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PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

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Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#321

Post by mysterypie »

usr1106 wrote: post #289
r00fus wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's supposed to be called government. Public banking (like what California has recently approved) should be the answer for legal and under-banked.

Banking is a citizen right. Well, at least it should be. In Germany every bank is obliged to offer everyone (including homeless, overindebted, asylum seekers, etc.) a so-called base account, which offers a way to receive payments and pay the bills and get a basic debit card. However, the law has a mistake: The price of the base account is not regulated. And many banks charge more than for a "normal" account. Germany…

> In Germany every bank is obliged to offer everyone a so-called base account

That's very commendable; I wish more countries had such a regulation. Does it extend to non-citizens living in Germany? What about to visitors to Germany? Could someone open an account (by right) while there on a holiday?

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#322

Post by turkeytotal »

ericb wrote: post #276
aazaa wrote: post #135

Financial deplatforming is a monster, long-term trend to watch over the next decades. Deplatforming happens with sex workers. It also happens in the US marijuana industry. It happens with perfectly legal political content. The number of ways in which someone, somewhere will be offended by products or services for sale is growing, driven by a rapidly improving worldwide communication network and delivery system, and b…

Bitcoin isn't a currency that can fix this. Bitcoin is either censorable (lightning network) or unaffordable when used heavily with slow confirmations and ridiculous fees. The lightning network is a joke--a frankenstein "Engineering UI" layed over a system to route around bad development decisions re:block size.

What sort of censorship are you referring to? If taproot-schnorr is deployed and adopted, cooperative channel operations will look exactly like normal single-sig transactions. As for routing censorship, if one node fails to route for me, I can open a channel with a different node and route around them.

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#323

Post by glenvdb »

arcticbull wrote: post #54
fooxbar wrote: post #50

Bitcoin Cash to the rescue!

Remind me again how you plan to pay your employees when all the fiat gateways also preclude this kind of transaction?

I think the lofty and idealistic "end goal" for cryptocurrencies is to be fiat independent, so you don't need any fiat on/off ramps and you will be able to use it for everyday purchases.

Whether that will realistically happen or not I have no idea, but that's the promised land held onto for true believers.

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#324

Post by draw_down »

linuxhansl wrote: post #123

Whatever you might think of the various professions... As long as it is legal, it seems the major payment service providers should not pass on their moral code onto everybody else. What's next? You get no water/power/whatever if you run a business that the service providers simply do not agree with?

It’s not obvious, but morality and fraud are linked. People buying something considered immoral, when confronted by a spouse or other loved one, lie and say the charge is fraudulent. In this way “immoral” businesses rack up lots of chargebacks, which pisses off financial institutions. Payment providers need to remain on good terms with those institutions. So dealing with these businesses can create more risk than is worth it.

Nobody who runs a payment processor is wagging their finger at camgirls or dispensaries or whatever. They could not care less.

I’m not saying it’s fair or good, I’m saying it’s about risk and financial institutions not morality.

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#325

Post by hackinthebochs »

dragonsngoblins wrote: post #164
teh_infallible wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are more motivated to go through extra steps for porn than they are for coffee.

No they aren't, because porn is available for free in abundance everywhere. I can't download a coffee from a torrent site or stream it from a tube site. The fact that people pay for porn at all is a small marvel. I might be willing to accept that people would more motivated to jump through some hoops to get porn than they would for coffee if porn weren't available without that hoop jumping. All this sort of thing wil…

Your argument would work if porn were interchangeable. It's not. People don't pay for porn, they pay for specific porn.

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#326

Post by tux1968 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #318
short_sells_poo wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a moral choice. It's a case of the business is not worth the hassle. KYC rules mean the bank is on the hook if they are found to harbor ill gotten gains and the sex industry had a some troubles in the past, while not producing enough volume on an individual level to make it worthwhile for a bank to overlook things.

Not just in the past. There's a current case going on about a major channel that Pornhub used to feature about performers being allegedly both lied to about where the footage would be available and raped. Very possibly what spurred PayPal to make this change.

That sounds like something that should be handled by law enforcement, not your bank.

