But it goes beyond credit card companies too. It applies to the whole banking system.
It will soon be the case where the majority of Americans live in states where recreational cannabis is legal (it was ~1 in 3 last year but NY, NJ and others will push it over). Yet you can't use a credit card to buy cannabis pretty much anywhere AFAIK.
Worse, dispensaries have to operate on an all-cash basis because they simply can't get bank accounts.
Granted, the legality of cannabis is a grey area since states allow it but the Federal government still maintains it as illegal.
I personally don't like the financial system being gatekept for legal activity this way.
Whether or not they could is a legal question. It seems though they're happy to appease politicians and "values" voters by virtue signaling on these issues, however.
As for sex work, in particular, this one is tricky. While I fully support body autonomy and in an ideal world, sex-for-money and the like should be legal, it's not that simple in reality. Why? Because the sex industry is deeply tied to human trafficking. I have no idea how to solve that problem.
> Granted, the legality of cannabis is a grey area since states allow it but the Federal government still maintains it as illegal.
This isn't some incidental detail - it's the entire reason why the banking and credit card industry doesn't want to interact with cannabis right now.
Guess who regulates the banking industry and has authority over interstate commerce? The federal government. This particular example has nothing to do with credit card companies making a statement against cannabis, and everything to do with them not wanting to break the law.
The US is an exception in its fragmented banking system. Usually there's no conflict of legality between state and federal government, and banks are consolidated in a few big players that are pretty eager to satisfy business owners demands so having bank accounts is not usually an issue (even for somewhat-illegal or unregulated market business). Even startups nowadays are getting fast access to corporate credit cards.
But credit cards are on scope of an entirely different order of magnitude compared to a local bank checking account. Visa and Mastercard are global authorities on cashflow. And this is exactly why they're accidentally becoming regulators, they transcend the US weirdly fragmented banking system.
The clothing manufacturing industry is also deeply tied to human trafficking, but no one is talking about banning credit card transactions at the Nike store.
As for sex work, in particular, this one is tricky. While I fully support body autonomy and in an ideal world, sex-for-money and the like should be legal, it's not that simple in reality. Why? Because the sex industry is deeply tied to human trafficking. I have no idea how to solve that problem.
You can't solve that problem, but I believe you could mitigate it by making prostitution legal. Funny thing is that prostitution is legal at the federal level, it's just that all the states except Nevada have laws against it. So it's kind of the opposite of cannabis, and if the credit card companies wanted to be consistent in following federal law they would allow it.
I was initially going to say the same thing, but then I reflected on what I saw in the past.
In a very real sense, government required compliance effectively forces banks into a gatekeeper position. And while some BSA enforcers do act in their interest the same any group does ( cops, politicians, IC, doctors ) by extending their reach and influence, others are wary of expanding it beyond current regime ( which is already pretty onerous ).
It does help that banks tend to get very sensitive about some things as they do rely on deposits to survive. In one of the banks I used to work for, teller BSA training included a mention to be sensitive about customers and questions along with a story of a teller, who prodded a little beyond what the customer deemed acceptable and who then proceeded to close the account with 'none of your god damn business'.
What I am saying is that things are only the way they are, because we allow it that way. Cash is still a viable, albeit annoying choice.
And banks have been complacent until now, but the cost of complacency seems to be going up.
All that said, ABA better gets it shit together. Between high compliance burden on banks combined with low to non-existent compliance on fintech startups can quickly amount to real trouble for the banking system in US.
I find it remarkable that in the same post where you criticize those who would maintain bans on drug purchases, you end up finding your own reasons why to maintain a ban on a different vice. But sex work has externalities I guess is how you might respond, but drug bans are also based on arguments of externalized social harm.
At first I thought you were going to give an argument for removing financial gatekeeping, which I think is an inappropriate point to apply leverage towards moral ends. But -- and this is the heart of the problem everywhere -- you end up picking and choosing between vices. This maintains the processor's position as the morality enforcer, which is the entire issue: it's just one more thing that power-driven agents can strive to influence.
