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 by people terrified of the change that brings.
The response by PayPal and many others has been to cut service. With each case, the circle of people finding themselves cut off from the traditional economy grows.
Bitcoin is often criticized for its lack of use cases. I find a very high correlation between the strength of this belief and lack of awareness of financial deplatforming in its many guises.
I've had several friends in the adult industry have their checking accounts closed at a several major banks as well. Traditional banking should definitely not be discriminating against fully legal activities.
This is the thing I find very disturbing. That an industry as highly regulated and essential to every day life as banking can pick and choose based on management's moral choices.
This debate is currently brewing in Australia, except its against providing services to mining companies.
When is right / wrong to boycott? And who should be allowed to? (Persons or companies)
Context: in Australia the prime minister (Scott Morrison) is looking into laws to ban boycotts by companies (who are being compelled by people / public opinion)
Checking accounts or merchant accounts? Most banks shy away from processing credit cards for adult sites because the chargeback rate is sky high and it therefore presents elevated risk. It has nothing to do with discrimination.
Considering the things that banks have financed in the past, the hypocrisy of this stance by banks is incredible. Everything up to and including genocide has been ok by them.
Bitcoin isn't criticized for this being an invalid use case, because it's totally valid.
It's criticized because it's useless for this use case, people involved in this scene in practice don't care about it to any serious degree beyond it being a talking point, and because anything for legally working around financial deplatforming still needs strong interfacing with the rest of the system as well as compliance with legal regimes, which BTC has nothing to say on that.
In fact, you can make your own payments platform denominated in USD and that's as useful as BTC for legal activities. So why go through the extra steps?
Why would you assume adult workers don’t care about Bitcoin? I follow “crypto twitter” a bit and there are certainly a decent number of adult workers that are interested in it. Most understand the benefits for an industry that is in a legal gray area.
Building your own PayPal is way harder than building a payout mechanism for Bitcoin.
I think part of it is a bootstrapping problem. Bitcoin solved an interesting technical problem, so people started using it. Once people started getting interested, companies popped up to sell it, but notably there was a base of users prior to that.
By contrast, the barrier to entry for a new system denominated in USD is much higher. People can't really start using it until there's a company around to support it, and starting a company to run a payments platform isn't for the faint of heart.
Still, I've been keeping an eye on GNU Taler[0], which seems to be tackling the technical side of that problem. I'm unclear on some of the technical details, but it's the closest thing I've found so far to digital cash.
> In fact, you can make your own payments platform denominated in USD and that's as useful as BTC for legal activities. So why go through the extra steps?
Good call. These pornstars should just create their own payment platform instead of going through all the hassle of using BTC.
> It's criticized because it's useless for this use case, people involved in this scene in practice don't care about it to any serious degree beyond it being a talking point
This is demonstrably false in the amateur porn industry.
> anything for legally working around financial deplatforming still needs strong interfacing with the rest of the system as well as compliance with legal regimes
I have never understood the obsession with complying with stupid laws. The solution needed here isn't "legally" working around financial deplatforming; illegally doing so will work just fine - and also probably have the benefit, as widespread disobedience often has, of putting extreme pressure on these laws themselves.
I don't think there will ever be one coin that will solve everyone's problem. As attested to by the number of new crypto currencies attempting to correct every perceived issue with more popular crypto currencies.
Ask Julian Assange [1] how this works with political speech and journalism. Though I've probably provoked "the hate" by naming the major example rather than thought about the underlying principles and what's at stake.
It will be funny that, as with other technologies from the past, pornography will be the use case that will finally bring cryptocurrencies to widespread adoption in society
This is relevant to the argument that Paypal is not merely responding to financial risks, but using its platform to impose its worldview. Guns are highly regulated in the US. Someone violating those regulations in the context on an online business is usually guilty of a felony, and has a high probability of being prosecuted. To my knowledge, guns don't have a high rate of chargebacks, as they involve a papertrail with an in-person pickup requiring government-issued ID and a background check.
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.
1 sat/byte transactions will still clear the mempool, eventually. I don't think you need payments for porn to settle immediately. There are workarounds a business could use like speculatively accepting payment before a confirmation using heuristics e.g. the customer's past history. It's not an ideal situation, but the market decided this is the coin to use.
Marijuana is separate from the deplatforming in the traditional sense because federal banking laws and the DEA's stubborn Schedule 1 tautology when it clearly has medical uses are to blame as opposed to uncooerced choices.
Yeah I think there’s an issue with legal sex or political content being deplatformed, but if you want to stop deplatforming weed you should focus on actually legalizing it first lol
This is Big Brother type censorship. Anyone they disagree with will get shut out of Paypal, Banks, Credit Cards, etc.
There was Hatreon but Visa canceled their services for them.
I agree the porn industry is legal and nobody forces people to watch Pornhub, now I doubt the future of Pornhub. I don't use it but I support those who do under the freedom of speech.
Most of the marijuana industry is illegal in the US. States making it legal doesn’t change the Controlled Substances Act. As banking is federally regulated, banks don’t have the freedom to knowingly allow illegal businesses.
Porn however, is legal, and deplatforming a legal product/business is wrong in my opinion.
To be clear, I am not suggesting marijuana should be illegal at the federal level at all, only that it’s not inconsistent that a bank not serve those customers — after all they would then become criminals themselves by facilitating the moment of funds for a product that is illegal.
Porn is legal if everybody involved is above age and gives consent and is capable of giving consent at the time and that consent is properly recorded and the resulting content is not judged criminally "obscene" by some judge in a hick town. Which is way too many ifs for most banks, particularly given the meager returns on offer.
