Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?
For reasons beyond this ask, I'm needing to use a payment processor that is fine with high-risk transactions (which the porn industry certainly fits in) so started looking around what adult websites are using.
Many are using probiller, vendo and similar, since Stripe and others have rules against porn/adult industry, citing high risk transactions for this.
But then I came across onlyfans.com, which is using Stripe for its payments, although Stripe has a strict "no porn" rule in their terms of service.
How does this work? Onlyfans is by now a huge website, with lots of transactions, so it's surely not flying under the radar. It's the only adult website I could find that is using Stripe.
Is it as simple as they have an agreement with Stripe to bypass the rule? Or am I missing something else obvious here?
304 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadThe reason that rule is there is because most adult sites are dodgy.
I can very easily imagine a scenario where Patreon looked at their options and decided it wasn't worth it.
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/americas/159637...
Benjamin got banned for saying stuff like:
> Really what [Hitler] was trying to do was clean Germany, clean it of the parasites, of the fleas. He did not hate Jews. He hated filth and he was trying to clean up.
and is similarly banned from Facebook, YouTube, PayPal and Twitter. They just don't have company-pays forced arbitration provisions that can be turned back on the company like Patreon does.
DoorDash had the same DDoS issue with their arbitration clause, no free speech issues required. https://www.vox.com/2020/2/12/21133486/doordash-workers-10-m...
> Benjamin has told his audience on YouTube that it is “infinitely more probable” that the Nazis over-worked Jews to death during the Holocaust than it was that they subjected them to execution in gas chambers. He went on to say that he was “a big fan” of Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler’s art.
>“Really what he was trying to do was clean Germany, clean it of the parasites, of the fleas. He did not hate Jews. He hated filth and he was trying to clean up,” Benjamin said.
>In another stream, he advocated conspiracy theories alleging massive Jewish influence in pornography, Hollywood and media, also alleging that Jews are secretly responsible for education programs that help children understand LGBTQ identities.
>“Nobody wants any of it and it’s all Jews!” Benjamin yelled into the camera. “It’s war Jews [and] sodomy Jews and they’re having a family feud at our expense.”
This is not sounding to me like someone who is trying to carefully describe Hitler's mindset, but instead someone with a similar mindset?
And still today, porn accounts are next to netflix & co on the DNMs. It's a sought after thing that's digital. Carding material products is much harder and riskier.
His wife looks at the statements and asks him what he’s up to.
He denies having made the payment so the wife initiates a chargeback.
It was a hilarious moment but I was scared to death we would be found out. Nothing ever happened but somebody got a charge.
AFAIK, 1-900 numbers only worked by billing you on your phone bill.
Call collect!
Even better, at least in the UK, the bank had tools to find out what the subscription was for and whose name it was in,
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pa8xy9/is-the-doj-forcing...
Also, it surely makes them a ton of money.
While I am aware of the adult content on the site, the only people that I know of that use OnlyFans are subscribing to physical training, musical talent, or other creative content. Unironically.
Your tax dollars at work.
...creating high-tech well-paying jobs in the local area. Is that a problem?
No doubt the guy is probably not a saint but the article starts with the site being worth "between $810m and $936m." and ends with him pivoting into drug smuggling? according to "xoxgoldenfox"?
Anecdote: we talked with every payment processor around for a product we were making that involved storing and spending value from a digital wallet. It was close enough to various Visa/MC rules and money transmitting statutes that the usual response was arguing for a few weeks about why we comply until higher management decided something akin to: well if you had a lot of volume we’d take the risk dealing with it, but you don’t so it’s not worth our time.
Last ditch effort was Stripe, who said: sure! And we asked again with more detail, making sure they saw the same issues and wouldn’t make us tear it down in a month. They said: sure! Did it a third time higher up for diligence, and finally just came to the conclusion they have different priorities and are getting big enough to use their scale to throw some weight around for all the small merchants.
There's a bit more nuance there, as the rules actually come from the bank issuing your merchant account, rather than some master "Visa" entity. So if you're a big player in the adult game you're going to work to find the right banks willing to issue you merchant accounts.