Dispensaries are getting wise too. Even though you can't use a credit card anywhere, they have found a way for you to use a debit card. Basically it's just like an ATM withdrawl but they tie it into the checkout flow so to you the customer, its just like you paid with a debit card.
The credit card companies, like every heavily regulated industry works like the federal government without the rules holding them back. Banking is only the most powerful hammer for it's favorite nails, but has been reluctant to use it much until recently. Once they started removing the gun industry's credit card access, it has slowly creeped everywhere. I am happy because it will only be a matter of time before people move to alternatives like crypto.
> Why? Because the sex industry is deeply tied to human trafficking. I have no idea how to solve that problem.
I mean, drug trafficking is deeply tied to human trafficking, as well, and your post concerns cannabis legalization, which is one way to combat that problem.
The reason the payments industry doesn't like sex isn't human trafficking. It's the high fraud and charge back rate.
When your parent or partner finds out you paid for an OnlyFans membership, you lie and tell them you lost your card. This happens incredibly often, and payments companies don't want to touch this.
The benefit of public oversight over free trade is accountability via due process. If you manufacture a hot dog and it's contaminated with something, or falsely advertised as kosher or halal, or doesn't meet any of a thousand little constraints in production, maintenance, delivery, and communication about the product, you are held accountable for violating the law.
Sex trade is different because of stigma and culture and prohibition. Stigma and culture have to change through education, activism, and time, but prohibition can be dealt with immediately. Create a robust framework of protections for sex work, protecting the rights of workers, and incorporate the industry into the existing legal system.
Getting rid of trafficking, pimps, and lack of recourse for workers and consumers negates far greater harms than any moral social corruption predicted by pearl clutchers.
The same applies to almost everything which society tries to cope with through prohibition. Black markets spawn second class dealers in vice, money and trade off book to the detriment of everyone except kingpins and corrupt agents of government and law enforcement. The vulnerable and desperate get locked into feedback loops of abuse and exploitation.
Legalizing all drugs and sex work almost completely eliminates the niches that perpetuate black markets. Forcing banks and legal jurisdictions to treat trade in vice equally to any other economic activity gives society the opportunity to treat drug abuse as a health issue. It enables sex workers to receive justice for abuse. It virtually eliminates the primary sources of income for cartels and kingpins. It forces culture to adapt, eventually allowing activists the opportunity to destigmatize responsible activities of adults in private.
We have laws that protect consumers and service providers, that give resource for violence and theft and fraud. It shouldn't matter what substance or sex act or hot dog brand was involved if a citizen is injured.
Adults have no business telling other adults what they can consume, or do in private. The business of government is behavior in public and in maintaining the rights of citizens in private.
We have ample and overwhelming evidence that prohibition always creates more harm than good, across thousands of years of history. It never works and always creates opportunities for abuse and horror. We also know that legalized vice results in more responsible use and less frequent consumption and fewer harms across the board.
It should be a no brainer. We should have responsible drug use education. We should have public sex work education.
Financial institutions crafting pseudo-moral gatekeeping policy from the whims of executives, pr departments, and Twitter outrage is a disgusting offense against society.
> Yet you can't use a credit card to buy cannabis pretty much anywhere AFAIK.
Every dispensary I've visited here in the northeast accepts cash and debit cards, I assume they don't accept credit due to higher processing fees and higher risk of chargebacks rather than processors being problematic (otherwise they would not accept debit since they get ran through the same system anyway).
> Yet you can't use a credit card to buy cannabis pretty much anywhere AFAIK.
The dispensaries I've been to in LA will generally take credit cards now. They round it up to multiples of 5 and give you change in cash, and I think under-the-hood they're doing a cash advance or something?
This doesn't detract from your point; if anything, it reinforces it. Just an interesting factual point.
>It will soon be the case where the majority of Americans live in states where recreational cannabis is legal (it was ~1 in 3 last year but NY, NJ and others will push it over). Yet you can't use a credit card to buy cannabis pretty much anywhere AFAIK.
There is not a single state where cannabis is legal, there are only states that have decided they won't enforce federal law.