IRS treats Bitcoin as property. Accordingly, the recipients need to report every bitcoin transaction on Schedule D and calculate its cost basis ( appreciation or depreciation of Bitcoin). I am not talking about the reporting of the cumulative income, but the additional requirement of reporting of each Bitcoin payment or disposal. Say you received 0.0001 BTC held it for 5 days and then converted to USD. These are two taxable events, not one, with the requirement of calculating BTC appreciation between these two events. Now multiply this burden by every transaction.
In my opinion, IRS successfully killed BTC use in the US by treating it as property rather than currency (for currency FX, transactions under $200 are exempt from cost basis reporting on schedule D)
Is the IRS going to seriously audit you for the $10 in taxes you should have paid because you held some BTC for a week? I can see that being an issue at institutional scale, but for small users it seems unlikely it would ever be enforced.
There are other payment platforms that still work here. The problem with most of these alternative platforms is their fraud rates are absolutely through the roof. For example, Green Dot and NetSpend are companies that provide pre-paid, secured credit cards online, and as someone who worked at a consumer fintech company, one of these cards coming through automatically raised the fraud score because we had so many issues with payments from these cards.
Printable cash for internet transaction would be nice...
Honestly, the behavior of paypal is abysmal and I wish there to be a real alternative. I despise credit cards and would like to have more options.
I doubt I will ever pay anything for porn, but there are a lot of content creators that can only receive money via paypal/credit card.
I do actually think a government should have some control over its currency, but if the institutions implement their own arbitrary rules, solutions like Bitcoin are the best alternative.
> I doubt I will ever pay anything for porn, but there are a lot of content creators that can only receive money via paypal/credit card.
A lot of porn models are becoming the content creators now. The line between your favorite adult actor and your favorite youtuber is growing thinner every day.
Which makes us wonder if one near day we'll see amateur adult content with sponsored products "... brought to you by Questionable VPN!"
Bitcoin would be great for this in theory, but the problem is that customers will not pay you in Bitcoin. People want their porn and they want it now, that's why they're paying. If you don't make it practically seamless for a layman to pay you for your porn, they're either pirating it or looking elsewhere. Sure, a few people might pay, but you're looking at probably a 50-75% revenue loss, best case.
PayPal is an accessible platform that works is a wide variety of scenarios — it’s almost unique in that respect.
Most forms of sex work are illegal in the US and other jurisdictions, and sites like PornHub are compliance nightmares where all manner of sleazy or illegal actions are likely happening. PayPal doesn’t want to be the financier for the next scandalous “amateur” producer.
To be honest I appreciate PayPal doing this.
The more we see prominent cases of deplatforming, the more people are going to take it as a serious problem.
One can always hide behind some pr bullshit when it comes to political free speech and so on. But porn it is finally something enough people care about to take it seriously.
It depends if the de-platforming is happening for reasons of social outrage / offense (bad) or commercial reasons (maybe not 'good' but at least 'better').
If it's about this particular industry sub-group having a much-higher-than-normal rate of fraud or returns or buyers remorse or whatever causes more hassle to PayPal's processes than they're worth, then that makes commercial sense.
How do people get bitcoin? Pay with a credit card? If so, btc exchanges can ban you still based on the name on the card.
I tried other means such as money transfer and cash gift cards, but the exchange rate can mean to pay for $100 I have to spend $3-400!!
A proposal: sell btc giftcards. Each card will have a qr code which is a url that allows download of a wallet (with priv key) where the URL is active after payment. You can transfer the funds to your permanent wallet or spend it directly. Maybe you can even use it to pay for IRL goods somehow. Either way, the participation barrier is lowered. I heard of btc ATMs as well but I can imagine carrying one more giftcard is easier for stores than adding an ATM.
You can use an ATM (or localbitcoins) to cash out Bitcoin without any connection to your bank account. Bitcoin doesn't have to be ubiquitous to use it even today, you just have to find businesses that accept Bitcoin. A buddy of mine accepts rent from a tenant in Bitcoin. There are exchanges to buy gift cards or Amazon credits with Bitcoin which you can use in real life to buy food. You can realistically go about your life completely in 2019 with just magic internet money. What a time to be alive.
Being deplatformed by a bank is less of an issue because there are thousands of banks in the US. If you just need a checking account for your adult business, you're likely to find a bank that doesn't mind. Then you're on the ACH network and should be good to go as far as bitcoin goes. The only ones who could truly deplatform you off the banking system are the government, by making it illegal / highly burdensome to service you.
But the credit card industry is an oligopoly. If Visa or Mastercard don't like you, you're completely screwed as far as online payments go.
This practice is getting seriously annoying in scope of current events like google going into banking bussiness. One part are privacy applications but even worse is that suddenly pulling the application from play store using aurora (3rd part app for those that dont want google mobile services spyware on the phone) could cost you bank account which google will surely tie to google account. This is not good, we are beeing pulled to distopia at progressing rate.
There is this guy I watch on YouTube, he had a Patreon account and a BTC address. I don't want to sign up for Patreon, so I sent him BTC.
The great thing about BTC is you can send it so easily without going through all the hoops other 'systems' need. Sure, it isn't so easy to get started with BTC, but once you are in, it is a breeze.
Are there any payment options that have so far been immune to this issue?
Maybe it's worth setting up alternative payment methods, even if the percent they charge per transaction is much higher, just to ensure stability of access to funds.
Nano is instantly fully-confirmed, secure and immutable. All a model needs to do is display a Nano address (or QR code) in their webcam backdrop, or on their website.
