The card networks are never on the hook for fraudulent transactions (nor for any other type of chargeback for that matter). If anything, it's the merchant's payment service provider/card acquirer that absorbs the loss if the merchant can't pay.
True until the acquiring (merchant side) bank is insolvent. Then the network pays. Source: worked at Visa for years. It's why it's so hard to become an acquiring bank on the network.
True – I was debating whether I should mention that edge case :)
I think the general idea is that acquiring banks are hopefully large enough to absorb any single merchant insolvency, but there are obviously limits to that. Airlines and event tickets are notorious example of that, since they usually take payment weeks or months ahead of providing the underlying service but want to get paid immediately.
I built a cool tool the last week's. I spent more time on evaluating payment processor than the code itself. I have ~5 projects in my shelf I did never launch because I didn't find a payment solution. Got instantly banned with all of them, had to write them an email wait for days to get some response. I usually just use crypto whenever it makes sense. And still have a hard time to believe that I can move as much as c…
This is what i settled on as well. I maintain a side project that is completely legal and above board but i refuse to go through the nonsense i was forced to go through the last time i had to integrate with a credit card payment gateway (another side project that went belly up). If someone wants to buy something from me badly enough, they'll figure out how to get some bitcoin. I don't have the time and energy to deal…
Exactly. Same boat here, fully legal normal business. My main issue is literally having customers from middle east. I've had bank accounts frozen, PayPal reverting my business account to personal without notice, fees, crazy amount of fees everywhere ... So much pain for no benefit compared to crypto.
> People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then. We literally had Puritans in Europe [1] ” The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to rid the Church of England of what they considered to be Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had…
Yeah, and then most of them left and came here, which the article cites as having caused a "radical" divergence: > Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity 1662. Many continued to practise their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches.[2] The nature of the Puritan movement in Eng…
If you’re looking at the geographical distribution of their influence, isn’t it weird that the place where the puritans settled (“New England”) is arguably the least puritanical region of the US?
It's a slippery slope. It's not real but can certainly, by definition, create a situation that mimics reality to the point of assisting someone at committing a real crime that they couldn't possibly commit without the simulation.
The slippery slope is in banning speech. If you want to make the claim that simulated sex leads to crimes we have been over this a thousand times with violence in games. There is no connection, you are without a leg to stand on except your own religious indoctrination.
>There is no connection, you are without a leg to stand on except your own religious indoctrination.
Flagging my reply is gross (you state that, not me!) and grounds for ban. I'll just leave this 2nd rebuttal here as I take back both my legs to stand on and yours as well :P
The article calls out “certain adult games” which is vague. It is interesting to note that most of the delisted games were themed specifically around incest. https://bsky.app/profile/steamdb.info/post/3lu32vdlsmg27 Wondering if this will be a slippery slope towards pulling more anodyne stuff.
Visa and Mastercard generally don't like anything with incest, rape, and/or underage participants.
Unless it's a TV show depicting it with live action. Then it's fine.
Part of the coalition directing ESG which direct BlackRock and Vanguard which then threaten Visa/Mastercard… has been extremely successful in making people believe this is a crusade only by Visa/Mastercard.
It’s the S. And so very few people have any idea. Visa/MC doesn’t actually hate money.
They have better argument fiduciary defense accept porn money than deny it - unless they don’t and no one asks or thinks about it.
It's because Visa got sued, lost, and it was found out they knowingly processed payments for illegal adult content, so they basically avoid the sector entirely now. Economist had an article about it maybe two years ago and came to much the same conclusion you did. IIRC, the failure in their mind was government not stepping in to make a law so things are less ambiguous in the future. Now payment processing cos get to…
> It's because Visa got sued, lost, and it was found out they knowingly processed payments for illegal adult content Got any source for that? What they got sued for? Aiding human trafficking?
>This week, US District Judge Cormac Carney of the US District Court of the Central District of California decided that there's reason to believe that Visa knowingly processed payments that allowed MindGeek to monetize "a substantial amount of child porn." To decide, the court wants to know much more about Visa's involvement, calling for more evidence of legal harms caused during a jurisdictional discovery process extended through December 30, 2022.
Tbh that's quite alarming what you've just said, and I'm not saying about government. I'm saying about an additional huge sales tax. I understand that wiring money or sending them in an envelope is the thing of past, but e.g. in my country and in whole EU the digital payment is promoted as the only righteous, because "cash is only used by gangsters and human traffickers" etc. And this is really playing against us and…
Credit cards are much less heavily relied on in Europe than in the USA. Europe basically runs on debit cards that every kid can have and where the fees are minuscule. There are countless banks providing the service and everything is highly regulated. On top of that, Europe still curbed Visa and Mastercard several times for antitrust behaviour. And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money launde…
The U.S. consumer economy functions primarily on debt from start to end these days, complete with debt collectors who buy it pennies on the dollar and then con grieving relatives into voluntarily accepting duty towards those debts that would otherwise have been discharged by death. So there are quite a lot of people these days who couldn’t use the European debit methods because they don’t have the cash and likely never will, what with one quarter of the country’s households unable to afford housing on effectively poverty wages. The federal government can’t crack down on this because they’d have to replace that consumer debt with public assistance. The puritanical / religious orgs control majority voting blocs that haven’t aged out as they used to and so are a continued threat to elected officials. So the threat those groups are holding over Visa/MC is triple-pronged: not only will they boycott (they can afford to), they can also leverage politicians (enforce our will or get ejected from office) and threaten capitalism (better economic armageddon than unpalatable sexual expressions). Valve can’t hold a candle to that kind of leverage, not without giving up the neutral-apolitical stance that most tech corporations prefer. They would essentially have to promote a counter-bloc of voters to counter-pressure the U.S. House and Senate into passing payment provider neutrality laws through elections. Valve is vanishingly unlikely to do this, and so their only choice is to prostrate to Visa/MC (or stop accepting USD) until the puritan bloc ages out in two or three decades. They can certainly afford to wait, especially given that these incremental religious bans advance slower than their revenues.
Violence has no religious morality baggage - religions were extremely violent. Sex, however, has all the baggage from all the angles. Even if we aren't religious, it doesn't matter, religion still dictates huge chunks of our lives and our mindsets. It has thousands of years of inertia.
Abrahamic religion is prudish about sex none of the pagan or Buddhism is prudish.
Buddhism literally teaches celibacy. Mostly for monks but if you get serious about your practice the advice is always to become celibate in order to make progress. It makes sense as you're trying to remove your desires.