censorship;
In Japanese culture there's often an 'official' layer of proper behavior that in some sense is a pretense and in reality people are much more free-wheeling, including in the adult sector where Japan is pretty big globally, which is likely understating it. The country is actually very sexually liberated.
The pernicious thing is that the US and Anglosphere work exactly the other way around, legally you can say anything but it's the people who chase you around the globe and you have Mumsnet and American soccer moms hound you across the ocean. Which is a moral tyranny any dictator is envious of. The US was the only Western country where Leon was censored, the actually made like a 20 minute shorter version for the US market. Censoring actual art, not just porn or slop, is foreign to anyone in continental Europe or Japan.
CERO (the Japanese ratings board) have required some mature-rated Western console video games to be edited (either for violence or sexual aspects) for it to receive the "Z" (age-restricted) rating be sold in the country.
Also, the passage of the law that regulated the AV (adult video) industry in 2022, intending to protect their performers, was notoriously controversial that year as well and seen as steps to censorship.
Japan has censorship as a result of the American occupation.
Correct; otherwise it would likely be illegal in Japan completely, judging by the nations around them.
Are you kidding me?
Definitely going to be "interesting" to see what happens once places like UK+EU commit to age verifying interent users soon.
* https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...
japan has fully legal drawn porn of children and tentacle beasts and whatever else, you just need small bars over genitals and beasts. you can buy it in a bookstore anywhere across the country freely, how is this not “down” with adult content? weird take
Last time I checked, you need an ID.
I'm astonished though that people sell ero fan manga from popular series at Komiket, like Sailor Moon (you know... "I'm Usagi Tsukino, I'm 14 years old") [1]
[1] though there was the episode that didn't get released in the US where she used a magical item to transform herself into an adult so she could go in a bar and get a drink
parody work is super popular-- people really love to see porn of their favourite characters, age/gender/year of publication be damned
It doesn't surprise me that people like it, it surprises me that they can get away with it in the open.
i've never needed to present ID in any mandarake or book-off or the like. of course if you go to events, they'll check ID to make sure you are 20+, or i'm sure if you look young. point is, the content is just there, even in some konbini, and it's not the norm, but certainly isn't demonised-- look at maid cafe and idol culture. /shrug
The same payment companies are very happy to take payments on porn sites. This manufactured outrage makes no sense. It's scary what a rather small activist group can accomplish.
Not at all. Square, Stripe, PayPal all outright refuse to deal with anything porn. Visa and Mastercard put out severe limitations, and (AFAICT) refuse to process payments to sites like pornhub.
This is not only due to reputation risks (even though these are real), but also because of the higher rates of fraud and chargebacks.
I'd say that anything that by its nature materially hampers the customer's ability to think rationally is risky for a payment processor, because it will always be a fertile ground for fraud and scams. Porn and gambling are obvious examples; alcohol is another, but (strong) alcohol is usually pretty strictly regulated, down to state-run monopolies in a number of countries.
My friend can confirm that regular visa/master card transations work on porn sites and onlyfans!
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Just use bitcoin
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Let's remember that there is no real "democracy" out there, activism and strikes are declared illegal/terrorism/threat in Europe and North America when it crosses the boundaries of the elite oligarchs.
US rail strikes, Canada truckers strikes, anti-genocide protests, anti-deportation protests, etc..
Online crackdown on journalism under the pretext of "graphic" content is an everyday occurrence.
So talking about ban on adult content in that context is naive at best.
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How is this a danger to "democracy?" The centralization of payment processing under a surveillance-friendly network that can debank people for socially unacceptable behavior was never on any ballot. Instead, surveillance capability is a regulatory requirement promulgated by governments that despise privacy, regardless of which party holds office. The mistake here is in thinking that there's "democracy" left to save.
> The game director’s statement was most likely triggered by the news that Manga Library Z is shutting down. The platform, which has preserved digital editions of out-of-print manga for the past 14 years, was initially pressured by international credit card companies to remove manga that contained certain words, and then abruptly forced to terminate all of its payment contracts, leaving it with no way to secure revenue for its authors. The cause cited for this was transactions involving adult content.
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Japan is a democracy. And yet payment processors from another country are powerful enough to bypass Japans political system.
Japan is reliant on use of those payment processors. Pretty sure Line Pay, crypto, Rakuten Pay, etc are all viable alternatives. I fail to see how a comic book site is at all relevant to democracy because some processors don't want to process payments for pornographic comic books.
You don't see how extra-legal foreign companies setting country wide policy is a threat to the local voters?
It's not country-wide policy though. They aren't deciding what people can and can't buy. They're deciding of what they will or won't facilitate the sale.
The American pornography industry has solved this problem by 1. recognizing that there is higher risk, like "oh no honey that $5.99 charge from onlyfans on the statement must have been fraud! do a chargeback." and 2. recognizing that the optics of selling pornography are bad and not everyone wants to assume what is essentially an externality (bearing that optics cost) without being paid extra for it. So there are providers that handle "high-risk" payments like that. Or they take crypto.
One of the cool things about the fact that companies are profit-seeking and really like making money, is that when they turn down what looks like an opportunity to make money you can be pretty sure it's for a good reason.
> American
What does this have to do with Japan?
The fundamental problem addressed here is that these Japanese people, one way or the other, are complaining about how our culture is influencing them. And your response is to tell them to be more American?
Presumably speaking, the Japanese people would want a Japanese solution here.
I don't live in Japan but I think I can at least get the gist of this guy's argument.
> One of the cool things about the fact that companies are profit-seeking and really like making money, is that when they turn down what looks like an opportunity to make money you can be pretty sure it's for a good reason.
Historically speaking, for profit companies of different cultures misunderstand and even abuse the locals. Because you know, profits to the foreigner and reasons that the local doesn't care or even may be opposed to.
For the locals to feel threatened by that (and claiming that democracy is at stake) is... Well, a trope at this point. It keeps happening so we probably should be sensitive to the gist of the argument.
It's a case study of how you can either work to assume those costs and build them into the price of the product, rather than being willfully blind and claiming they don't exist or should remain externalities, and maintain relationships with processors. It's also a case study of when you can just bypass them and use other payment methods.
This isn't an "American solution", it's an example of ways around a problem with the industry.
I'm not sure how refusing business (which, if these costs weren't real, would reduce "profits to the foreigner") is supposed to contribute to "misunderstand[ing] and even abuse."
I guess I can understand why they're sensitive, but they have multiple homegrown sets of payment rails they can use. If they want to use the foreign ones they can reasonably accept that a large multinational is "less Japanese" than the Japanese ones.
Hi dragontamer, super random question. You posted back in 2019 that you used a dental device to help you sleep. Is it still effective for you? Have you experienced any bad side effects?
I remember it working reasonably well, but there was jaw pressure. Later, my dentist pointed out that my teeth were misaligned so I stopped using the device, worried that it was messing with my jaw and teeth structure.
I think they could have used another alternative if they were given a generous timeline to switch over. The lack of this seems to indicate that the goal was to sabotage them rather than an amicable separation.
> The mistake here is in thinking that there's "democracy" left to save.
There is no democracy, never has been, it is an illusion of choice maintained by the oligarchs to keep people motivated just to get exploited more by whoever wins their next ballot.
I don't care about DVs
The fact we have PSPs endanger Democracy, because we could technically exchange eCash P2P, there is exactly ZERO reasons to keep up the banking systems, and banksters knows that well, https://web.archive.org/web/20240213185758/https://www.cimb.... unfortunately people seems to be unaware of that...