They get instant notification of payments, so have the option of instantly reacting to them. So they can be interactive with their viewers in real-time.
Nano is feeless, unlike Bitcoin, and will always be feeless.
(Bitcoin's fees jumped to $6.25 on June 28 2019 so saying Bitcoin is currently 'cheap' doesn't really cover that.)
Yeah, things like subscribe star exist in part for this reason, and there are plenty of groups that discuss alternative technology, such as this news org https://reclaimthenet.org/ or this group https://gab.com/groups/377 (though the last two mostly focus on political content)
The US marijuana industry is, under federal law, entirely criminal, so that's kind of understandable, even if the underlying law is arguably undesirable.
It would be terrific if as much energy would be spent on shutting down human sex trafficking finances for children and black and international markets.
Certainly there is some % of pornhub sex workers that are there against their will, but the dark web child porn networks are what our primary focus should be going against.
I'm with you except for conflating right wing propagandists with sex workers and the cannabis industry.
Right wing propagandists are rarely deplatformed compared to the other two groups and when they are it's generally for spreading conspiracy theories (remember that people have already died because of Pizzagate and QAnon "truthers") or inciting (racial/religious/homophobic) hatred.
The difference is that right wing propagandists are also a lot more vocal than the other group (or left wingers for that matter), skewing the perception. There's a widely known joke about how many comedians have shows on mainstream platforms with titles like "Cancelled" or "Triggered", complaining about "things you can't say anymore". Also see the "Intellectual Dark Web" whose whole shtick is being "deplatformed" by academia and the mainstream while having a massive mainstream media presence.
At a certain point they will start to ask you "where did you get this coins?" because sooner or later you'll have to convert them to real currencies
Cash is still a better option, there are plenty others: rechargeable CC, gift cards, vouchers, etc etc that work better than bitcoin, require no setup, no knowledge and can be used without hassles.
Bitcoin’s use case for this is limited. If I were to purchase a product or service that might be subject to deplatforming, it’d better be anonymous, or I risk facing the social sanctions instead. “Amezarak’s bitcoin address sent 10BTC to a sex worker, fire him” is not a much better situation.
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?
Water/power are utilities and are regulated differently than other industries.
But your general question is an open debate. If you run a hosting company do you have to host things you disagree with? If you run a transaction company doy you have to exchange with parties you disagree with? What if a certain type of transaction is too high risk, do they have to do it anyways?
Personally I'd like to see things lean more towards being agnostic to avoid amplification of the popular opinion but it isn't a cut and dry topic without corner cases or hard to define regulations.
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 companies to not discriminate.
I always look at it as: can I function in society without X. With that in mind, the general consumer can function just fine in society without hosting. Three* things off the top of my head that SHOULD be regulated as a utility but currently aren't:
ISP/Broadband access
Payment processing
Cellphone/telecom
It's exceedingly difficult to function in 2019 on a strictly cash basis. Just like it's almost impossible to function in society without broadband. On the other hand, I can get by just fine if "hosting" doesn't agree with some questionable content I want to post online. It's more likely to get me a job than prevent me from getting one....
The answer to all of your questions is..."Are you a platform?" [0]
If so, you must accept, by law, all customers/participants/users without prejudice or discrimination, and you may only deny or limit service to same after a written order from a court of law instructing you to do so. Furthermore, this rule supersedes any Terms of Service that a company may wish to enforce.
That's not what we have in the US today—but we should. My money is on the EU crafting legislation to that effect first. I'd normally expect California to implement this kind of legislation first, but given the amount of money donated by the big tech companies, I doubt it'll happen.
[0] A "platform" is any business with a userbase that exceeds 1% of the population (for non-commercial customers, e.g. YouTube/Twitter/Facebook), or in the case of a business-oriented marketplace (such as Amazon's Seller Central), 10% of the specific market the business is targeting with their platform.
If you run a shop, you can't decline service to democrats, even if disagree with them. You can't discriminate, that's the law. I don't see how is it radically different from running a hosting company.
I think PayPal might've publicly said that this is solely because porn poses a greater risks and SFW businesses just due to the amount of actually fraudulent payments and account hacking performed to pay for porn. Also, there's the less obvious issue with charge backs and people lying about getting hacked and having to deal with all that.
My experience in both digital payments and the adult space is that this line of reasoning (high risk + fraud) is outdated. The myth that adult payments are higher risk is perpetuated by those certain PSPs (CCBill, et al) that process adult payments for 15-20%, require 4% reserves, and have very high setup fees.
I would love to see an adult version of Stripe to help innovate payments in the adult industry. Paging @pc???
The problem for those providers is often not their own morals per se. But the fear of being related to certain verticals. This oftentimes has a real impact on lost deals from other companies that do have a moral judgment and wont do business with you if you are related say to marijuana selling companies.
In that case, wouldn't this be a great opportunity to start a payment processor that (mainly) deals with these "fringe" verticals? What's stopping someone from creating MoralPay (or whatever) that accepts all money from adult entertainment, dispensaries, etc. From what I understand there is a huge market for processing legal monies from these types of businesses, especially dispensaries.
Is it too difficult in 2019 to start a payment processor? Is there some legal requirement that is preventing it? Some people said that creating a new car company in today's market would be impossible (too many regulations, expense, etc.) but Tesla seems to be doing pretty well. Is there a "Tesla" for the payment processing industry?
I totally agree with you but I wonder if it’s a moral thing (like those assholes have any) or if it’s a fraud thing. I’ve worked in the online dating space and we always had trouble with payment providers due to a really high rate of fraudulent transactions.