Everybody wants to become a "reluctant regulator of the web" if it means them getting a cut of all economic activity (as the new tax man) without any liability
Let us not be naive. The decades long preference for oligopolistic rather than competitive markets is what created behemoths (both new and old) and now the only question is who of them is going to be granted the keys to the digital kingdom by fiat.
What 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. Stuff like this ruins the web.
Credit card firms should be just utility providers... Like roads are. You go on a highway, pay your toll, and noone asks you if you're driving to meet your parents, if you're going to get a prostitute or if you're going to buy drugs.
Law enforcement should deal with the endpoints, so dealers, brothels, and your moms shitty meatloaf.
HN readers are wrong to think this will be fixed when the government creates a CBDC or regulates payment providers like a utility.
In addition to the government currently blocking transactions from semi-legal industries that should be legal (cannabis), the government has a history of censoring mail mentioning contraceptives (Comstock Laws) and pressuring banks to cut businesses with legal, undesirable industries (Operation Chokepoint). A few weeks ago, an IRS agent at a service center refused to help me because they didn’t like my clothes. (I was wearing a tank top.) This is inevitable when you create government-backed monopolies.
How strange, because your examples don't make sense.
Sure, some things should be legal but aren't. It hardly seems surprising that while they are illegal the federal government tries to prevent them.
The Comstock Laws applied to all carriers (private or public) and therefore would apply to FedEx or UPS as well. They also were ruled unconstitutional over a hundred years ago.
Meanwhile, Operation Chokepoint was something that lasted less than a year before the same administration said it was an overreach and reversed it. It was an error, and between that and congressional oversight got fixed. It sucks, but it should be pointed out that, again, it was government pressure on private entities. Nothing that wouldn't be at least as good under government control.
Meanwhile, if an IRS agent refuses to help you because you're wearing a tank top, that seems like something you should escalate. But I will point out many private enterprises (airlines, etc.) have refused to serve people wearing tank tops. To the point of refusing to honor their ticket and screwing up their whole vacation with no recourse. But the only official IRS dress code deals with profane/offensive writings. Tank tops are allowed, even for IRS agents.
The 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?
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.
Very poorly. The only way it's usable is by relying on third parties, at which point you might as well use standard services. Or even actual cryptocurrencies for that matter.
Reluctant because they aren't taking the initiative on these things. Some lawmakers or activist groups created a lot of pressure and they bowed to it.
I don't think they want to be dealing with any of this as it is costly (compliance staff and lost revenue) and fraught with political peril. But when the alternative is press releases arguing that Visa is helping aid sexual exploitation, they are going to choose to wash their hands of the market segment.
Regulating is expensive and they are not being paid for it. It Same reason why online social media would do as little content moderation as they can get away with .
Jon Oliver did a great piece yesterday on the state of non English content moderation on popular social media like YouTube and Facebook : the numbers he gave were 90% users can be non English but only 13% of the moderators deployed for other languages .
The real sad part is most of the content moderators for these companies all come from developing countries like India and already know a lot of other languages better than they do English.
They only care so far as to make users and regulators think they doing enough.
I always thought that cryptocurrencies and the whole circuit around them are "useful" in the sense that they provide an alternative to the Mastercard / VISA duopoly - see all the "free speech" platform that were refused by CC circuits and at the moment are alive only thanks to crypto payments.
Obviously, a day will come when the biggest processors (ie Coinbase) will be forced to not accept certain clients / transactions, effectively destroying in practice the possibility of exchanging cryptocurrencies with dollars.
The relevant point, to me, has always been that CCs never needed to work perfectly for the payment use case, they just had to work well enough to be a viable alternative (warts and all).
The fact that some of them do fill this role and have since their creation, namely bitcoin, is what makes me pay attention to the space.
> Obviously, a day will come when the biggest processors (ie Coinbase) will be forced to not accept certain clients / transactions, effectively destroying in practice the possibility of exchanging cryptocurrencies with dollars.
This would only prevent that possibility for the affected clients and only on Coinbase.