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#327

Post by int_19h »

zamadatix wrote: post #213
int_19h wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer to those questions depends on what your market dominance is. If you're one of many players in the market, and you're all actively competing against each other, then discriminate all you want - somebody else will cover that niche. But if you're the only option for many people, or there are so few options that the market is not really competitive, then yeah, I think it's perfectly legitimate to force compani…

It's relatively hard to make reliable regulation on "active competition" especially since you're talking about it only being valid with large numbers of players. How is a hosting company with 20 locations supposed to know that today a startup hosting company has closed in Wichita and it can't discriminate anymore since the other competitor in that area upped their per month cost? What defines if competitor #4 farther…

It's hard in a sense that it requires some regulatory body that proactively monitors the market and issues directives (and then enforces them if they aren't followed). But that kind of thing is exactly what we have governments for.

(I should note that my politics is that of inherent distrust towards all large entities, whether they're governments or private entities. I would prefer the society and its economy to function on the principles that preclude either from existing at all. But regardless of that long-term goal, there's a question of what to do here and now, with the society and economy that we have. It's going to have monopolized markets - and proportionally sized governments are needed to be a check and balance on that.)

As to your second question - well, why shouldn't they? And how much is that overhead in practice, if we're talking about not picking one company out of many? The more socially unacceptable such discrimination is, the more attention to its violators - i.e. well-publicized blacklists, among other things. I seriously doubt that, in your particular example, a company that does that wouldn't be infamous for that exact reason.

And sure, there are people who would disagree with that. This is fundamentally an ethical question, and there's no single objectively correct answer to it; I merely gave mine. Some would say that anti-discrimination has to be enforced even in a truly competitive market, when there's no demonstrable economic harm, purely as a matter of principle. This kind of disagreement is meant to be resolved through a (hopefully) democratic political process.

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#328

Post by dragonsngoblins »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #325
dragonsngoblins wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they aren't, because porn is available for free in abundance everywhere. I can't download a coffee from a torrent site or stream it from a tube site. The fact that people pay for porn at all is a small marvel. I might be willing to accept that people would more motivated to jump through some hoops to get porn than they would for coffee if porn weren't available without that hoop jumping. All this sort of thing wil…

Your argument would work if porn were interchangeable. It's not. People don't pay for porn, they pay for specific porn.

I'm willing to accept that but I think it would still lower the amount of income significantly. Sure people would still pay for custom porn or specific clips that are hard to find (though even then I'd suspect quite a bit less than they do now), but they probably wouldn't join any subscription based sites for example.

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#329

Post by jorgesborges »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #318
short_sells_poo wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a moral choice. It's a case of the business is not worth the hassle. KYC rules mean the bank is on the hook if they are found to harbor ill gotten gains and the sex industry had a some troubles in the past, while not producing enough volume on an individual level to make it worthwhile for a bank to overlook things.

Not just in the past. There's a current case going on about a major channel that Pornhub used to feature about performers being allegedly both lied to about where the footage would be available and raped. Very possibly what spurred PayPal to make this change.

I understand from a corporate perspective the need to step away from potential scandal and public outrage, but this decision only creates more obstacles and misfortune for the people actually being abused.

Re: PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

#330

Post by bananocurrency »

baumy wrote: post #219
caconym_ wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pornography consumption generally does not represent "moderation" of sex, but the extreme end of it - you crave sexual stimulation so badly that you resort to watching other people having their sexual urges fulfilled (which can then make the porn consumer less motivated to pursue healthy avenues to achieve their own sexual fulfillment, leading to a downward spiral). This is equal parts editorializing and [citation…

> This is equal parts editorializing and [citation needed]. Keep in mind that correlation != causation. If you still trust any citations to social science research in 2019, I have a bridge to sell you. Unfortunately it is my strong belief that for the moment, we're on our own on this one. When discussing climate change, programming language trade-offs, tax policy, etc, give me all the evidence and data. But for this…

>But for this particular area of study, I trust my own observations/life experiences more than any research. I'm sure you and many other HNers will hate that answer, but I stand by it.

Good for you! Don't let facts get in the way of your feelings.

>As to your second point, if shallow and transactional sexual relationships becoming more common does not seem to you like a downside, I doubt we will ever see eye to eye on this.

You need to provide a downside for this that doesn't involve your hands getting tired of clutching pearls.

>I'm unwilling to go into more detail as sharing my opinions on topics less controversial than this has resulted in real life threats more than once.

It sounds more like you're unable to go into detail without offending people because you say ignorant shit that people can easily defend with research.

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