Talk to tobacco about being deplatformed. Tobacco companies have banking, but fewer places sell cigarettes or allow smoking. It’s not discrimination —- neither cam girls or tobacco farmers are a protected class. Payment processing isn’t a right.
A chilling effect on free speech. Real alternatives to paypal and credit cards need to enter the market.
It sadly looks like my favorite hope is still not ready, but I am hopeful that this is due to slow and careful development that will lead to a stable long term outcome. https://taler.net/en/faq.html
There are alternatives. Even obvious ones like wire transfers (ACH, SEPA) which have less fraud due to enforced two-factor and better online banking cyber security. PayPal, on the other hand, is free game after you infect a Windows PC with any malware.
The problem is that your CC number is both username and password. Cardsters are looking ways to convert soft credit card money to something without chargebacks. These services are fraud and money laundering magnets. Think it as a same as publishing fake eBooks on Amazon and then sell them to launder your income clean.
3D Secure solves part of this problem. But there are two issues with it (1) some companies like PayPal have forced banks to make an exception for them (2) your credit card number can still be used in other contexts but much less conveniently than it used to be able to.
This is a real opportunity for the new cohort of challenger banks like the Cash App, Chime, N26 and Monzo. You could probably win a lot of businesses and their customers by agreeing to process payments for businesses that PayPal won't. Combine that with the fact that the Venmo-like P2P payments these startups provide are fast and free and you've got another reason for merchants to switch.
Stripe won't touch adult content, I've tried (chargeback ratio is very high, I don't blame them). Very hard to find processors who will work with adult content of any sort.
The real problem is that person to person money transfers shouldn't be prohibited unless by law. Perhaps Pornhub, in the US at least, could use something like Zelle to mediate transfers between patrons and performers (using their bank account to make Zelle requests, and then distributing that out to performers with Zelle). At least until the Fed gets their ACH modernization act together and we get near real time payments.
I think this is a US thing. I've tried to do chargebacks before in Europe because a website wouldn't stop billing me, and was told the only thing I could do is cut up the card and get issued a new one.
US PayPal is not a bank. They don't actually perform money transfers between individuals. You pay PayPal and they disburse it to your designee. There are two transactions involved.
> A chilling effect on free speech. Real alternatives to paypal and credit cards need to enter the market.
This would have been a huge problem in 2012, Now there are realistic solutions to avoid this. Just pay by cryptocurrencies on to a Coinbase Card and you can withdraw the cash and pay anonymously.
I've just discovered Coinbase Commerce [1], it's an awesome way to quickly start accepting cryptocurrencies, they offer hosted payment pages, payment buttons, webhooks, everything you want. It took me a couple of minutes to sign up and configure a hosted payment page to start accepting donations for my projects.
It's rare that I'm excited about a service, but this one appears to come with no strings attached, the wallet is even generated on the client-side.
It will have a chilling effect on Pornhub for sure, but porn and commerce speech are already both separately and specifically quite limited in their free speech protections in the U.S. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex... Put them together and it might be difficult to demonstrate that there was much expectation of free speech in this case in the first place.
There's almost no reason payment couldn't be handled with a reputable, totally decentralized stablecoin like Dai. The solutions exist, but they need to be socialized and streamlined.
The only crypto that will ever matter is one fully endorsed by banks.
At the end of the day you can't spend cryptocurrencies. When Walmart accepts a cryptocurrency then maybe people will consider actually using it. Paying people in some weird unheard of stable coin doesn't help anyone if it can't be easily converted into real currency that people use and accept.
I'm surprised that people suddenly think that banks aren't greedy enough to profit from the porn industry!
Maybe the reason PayPal and so many other companies won't service adult industries is that there are laws that put them within arms reach of criminal liability?
On a related note, this reminds me of Operation Choke Point (2013-2017), where the DOJ harassed banks that did business with customers in legal, but "undesirable", industries [1].
There are plenty of porn friendly payment providers. They just cost a lot of money relative to "normal" merchants because of a few simple reasons:
1) Chargebacks -- people chargeback the shit out of these kinds of transactions. Significant other sees the bill, gets pissed / confused about the charge / whatever
and gets it charged back.
2) Fraud -- people use stolen CC's to pay for this kind of thing.
3) Porn operators are, as a whole, rather shady themselves and present their own set of risks to a payment provider. A lot of those chargebacks in #1 are actually valid chargebacks.
You could say "use bitcoin", which would solve the chargeback problem but do nothing for fraud and shady porn sites. If anything it would exacerbate the shady behavior because consumers would have no recourse against fraud.
In short, collecting payment for porn sites a tough, costly business.
Used to work in a business that sold porn DVDs and had to deal with chargebacks. We had an inbound sales call center, and a customer service one where you could cancel.
Among the chargebacks, fraud is the most common reason code, but the amount of true fraud such as stolen credit cards is astoundingly low to the point of being almost non-existent. I would say 90% of cases were the angry spouse and the man denying it. The most common actual fraud you would see is a relative who lives in the house using it, say a grandson using grandma's credit card or adult children running up a $4k tab after their parent died.
Also I had to find friendly merchant banks, the problem with this is it is very much a two-way trust street. Just as there are tons of shady porn providers, there are tons of shady merchant banks. Some will hold your money for no reason and can jeopardize your whole business, so we always had everything spread across multiple banks but that could still be problematic.
What's the percentage of porn-related shadiness is because our society and business culture forces that? It seems similar to drug prohibitions etc. I haven't had to deal with a shady drug dealer in years now that weed is legal. Maybe if vice-clauses and the like weren't so ubiquitous we'd see more upright actors in the field.
> 1) Chargebacks -- people chargeback the shit out of these kinds of transactions.