By the way Coinbase already has the possibility to blacklist any USDC address it is required to do so by law enforcement. (USDC being a stable coins basically worth 1:1 with USD at this point). And that is because the smart contract governing USDC can have its list of blacklisted addresses updated at any moment.
So in a way the day you're talking about is already there.
Weird 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.
> Tom Mutton, a director at the Bank of England, said during a conference on Monday that programming could become a key feature of any future central bank digital currency ... what happens if one of the participants in a transaction puts a restriction on [future use of the money]? ... Sir Jon Cunliffe, a deputy Governor at the Bank, said digital currencies could be programmed for commercial or social purposes ... “You could think of giving your children pocket money, but programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets. There is a whole range of things that money could do, programmable money, which we cannot do with the current technology.”
> With cash, we don't know who is using the 100 dollar bill today ... a key difference with CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that determine the expression of that central bank liability .. also we will have the technology to enforce that ... if an advanced economy issues a CBDC, and someone in a 3rd country wants to use it, it will require the consent of the central bank of the residence of that person, therefore the degree of control will be far bigger.
Well-intentioned initiatives like Linux Foundation GHP (https://www.goodhealthpass.org/), EU digital health certificate and Apple+Android digital driver's license can all be drafted into the service of CBDC initiatives which require digital identity for digital currency wallets, unifying online and offline policy for programmable "permissions" like carbon/food quotas or other social credits. If western citizens acclimate to "showing papers" for routine daily movement, then real-time policy can be applied to those movements.
This could replace fungible currency with "colored credits", with policy attached to both the origin of money and a whitelist of possible destinations, goods or services. PayPal has amended their ToS to include merchant content regulation as a condition of payment processing.
Payments should be treated like a public utility services, so that they cannot deny customers or uses that are legal. It is a bad idea to let any private service that is so widespread and fundamental to function as a proxy regulator of speech.
This problem was very apparent when Wikileaks faced a payment blockade a decade back (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2012/07/18/wikileaks-break...). We are overdue to reign in Visa and MasterCard, just as we are with giant social media common carriers.
I wonder where this will go with the rise of Stablecoins like USDC, USDT and DAI. The traditional argument to this is just "use crypto" but the traditional counterargument is "what if BTC falls off a cliff tomorrow" or similar comments about the volatility of crypto.
But now with stablecoins, I wonder how long before all places deemed too unsavory to will just start accepting Tether or another stablecoin. You can already see the govt scrambling to patch their own weakness in this area with their own coin (forgot what it's called). The govt knows they are in the weaker position here because they have virtually zero regulatory authority over stablecoins.
OK so back in 2012, I donated to a site that was on everyone's bad list at the time. I had my bank flag my account after that. Not only that, but they texted my mother to inform her of the fraud alert/flag.
Eventually, I called them and told them to quit it. It took a weekend to clear it all up. this has been going on since November/December 2010, actually.
The intuition here is that credit-card firms have to take these precautions in order to protect against excessive chargebacks, right? Would it not be possible to create a new style of transaction that is unable to be charged back but requires account authorization and 3-days forewarning (maybe with small withdrawals first)?
I am glad this finally gets some mainstream attention. This unfair, arbitrary situation has been a thorn in my flesh for a while. Respectively, I have been avoiding using the cards of VISA and MasterCard. There are very little alternatives. Maybe crypto?
[+] [-] cletus|4 years ago|reply
But it goes beyond credit card companies too. It applies to the whole banking system.
It will soon be the case where the majority of Americans live in states where recreational cannabis is legal (it was ~1 in 3 last year but NY, NJ and others will push it over). Yet you can't use a credit card to buy cannabis pretty much anywhere AFAIK.
Worse, dispensaries have to operate on an all-cash basis because they simply can't get bank accounts.
Granted, the legality of cannabis is a grey area since states allow it but the Federal government still maintains it as illegal.
I personally don't like the financial system being gatekept for legal activity this way.
Whether or not they could is a legal question. It seems though they're happy to appease politicians and "values" voters by virtue signaling on these issues, however.
