Is there anyone at all who doesn’t feel extremely uncomfortable with this development?
Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
41–50 of 288 posts
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#42The Lightning Network might or might not lead to a widely used open payment network. I would love to hear more from people who already use it. How well does it work? As far as I know, El Salvador is currently trying to shift their whole economy to Bitcoin. Handling day to day payments via Lightning. Is anybody from HN there? How practical is it for non tech people to use it for their daily payments?
Its an option. Basically a litmus test will be when a gigantic brothel in Europe or a European country’s Caribbean district does a very public but permissionless capital raise, gets filled by retail, and pays dividends while shares being actively traded permissionlessly. Thats when you’ll know the floodgates are open. Just given how much unwanted attention and publicity that will generate. To me, its surprising it ha…
You don't generally need to raise capital for sex work, and the problem there is having a physical location that will be raided if it's illegal.
To me, the important litmus test is when bitcoin gets definitively linked to a specific terrorist incident. Now, terrorism in the West is mostly out of fashion, except US rightwing extremists, because it's hard to have a death toll that anyone would notice over COVID, but that's not to say it won't happen in the future.
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#43Since HN generally does not like mentions of Bitcoin, here are some stats.
Bitcoin was launched 12 years ago, reached $1'000'000'000'000 monetization this year (>1.5x larger than IMF), exploded interest and funding for cryptography and p2p networking over the past 6-8 years, and is marching towards reaching monetization of gold ($11T).
Lightning network runs over 3 years already and growing its capacity exponentially, offering truly "digital cash" capability: no trusted third parties and instant transactions.
Yes, Bitcoin is volatile and it will remain so until it saturates the market like gold did, and every person has as much bitcoin as they want to carry, relative to other assets.
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#44I would want to see regulations where banks are explicitly forbidden from blocking legal transactions. If it's legal then banks should have no choice but to handle it.
The banks of the power and lobbyists to make certain things illegal.
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest problem with this is that we already have regulations than punish banks for processing illegal transactions. If you don't want that, and you want the banks not to refuse any legal transactions, that's easy. They then don't refuse to process any transactions at all. If you do want them to refuse illegal transactions, and they're allowed to refuse legal transactions, that makes it easy for the bank because…
Isn't that a false choice, that's only phrased to cater to the "that makes it easy for the bank"? They are now categorically refusing certain businesses. If those businesses could at least appeal and demonstrate that they are within the law, why wouldn't banks be mandated to process the transactions? This could go with some sort of safe haven for the banks, that if they did this review process that they won't be liab…
Possibly, but those businesses tend to be the ones that lack political cover and that a large section of the public and political sphere would happily ban anyway.
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#46I would want to see regulations where banks are explicitly forbidden from blocking legal transactions. If it's legal then banks should have no choice but to handle it.
We would need at least _one_ chain of bank - payment processor that only works on payment fees and has a public mandate of letting the maximum transactions go through.
Basically a pubic service PSP with loss financed by govs. I'm not holding my breath, and I can't imagine what could realistically be done at our level to be even an inch closer to that ideal. It's depressing.
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest problem with this is that we already have regulations than punish banks for processing illegal transactions. If you don't want that, and you want the banks not to refuse any legal transactions, that's easy. They then don't refuse to process any transactions at all. If you do want them to refuse illegal transactions, and they're allowed to refuse legal transactions, that makes it easy for the bank because…
Isn't that a false choice, that's only phrased to cater to the "that makes it easy for the bank"? They are now categorically refusing certain businesses. If those businesses could at least appeal and demonstrate that they are within the law, why wouldn't banks be mandated to process the transactions? This could go with some sort of safe haven for the banks, that if they did this review process that they won't be liab…
Challenging it in court is an impossible burden for most people, so the most important thing is the default. Do we want the bank to assume you're a criminal, or do we want to assume you're innocent and make the police be the ones to prove if you're not?
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#48I would want to see regulations where banks are explicitly forbidden from blocking legal transactions. If it's legal then banks should have no choice but to handle it.
We would need at least _one_ chain of bank - payment processor that only works on payment fees and has a public mandate of letting the maximum transactions go through.
Basically a pubic service PSP with loss financed by govs. I'm not holding my breath, and I can't see a single action I could take that would bring us even a millimeter closer to this goal. It's depressing.
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#49Is there anyone at all who doesn’t feel extremely uncomfortable with this development?
I'm more uncomfortable with the fact that Visa and MasterCard have a duopoly around most of the world. Without that most of these questions would become irrelevant because there would always be an alternative.
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#50What do you mean, "are becoming"? They have always been. If the payment processors don't want to be associated with a service, they'll refuse to handle payments and then there's simply no way for the service providers to get paid. See wikileaks and other "problematic" sites. Advertisers are also regulators. I've seen sites start heavily censoring themselves because someone complained to Google and they pulled the ads…
This is a recent situation. Back in the early 00's, paying for something online with a credit card, other than porn, was a novelty. I think things started to change in the late 00's.
I remember a LOT of software being sold online (licenses and such) was sold via money orders or sometimes wire transfers.