So perhaps offer a payment system without chargebacks? Direct bank transfers also do not offer chargebacks and people use them for payment for goods and services.
> If anything it would exacerbate the shady behavior because consumers would have no recourse against fraud.
Cryptocurrency works quite a bit differently to credit cards. "Fraud" in the usual sense isn't possible: it is not possible for the service provider to take your money merely by falsely claiming that you authorised a payment. Payments can only be initiated by the client.
> Porn operators are, as a whole, rather shady themselves and present their own set of risks to a payment provider. A lot of those chargebacks in #1 are actually valid chargebacks.
Have worked in men's and women's porn. Women have this solved, all their porn is from Amazon. Historically don't chargeback so that hurdle never existed.
I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of Kindle revenue and certainly more than half of Kindle profits were just women's porn. Amazon occasionally has half-hearted crackdowns because some conservative finds it and complains.
I work with credit card data, and I'm always astounded at how much ambiguity the banks allow. We see major brands redact what's in the transaction description to the point where it may only say the street intersection of the transaction (Main & 4th), yet the banks have a call center handling questions like, 'I don't recognize this place and it's a $200 charge, so what was it?'. With simple rules to make the transaction descriptions less opaque, I'd think the banks would come out ahead.
These have existed for quite awhile. CCBill was the big player around 10 years ago. They take a slightly larger cut for the service relative to something like a Braintree or a Paypal.
But in all seriousness, imagine using the Apple card for this, and then it comes up with a logo which says exactly what it is, heh :)
The best way to tackle that is to own a media company, and have PornHub as one of its' holdings, and then the bill would appear to be a neutral 'Decent Looking Media Inc.' or something like that.
Crypto replaces a major painpoint (chargeback, getting 0% of your money) with a minor painpoint (volatility, losing or gaining <10% of your money).
There are other cryptocurrencies (eg Tether) that follow USD (eg 1 Tether is almost always equal to $1.00 USD), to avoid issues with volatility.
I guess another issue is that you'd have to pay taxes on any gains/losses between receiving your crypto and cashing it in for USD, and that would be pretty annoying to calculate manually.
I'm not the biggest fan of crypto but I think it actually solves this problem pretty well. There are probably other solutions too though (like only accept debit cards / payment methods that can't be charged back).
I lived through hyperinflation. Sometimes products were updated mid day. Comics used codes that referred to a table because it was not possible to change the price on the cover.
Would there be a way to peg valuation to clock periods? Or a certain number of transaction counts? (Ie., between the next 1000 transactions the value must be exactly 'X'.)
It would also be interesting for the protocol to gain the ability for arbitrage. Or even negotiate whom the arbitrating party would be.
Bitcoin isn't good for transactions. It's too slow, too cumbersome for he average consumer and its value fluctuates so much that you'd have to have dynamic pricing.
I love the idea of crypto currency and I really do think, one day, some form of it will be out future. But Bitcoin today just doesn't fit that bill at all.
In my recent experience, payments confirm ~5 times within an hour or so.
> too cumbersome for he average consumer
The BitPay wallet is very easy to use. And many sites now use payment URLs, so it's basically just click the link, and hit OK.
> and its value fluctuates so much that you'd have to have dynamic pricing.
I haven't seen anything in recent memory that doesn't use dynamic pricing. Many sellers say something like "this Bitcoin quote is good for X minutes". And the payment URL doesn't work if it's expired.
Their second layer network (lightning) is still very early, but it really does solve a lot of the slowness issues. I use it for purchases a few times a week, and rarely run into issues.
If you have a few minutes and a few dollars in bitcoin, install Breez wallet, and try it with a few sites like yalls.org.
Note: This obviously doesn't solve the value fluctuation problem.
Shouldn’t there be a futures market for bitcoin like there is for commodities? Where a middleman could lock in the price and do the transactions for both sides? The middleman is taking the risk and charging a fee.
Agreed. I'm very optimistic about cryptocurrency as tech in the longer term, but there are still a bunch of problems to be solved. The specific boosterism of Bitcoin is odd and probably counterproductive.
You’re on a porn site. You expect a certain amount of sketchiness. Right now, the customers are the sketchy ones. They pay for a product and or statistically more likely to do chargebacks.
I hate that any online company can set arbitrary Terms of Service which they know for a FACT I have not read (I didn't click) and then decide to pull the rug out from me at any time because of that.
These companies are seriously important in our lives. If you take away my payment source or my email or whatever you are potentially setting me on a path to ruin.
I don't know what the answer is but I do think these companies should be required to have an appeal process of some kind that's regulated. They have so much power.
Even if you did click to accept the terms of service, their server knows you probably didn’t read it. They know exactly how long it was between you being served the contract, and you accepting it.
Clearly if that time is anything under a number of minutes or hours you can’t possibly be agreeing to the contract and so they should be duty bound to refuse service.
I look forward to a test case where a judge rules a terms-of-service contract unenforceable because the vendor logged that I read it in 3.2 seconds and accepted that as me having read it.
Or maybe it’s time to start being that person again, who reads contracts slowly and in full before signing.
Actually I’d suggest we all take some time to learn the law. Actual legal practices and whatever. I’m increasingly of the impression that lawyers are the real first class citizens of a constitutional government.
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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 by people terrified of the change that brings.
The response by PayPal and many others has been to cut service. With each case, the circle of people finding themselves cut off from the traditional economy grows.
Bitcoin is often criticized for its lack of use cases. I find a very high correlation between the strength of this belief and lack of awareness of financial deplatforming in its many guises.