As for sex work, in particular, this one is tricky. While I fully support body autonomy and in an ideal world, sex-for-money and the like should be legal, it's not that simple in reality. Why? Because the sex industry is deeply tied to human trafficking. I have no idea how to solve that problem.
[+] [-] jonas21|4 years ago|reply
This isn't some incidental detail - it's the entire reason why the banking and credit card industry doesn't want to interact with cannabis right now.
Guess who regulates the banking industry and has authority over interstate commerce? The federal government. This particular example has nothing to do with credit card companies making a statement against cannabis, and everything to do with them not wanting to break the law.
[+] [-] villasv|4 years ago|reply
But credit cards are on scope of an entirely different order of magnitude compared to a local bank checking account. Visa and Mastercard are global authorities on cashflow. And this is exactly why they're accidentally becoming regulators, they transcend the US weirdly fragmented banking system.
[+] [-] jnwatson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|4 years ago|reply
You can't solve that problem, but I believe you could mitigate it by making prostitution legal. Funny thing is that prostitution is legal at the federal level, it's just that all the states except Nevada have laws against it. So it's kind of the opposite of cannabis, and if the credit card companies wanted to be consistent in following federal law they would allow it.
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|4 years ago|reply
In a very real sense, government required compliance effectively forces banks into a gatekeeper position. And while some BSA enforcers do act in their interest the same any group does ( cops, politicians, IC, doctors ) by extending their reach and influence, others are wary of expanding it beyond current regime ( which is already pretty onerous ).
It does help that banks tend to get very sensitive about some things as they do rely on deposits to survive. In one of the banks I used to work for, teller BSA training included a mention to be sensitive about customers and questions along with a story of a teller, who prodded a little beyond what the customer deemed acceptable and who then proceeded to close the account with 'none of your god damn business'.
What I am saying is that things are only the way they are, because we allow it that way. Cash is still a viable, albeit annoying choice.
And banks have been complacent until now, but the cost of complacency seems to be going up.
All that said, ABA better gets it shit together. Between high compliance burden on banks combined with low to non-existent compliance on fintech startups can quickly amount to real trouble for the banking system in US.
[+] [-] paisawalla|4 years ago|reply
At first I thought you were going to give an argument for removing financial gatekeeping, which I think is an inappropriate point to apply leverage towards moral ends. But -- and this is the heart of the problem everywhere -- you end up picking and choosing between vices. This maintains the processor's position as the morality enforcer, which is the entire issue: it's just one more thing that power-driven agents can strive to influence.
[+] [-] _fat_santa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] obviouslynotme|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heavyset_go|4 years ago|reply
I mean, drug trafficking is deeply tied to human trafficking, as well, and your post concerns cannabis legalization, which is one way to combat that problem.
[+] [-] kevingadd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xer0x|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] echelon|4 years ago|reply
When your parent or partner finds out you paid for an OnlyFans membership, you lie and tell them you lost your card. This happens incredibly often, and payments companies don't want to touch this.
[+] [-] robbedpeter|4 years ago|reply
Sex trade is different because of stigma and culture and prohibition. Stigma and culture have to change through education, activism, and time, but prohibition can be dealt with immediately. Create a robust framework of protections for sex work, protecting the rights of workers, and incorporate the industry into the existing legal system.
Getting rid of trafficking, pimps, and lack of recourse for workers and consumers negates far greater harms than any moral social corruption predicted by pearl clutchers.
The same applies to almost everything which society tries to cope with through prohibition. Black markets spawn second class dealers in vice, money and trade off book to the detriment of everyone except kingpins and corrupt agents of government and law enforcement. The vulnerable and desperate get locked into feedback loops of abuse and exploitation.
Legalizing all drugs and sex work almost completely eliminates the niches that perpetuate black markets. Forcing banks and legal jurisdictions to treat trade in vice equally to any other economic activity gives society the opportunity to treat drug abuse as a health issue. It enables sex workers to receive justice for abuse. It virtually eliminates the primary sources of income for cartels and kingpins. It forces culture to adapt, eventually allowing activists the opportunity to destigmatize responsible activities of adults in private.
