More than ten years ago since Visa, Mastercard etc blocked access to WikiLeaks: https://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html.
I guess they started blocking things The Economist care about.
Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
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Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#32The 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 hasnt happened yet but I think now it is just a matter of time. Many services will take a second look when ownership by address is still concealed. Most crypto platforms do not offer that yet for shares/assets issued on their platform (ie. Monero has no ability to have fungible assets traded on it). Lightning Network has a theoretical but limited ability to do this. Bitcoin will have a greater ability to do this after its current inprogress upgrade goes live (taproot, schnorr) but not a complete solution out of the box even then.
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#33I 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 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 liable if an illegal transaction slips through. (And sure, some illegal transactions would slip through, but I'm convinced that this is already the case.)
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#34I 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.
It's a very difficult task to determine if a transaction is legal or not, sometimes impossible. Regulations differ not only on the country and state level, but sometimes the city level. For example, can you buy alcohol in Delaware? Well, not if it's Sunday. How about a weekday? Not if it's between 1am and 9am. Can you buy alcohol in New Jersey on Sunday? Sure, well not if you're in Bergen County. That's one product.…
So, are you suggesting that credit card firms no longer process liquor transactions? I think it's understood that there are nuanced difficulties, but does that mean they should categorically shut out entire industries? (I feel like for liquor we generally fall on the side of "no".)
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#35Weird to me how misdirected the mass outrage against tech censorship feels, given that it's really the payment processors doing the most to stigmatize & make untenable any form of speech & commerce they consider risky.
Payment processors are doing it in response to mass outrage, particularly about revenge porn.
Really? I thought they just had rather conservative people on their board.
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#36What 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…
In a world where cash is starting to dissapear, payment processors and banking in general should be regulated and treated just like some sort of utility company (Ex: Water, electricity).
Advertising is a different beast altogether. Being able to to exchanges (money for goods, etc) is something quite a basic right(If I can call it that). That doesn't apply to making money though. I don't think it's normal in any way to force anyone to conduct business with someone they don't want to unless is a basic necessity in that particular day and age.
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding of lightning is, that unless you run your own node (which requires a lot of funds and needs to be online 24/7), you are using a third-party node for these payments. The positive would be, that there are (I presume, don’t know) far more nodes/services available to choose from than there are credit-card firms. This is just what I remember from reading into lightning a few months ago.
You don't need a lot of funds, or to always be online. You can run the software quite happily on a cellphone (I have previously), the requirement to be "online" is only in the scale of occasionally (once a day would be more than sufficient), and even that can be delegated (dork "watchtowers") with little to no risk.
Ah, so you can leave the channel open without being online?
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need a lot of funds, or to always be online. You can run the software quite happily on a cellphone (I have previously), the requirement to be "online" is only in the scale of occasionally (once a day would be more than sufficient), and even that can be delegated (dork "watchtowers") with little to no risk.
Ah, so you can leave the channel open without being online?
Yes. You only need to be “online” periodically to check for fraud, which is a task which can be relatively trustlessly delegated if need be.
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#39I 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 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…
[deleted]
Re: Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web
#40More than ten years ago since Visa, Mastercard etc blocked access to WikiLeaks: https://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html . I guess they started blocking things The Economist care about.
Yeah, and didn't seem reluctant at all at the time.