When is right / wrong to boycott? And who should be allowed to? (Persons or companies)
Context: in Australia the prime minister (Scott Morrison) is looking into laws to ban boycotts by companies (who are being compelled by people / public opinion)
Legal has nothing to do with it. There is an increasing degree of business that entirely revolves around feelings of people who yell the loudest.
Who could possibly threaten a bank over handling financial transactions for sex workers? And what could they possibly threaten the bank with?
Even if it's some big business like Chick-fil-A...
Presumably they only bank with one bank, and presumably the porn and sex work industry has more money at that bank than Chick-fil-A.
How's this actually work? It's not making sense to me.
Because, indeed, discrimination is illegal, but suing a bank for it is long and very difficult if your account is frozen.
It's criticized because it's useless for this use case, people involved in this scene in practice don't care about it to any serious degree beyond it being a talking point, and because anything for legally working around financial deplatforming still needs strong interfacing with the rest of the system as well as compliance with legal regimes, which BTC has nothing to say on that.
In fact, you can make your own payments platform denominated in USD and that's as useful as BTC for legal activities. So why go through the extra steps?
Building your own PayPal is way harder than building a payout mechanism for Bitcoin.
By contrast, the barrier to entry for a new system denominated in USD is much higher. People can't really start using it until there's a company around to support it, and starting a company to run a payments platform isn't for the faint of heart.
Still, I've been keeping an eye on GNU Taler[0], which seems to be tackling the technical side of that problem. I'm unclear on some of the technical details, but it's the closest thing I've found so far to digital cash.
[0] https://taler.net/en/
Good call. These pornstars should just create their own payment platform instead of going through all the hassle of using BTC.
This is demonstrably false in the amateur porn industry.
I have never understood the obsession with complying with stupid laws. The solution needed here isn't "legally" working around financial deplatforming; illegally doing so will work just fine - and also probably have the benefit, as widespread disobedience often has, of putting extreme pressure on these laws themselves.
As in you get paid 550$, by the time it's yours it's worth $600 and the next day $250 ?
[1] https://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html
I wish. But I'm afraid no one will be able to ask him anything, ever.
Videocasettes? Check.
Internet? Check.
Thank heaven for prurient smut, driver of all great technology. Without it we would still be in the stone age.
No firearms, firearm parts, or ammunition. [1]
[1] https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/What-is-PayPal%E...
The lightning network is a joke--a frankenstein "Engineering UI" layed over a system to route around bad development decisions re:block size.
That's because it is still federally illegal
There was Hatreon but Visa canceled their services for them.
I agree the porn industry is legal and nobody forces people to watch Pornhub, now I doubt the future of Pornhub. I don't use it but I support those who do under the freedom of speech.
There is one absolute in the world: porn will exist.
Look at every technology and one of the first adopters is porn. Porn has chosen the winner of most battles in tech.
Most of the marijuana industry is illegal in the US. States making it legal doesn’t change the Controlled Substances Act. As banking is federally regulated, banks don’t have the freedom to knowingly allow illegal businesses.
Porn however, is legal, and deplatforming a legal product/business is wrong in my opinion.
To be clear, I am not suggesting marijuana should be illegal at the federal level at all, only that it’s not inconsistent that a bank not serve those customers — after all they would then become criminals themselves by facilitating the moment of funds for a product that is illegal.
In my opinion, IRS successfully killed BTC use in the US by treating it as property rather than currency (for currency FX, transactions under $200 are exempt from cost basis reporting on schedule D)
https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/e-krona/e-krona...
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Honestly, the behavior of paypal is abysmal and I wish there to be a real alternative. I despise credit cards and would like to have more options.
I doubt I will ever pay anything for porn, but there are a lot of content creators that can only receive money via paypal/credit card.
I do actually think a government should have some control over its currency, but if the institutions implement their own arbitrary rules, solutions like Bitcoin are the best alternative.
A lot of porn models are becoming the content creators now. The line between your favorite adult actor and your favorite youtuber is growing thinner every day.
Which makes us wonder if one near day we'll see amateur adult content with sponsored products "... brought to you by Questionable VPN!"
Most forms of sex work are illegal in the US and other jurisdictions, and sites like PornHub are compliance nightmares where all manner of sleazy or illegal actions are likely happening. PayPal doesn’t want to be the financier for the next scandalous “amateur” producer.
If it's about this particular industry sub-group having a much-higher-than-normal rate of fraud or returns or buyers remorse or whatever causes more hassle to PayPal's processes than they're worth, then that makes commercial sense.
I tried other means such as money transfer and cash gift cards, but the exchange rate can mean to pay for $100 I have to spend $3-400!!
A proposal: sell btc giftcards. Each card will have a qr code which is a url that allows download of a wallet (with priv key) where the URL is active after payment. You can transfer the funds to your permanent wallet or spend it directly. Maybe you can even use it to pay for IRL goods somehow. Either way, the participation barrier is lowered. I heard of btc ATMs as well but I can imagine carrying one more giftcard is easier for stores than adding an ATM.
That said, I've heard that the ATMs in recreational marijuana shops are themselves significant sources revenue for the shops.
Until Bitcoin is ubiquitous (doubtful this will occur in my life time) we are still vulnerable to deplatforming when we go to exchange btc for fiat.
So this is already a solved issue. They aren't deplatforming me right now!
But the credit card industry is an oligopoly. If Visa or Mastercard don't like you, you're completely screwed as far as online payments go.
The great thing about BTC is you can send it so easily without going through all the hoops other 'systems' need. Sure, it isn't so easy to get started with BTC, but once you are in, it is a breeze.