We have laws that protect consumers and service providers, that give resource for violence and theft and fraud. It shouldn't matter what substance or sex act or hot dog brand was involved if a citizen is injured.
Adults have no business telling other adults what they can consume, or do in private. The business of government is behavior in public and in maintaining the rights of citizens in private.
We have ample and overwhelming evidence that prohibition always creates more harm than good, across thousands of years of history. It never works and always creates opportunities for abuse and horror. We also know that legalized vice results in more responsible use and less frequent consumption and fewer harms across the board.
It should be a no brainer. We should have responsible drug use education. We should have public sex work education.
Financial institutions crafting pseudo-moral gatekeeping policy from the whims of executives, pr departments, and Twitter outrage is a disgusting offense against society.
[+] [-] stooliepidgin|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shartacct|4 years ago|reply
Every dispensary I've visited here in the northeast accepts cash and debit cards, I assume they don't accept credit due to higher processing fees and higher risk of chargebacks rather than processors being problematic (otherwise they would not accept debit since they get ran through the same system anyway).
[+] [-] varispeed|4 years ago|reply
You can in the UK. Dispensaries here do accept credit cards.
[+] [-] wutbrodo|4 years ago|reply
The dispensaries I've been to in LA will generally take credit cards now. They round it up to multiples of 5 and give you change in cash, and I think under-the-hood they're doing a cash advance or something?
This doesn't detract from your point; if anything, it reinforces it. Just an interesting factual point.
[+] [-] some_random|4 years ago|reply
There is not a single state where cannabis is legal, there are only states that have decided they won't enforce federal law.
[+] [-] streamofdigits|4 years ago|reply
Let us not be naive. The decades long preference for oligopolistic rather than competitive markets is what created behemoths (both new and old) and now the only question is who of them is going to be granted the keys to the digital kingdom by fiat.
[+] [-] webspinner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|4 years ago|reply
Advertisers are also regulators. I've seen sites start heavily censoring themselves because someone complained to Google and they pulled the ads. Stuff like this ruins the web.
[+] [-] kmfrk|4 years ago|reply
I guess they started blocking things The Economist care about.
[+] [-] Isinlor|4 years ago|reply
If it's legal then banks should have no choice but to handle it.
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|4 years ago|reply
Law enforcement should deal with the endpoints, so dealers, brothels, and your moms shitty meatloaf.
[+] [-] yunesj|4 years ago|reply
In addition to the government currently blocking transactions from semi-legal industries that should be legal (cannabis), the government has a history of censoring mail mentioning contraceptives (Comstock Laws) and pressuring banks to cut businesses with legal, undesirable industries (Operation Chokepoint). A few weeks ago, an IRS agent at a service center refused to help me because they didn’t like my clothes. (I was wearing a tank top.) This is inevitable when you create government-backed monopolies.
[+] [-] HWR_14|4 years ago|reply
Sure, some things should be legal but aren't. It hardly seems surprising that while they are illegal the federal government tries to prevent them.
The Comstock Laws applied to all carriers (private or public) and therefore would apply to FedEx or UPS as well. They also were ruled unconstitutional over a hundred years ago.
Meanwhile, Operation Chokepoint was something that lasted less than a year before the same administration said it was an overreach and reversed it. It was an error, and between that and congressional oversight got fixed. It sucks, but it should be pointed out that, again, it was government pressure on private entities. Nothing that wouldn't be at least as good under government control.
Meanwhile, if an IRS agent refuses to help you because you're wearing a tank top, that seems like something you should escalate. But I will point out many private enterprises (airlines, etc.) have refused to serve people wearing tank tops. To the point of refusing to honor their ticket and screwing up their whole vacation with no recourse. But the only official IRS dress code deals with profane/offensive writings. Tank tops are allowed, even for IRS agents.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|4 years ago|reply
What does this refer to?
[+] [-] ArtTimeInvestor|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] kevinak|4 years ago|reply
Any custodial ones I have tested have worked well, though.