Are there any payment options that have so far been immune to this issue?
Maybe it's worth setting up alternative payment methods, even if the percent they charge per transaction is much higher, just to ensure stability of access to funds.
Nano is instantly fully-confirmed, secure and immutable. All a model needs to do is display a Nano address (or QR code) in their webcam backdrop, or on their website. They get instant notification of payments, so have the option of instantly reacting to them. So they can be interactive with their viewers in real-time.
Nano is feeless, unlike Bitcoin, and will always be feeless. (Bitcoin's fees jumped to $6.25 on June 28 2019 so saying Bitcoin is currently 'cheap' doesn't really cover that.)
Nevermind the sex industry is probably the biggest attractor for fraudulent charges and overall sketchy business.
The US marijuana industry is, under federal law, entirely criminal, so that's kind of understandable, even if the underlying law is arguably undesirable.
Certainly there is some % of pornhub sex workers that are there against their will, but the dark web child porn networks are what our primary focus should be going against.
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Right wing propagandists are rarely deplatformed compared to the other two groups and when they are it's generally for spreading conspiracy theories (remember that people have already died because of Pizzagate and QAnon "truthers") or inciting (racial/religious/homophobic) hatred.
The difference is that right wing propagandists are also a lot more vocal than the other group (or left wingers for that matter), skewing the perception. There's a widely known joke about how many comedians have shows on mainstream platforms with titles like "Cancelled" or "Triggered", complaining about "things you can't say anymore". Also see the "Intellectual Dark Web" whose whole shtick is being "deplatformed" by academia and the mainstream while having a massive mainstream media presence.
At a certain point they will start to ask you "where did you get this coins?" because sooner or later you'll have to convert them to real currencies
Cash is still a better option, there are plenty others: rechargeable CC, gift cards, vouchers, etc etc that work better than bitcoin, require no setup, no knowledge and can be used without hassles.
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What's next? You get no water/power/whatever if you run a business that the service providers simply do not agree with?
But your general question is an open debate. If you run a hosting company do you have to host things you disagree with? If you run a transaction company doy you have to exchange with parties you disagree with? What if a certain type of transaction is too high risk, do they have to do it anyways?
Personally I'd like to see things lean more towards being agnostic to avoid amplification of the popular opinion but it isn't a cut and dry topic without corner cases or hard to define regulations.
So for instance this would be fine:
- A web hosting company refusing clients, because you can use another one
- Amazon refusing to sell the item themselves, because other companies can sell on the Amazon marketplace
- A bank refusing a client, since you can just use another bank
This would not be fine:
- Apple refusing to list an app on the app store, since no else can do so
- Amazon refusing to allow an item on its marketplace at all, since there is no other way to sell to people who buy on Amazon
- Google banning something from their search engine, since that's the only way to reach people who search with only Google
- PayPal refusing a client, since using PayPal is the only way to easily accept payment from PayPal account holders
ISP/Broadband access
Payment processing
Cellphone/telecom
It's exceedingly difficult to function in 2019 on a strictly cash basis. Just like it's almost impossible to function in society without broadband. On the other hand, I can get by just fine if "hosting" doesn't agree with some questionable content I want to post online. It's more likely to get me a job than prevent me from getting one....
If so, you must accept, by law, all customers/participants/users without prejudice or discrimination, and you may only deny or limit service to same after a written order from a court of law instructing you to do so. Furthermore, this rule supersedes any Terms of Service that a company may wish to enforce.
That's not what we have in the US today—but we should. My money is on the EU crafting legislation to that effect first. I'd normally expect California to implement this kind of legislation first, but given the amount of money donated by the big tech companies, I doubt it'll happen.
[0] A "platform" is any business with a userbase that exceeds 1% of the population (for non-commercial customers, e.g. YouTube/Twitter/Facebook), or in the case of a business-oriented marketplace (such as Amazon's Seller Central), 10% of the specific market the business is targeting with their platform.
I would love to see an adult version of Stripe to help innovate payments in the adult industry. Paging @pc???
Is it too difficult in 2019 to start a payment processor? Is there some legal requirement that is preventing it? Some people said that creating a new car company in today's market would be impossible (too many regulations, expense, etc.) but Tesla seems to be doing pretty well. Is there a "Tesla" for the payment processing industry?
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It sadly looks like my favorite hope is still not ready, but I am hopeful that this is due to slow and careful development that will lead to a stable long term outcome. https://taler.net/en/faq.html
The problem is that your CC number is both username and password. Cardsters are looking ways to convert soft credit card money to something without chargebacks. These services are fraud and money laundering magnets. Think it as a same as publishing fake eBooks on Amazon and then sell them to launder your income clean.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/26/crooks-launder-money-using...
This is assuming that banks don't just close your accounts for the same reasons...
https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/26/chase-closing-accounts-of-po...
In what world do wire transfers require 2FA?
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The real problem is that person to person money transfers shouldn't be prohibited unless by law. Perhaps Pornhub, in the US at least, could use something like Zelle to mediate transfers between patrons and performers (using their bank account to make Zelle requests, and then distributing that out to performers with Zelle). At least until the Fed gets their ACH modernization act together and we get near real time payments.
This would have been a huge problem in 2012, Now there are realistic solutions to avoid this. Just pay by cryptocurrencies on to a Coinbase Card and you can withdraw the cash and pay anonymously.
Job done.
Imagine if every time you wanted to buy a cup of coffee or a video game you had to buy a special currency to do it? I bet less of both would be sold
It's rare that I'm excited about a service, but this one appears to come with no strings attached, the wallet is even generated on the client-side.
[1] https://commerce.coinbase.com
It will have a chilling effect on Pornhub for sure, but porn and commerce speech are already both separately and specifically quite limited in their free speech protections in the U.S. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex... Put them together and it might be difficult to demonstrate that there was much expectation of free speech in this case in the first place.
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EDIT: Would love some reasoning around downvotes.
At the end of the day you can't spend cryptocurrencies. When Walmart accepts a cryptocurrency then maybe people will consider actually using it. Paying people in some weird unheard of stable coin doesn't help anyone if it can't be easily converted into real currency that people use and accept.
Maybe the reason PayPal and so many other companies won't service adult industries is that there are laws that put them within arms reach of criminal liability?
On a related note, this reminds me of Operation Choke Point (2013-2017), where the DOJ harassed banks that did business with customers in legal, but "undesirable", industries [1].
[1] https://cei.org/blog/operation-choke-point-targets-porn-and-...
[2] https://reason.com/2014/04/28/doj-operation-chokepoint-and-p...
1) Chargebacks -- people chargeback the shit out of these kinds of transactions. Significant other sees the bill, gets pissed / confused about the charge / whatever and gets it charged back. 2) Fraud -- people use stolen CC's to pay for this kind of thing. 3) Porn operators are, as a whole, rather shady themselves and present their own set of risks to a payment provider. A lot of those chargebacks in #1 are actually valid chargebacks.
You could say "use bitcoin", which would solve the chargeback problem but do nothing for fraud and shady porn sites. If anything it would exacerbate the shady behavior because consumers would have no recourse against fraud.
In short, collecting payment for porn sites a tough, costly business.
Among the chargebacks, fraud is the most common reason code, but the amount of true fraud such as stolen credit cards is astoundingly low to the point of being almost non-existent. I would say 90% of cases were the angry spouse and the man denying it. The most common actual fraud you would see is a relative who lives in the house using it, say a grandson using grandma's credit card or adult children running up a $4k tab after their parent died.
Also I had to find friendly merchant banks, the problem with this is it is very much a two-way trust street. Just as there are tons of shady porn providers, there are tons of shady merchant banks. Some will hold your money for no reason and can jeopardize your whole business, so we always had everything spread across multiple banks but that could still be problematic.
So perhaps offer a payment system without chargebacks? Direct bank transfers also do not offer chargebacks and people use them for payment for goods and services.
Cryptocurrency works quite a bit differently to credit cards. "Fraud" in the usual sense isn't possible: it is not possible for the service provider to take your money merely by falsely claiming that you authorised a payment. Payments can only be initiated by the client.
...is there a logical reason for this?
I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of Kindle revenue and certainly more than half of Kindle profits were just women's porn. Amazon occasionally has half-hearted crackdowns because some conservative finds it and complains.
I had a buddy who nearly did a chargeback against a club that put "E 11 EVN" on his bill... name is Eleven Club.
edit....or so I'm told :)
Are you sure the name isn't "Club E11Even"? Because there is a rather famous strip club in Miami named E11Even (pronounced Eleven).
That's called a hotel room.
But in all seriousness, imagine using the Apple card for this, and then it comes up with a logo which says exactly what it is, heh :)
The best way to tackle that is to own a media company, and have PornHub as one of its' holdings, and then the bill would appear to be a neutral 'Decent Looking Media Inc.' or something like that.
There are other cryptocurrencies (eg Tether) that follow USD (eg 1 Tether is almost always equal to $1.00 USD), to avoid issues with volatility.
I guess another issue is that you'd have to pay taxes on any gains/losses between receiving your crypto and cashing it in for USD, and that would be pretty annoying to calculate manually.
I'm not the biggest fan of crypto but I think it actually solves this problem pretty well. There are probably other solutions too though (like only accept debit cards / payment methods that can't be charged back).
It would also be interesting for the protocol to gain the ability for arbitrage. Or even negotiate whom the arbitrating party would be.
I love the idea of crypto currency and I really do think, one day, some form of it will be out future. But Bitcoin today just doesn't fit that bill at all.
In my recent experience, payments confirm ~5 times within an hour or so.
> too cumbersome for he average consumer
The BitPay wallet is very easy to use. And many sites now use payment URLs, so it's basically just click the link, and hit OK.
> and its value fluctuates so much that you'd have to have dynamic pricing.
I haven't seen anything in recent memory that doesn't use dynamic pricing. Many sellers say something like "this Bitcoin quote is good for X minutes". And the payment URL doesn't work if it's expired.
If you have a few minutes and a few dollars in bitcoin, install Breez wallet, and try it with a few sites like yalls.org.
Note: This obviously doesn't solve the value fluctuation problem.
How will you deal with fraudulent / sketchy site operators scamming people into sending them money via irreversible payment channels?
It should be noted that Europe runs on SEPA payment system that has irreversible transactions. It's not that much of a problem.
1. Don't pay more in one go, than you can accept losing with a shrug.
2. Check the reputation.
These companies are seriously important in our lives. If you take away my payment source or my email or whatever you are potentially setting me on a path to ruin.
I don't know what the answer is but I do think these companies should be required to have an appeal process of some kind that's regulated. They have so much power.
Clearly if that time is anything under a number of minutes or hours you can’t possibly be agreeing to the contract and so they should be duty bound to refuse service.
I look forward to a test case where a judge rules a terms-of-service contract unenforceable because the vendor logged that I read it in 3.2 seconds and accepted that as me having read it.
Or maybe it’s time to start being that person again, who reads contracts slowly and in full before signing.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Private companies have no incentive to take a stand for individual freedom and will always bow before the demands of a (loud) minority
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