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lawn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epicureanideal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koheripbal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattGaiser|4 years ago|reply
I don't think they want to be dealing with any of this as it is costly (compliance staff and lost revenue) and fraught with political peril. But when the alternative is press releases arguing that Visa is helping aid sexual exploitation, they are going to choose to wash their hands of the market segment.
[+] [-] manquer|4 years ago|reply
Regulating is expensive and they are not being paid for it. It Same reason why online social media would do as little content moderation as they can get away with .
Jon Oliver did a great piece yesterday on the state of non English content moderation on popular social media like YouTube and Facebook : the numbers he gave were 90% users can be non English but only 13% of the moderators deployed for other languages .
The real sad part is most of the content moderators for these companies all come from developing countries like India and already know a lot of other languages better than they do English.
They only care so far as to make users and regulators think they doing enough.
[+] [-] curtisblaine|4 years ago|reply
Obviously, a day will come when the biggest processors (ie Coinbase) will be forced to not accept certain clients / transactions, effectively destroying in practice the possibility of exchanging cryptocurrencies with dollars.
[+] [-] dogman144|4 years ago|reply
The relevant point, to me, has always been that CCs never needed to work perfectly for the payment use case, they just had to work well enough to be a viable alternative (warts and all).
The fact that some of them do fill this role and have since their creation, namely bitcoin, is what makes me pay attention to the space.
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|4 years ago|reply
This would only prevent that possibility for the affected clients and only on Coinbase.
By the way Coinbase already has the possibility to blacklist any USDC address it is required to do so by law enforcement. (USDC being a stable coins basically worth 1:1 with USD at this point). And that is because the smart contract governing USDC can have its list of blacklisted addresses updated at any moment.
So in a way the day you're talking about is already there.
[+] [-] rektide|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mickjagger|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walterbell|4 years ago|reply
> Tom Mutton, a director at the Bank of England, said during a conference on Monday that programming could become a key feature of any future central bank digital currency ... what happens if one of the participants in a transaction puts a restriction on [future use of the money]? ... Sir Jon Cunliffe, a deputy Governor at the Bank, said digital currencies could be programmed for commercial or social purposes ... “You could think of giving your children pocket money, but programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets. There is a whole range of things that money could do, programmable money, which we cannot do with the current technology.”
At an IMF meeting last October, Swiss BIS director Carstens commented on CBDCs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVmKN4DSu3g&t=1451s
> With cash, we don't know who is using the 100 dollar bill today ... a key difference with CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that determine the expression of that central bank liability .. also we will have the technology to enforce that ... if an advanced economy issues a CBDC, and someone in a 3rd country wants to use it, it will require the consent of the central bank of the residence of that person, therefore the degree of control will be far bigger.
Well-intentioned initiatives like Linux Foundation GHP (https://www.goodhealthpass.org/), EU digital health certificate and Apple+Android digital driver's license can all be drafted into the service of CBDC initiatives which require digital identity for digital currency wallets, unifying online and offline policy for programmable "permissions" like carbon/food quotas or other social credits. If western citizens acclimate to "showing papers" for routine daily movement, then real-time policy can be applied to those movements.
This could replace fungible currency with "colored credits", with policy attached to both the origin of money and a whitelist of possible destinations, goods or services. PayPal has amended their ToS to include merchant content regulation as a condition of payment processing.
[+] [-] throwawaysea|4 years ago|reply
This problem was very apparent when Wikileaks faced a payment blockade a decade back (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2012/07/18/wikileaks-break...). We are overdue to reign in Visa and MasterCard, just as we are with giant social media common carriers.
[+] [-] _fat_santa|4 years ago|reply
But now with stablecoins, I wonder how long before all places deemed too unsavory to will just start accepting Tether or another stablecoin. You can already see the govt scrambling to patch their own weakness in this area with their own coin (forgot what it's called). The govt knows they are in the weaker position here because they have virtually zero regulatory authority over stablecoins.
[+] [-] jashmenn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] webspinner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] traveler01|4 years ago|reply
With them blocking all that kind of stuff, people will start looking another way (you know).
[+] [-] jimbob45|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h0nd|4 years ago|reply