Those banks will also have a compliance department which will look at your content and make sure it's inline with what they're willing to allow. If you want to make adult content where consensual adults do things together there's one group of banks you can go to. If you want to make niche content with acted out violence and such you're going to find a much smaller group of banks willing to issue you merchant accounts. Or possibly no banks at all. It's interesting that the thing deciding what adult content will be easily monetizable on the internet is small merchant account issuing banks.
On the charging side I believe Stripe uses Wells Fargo, which has pretty strict rules.
Source: worked for one of the large players in the adult market a while back. Some info may be dated.
Note: one of the fun things about credit cards is that Visa and MC are issued by banks, and Amex is issued by Amex. There was a new fraud style a few years ago that amex was able to lock down pretty quick due to its centralized nature, while Visa and MC had a harder time.
Note2: I may define fun differently than you.
https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/about-visa/visa-rules...
yet a search for "adult" only yield one result, and it's in the context of a card for minors.
My guess is most of traffic is various intelligence agencies copying all other traffic in the world.
That's all back of the envelope calculations off course.
[1] https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review#traffic
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/319732/daily-time-spent-...
It ends up with "somewhere between 4 and 15 percent of web use involves porn."
There's some interesting sub-stats on percentage of porn related searches, etc.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201611...
For example:
"Ogas and Gaddam also tracked web searches from July 2009 to July 2010. The proportion that involved porn: 13 percent.
Finally, they interviewed officials at the major search engines about the prevalence of porn searches. Those estimates: 10 to 15 percent."
3hrs per day on Facebook and Netflix and Youtube corresponds to very few search engine searches. Very few people are spending a comparable fraction of time on porn; it's a self rate-limiting activity.
Beyond leisure time, a huge portion of people use Internet for work some or all day.
Millions of people stream music all day.
Porn is the least optimized search target so you'd expect more porn searches per session than other topics searches per session.
4+% of "things people do" in some sense? Sure.
Somewhat old statistics here: https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-youtube-gobble-up-half-of-... and https://thenextweb.com/apps/2014/11/21/netflix-now-accounts-... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/05/28... (all from Sandvine, mind you)
I would have to imagine that, also being a streaming video service, PornHub and the rest of MindGeek's properties consolidated probably take up another decent portion.
Those of us just posting on Internet forums, reading news, and sending emails use a tiny minuscule portion of Internet traffic comparatively. There's a reason ISPs want to charge extra/differently for high bandwidth streaming video: It's the vast majority of what's loading up their networks.
Why not just charge by the byte and be done with it?
Internet billing should look more like your electric and natural gas bills.
Utility systems in most countries work on a grid system: natural-gas and electricity is pumped into the grid by supplier/producer companies, managed by the grid-infrastructure people, and measured at the point of consumption. This works because both natural-gas and electronic-potential are both fungible and do not originate on your utility-grid company's premises (assuming your utility-grid company is not also an energy-producer). Bytes transferred over the internet are not fungible, so it is incorrect to compare residential gas and electricity billing to residential Internet billing.
Also consider that just as data itself isn't fungible, the value of that data varies tremendously: A high-quality VOIP connection is probably 128kbps and needs modest latency needs, but it absolutely has to always work - whereas Netflix et al. is high-bandwidth but not latency sensitive and occasional outages and poor routing is acceptable; disregarding network QOS, I'd still gladly pay far more per-byte for a hyper-reliable VOIP 128kbps connection than a 1Gbps link for Netflix.
Also, note that Netflix gets its CDN boxes hosted for free. It "lets" ISPs host them, rather than paying for colocation space. Charging equally for data use regardless of CDNs or not would rebalance this effect.
And finally, the largest cost for building out residential ISP networks is last mile. It's the most expensive part to build, maintain, and upgrade to support increasing usage. The CDN boxes are on the far end of this, so mostly irrelevant anyways to this point.
To the point that a very small ISP that is singlehomed to a Cogent or HE type transit provider, can halve its monthly IP transit bill by joining an IX such as the NWAX and establishing settlement-free peering BGP sessions with just google and netflix.
I know that some provide methods whereby a site can have the actual payment entry form served and processed by the payment processor instead of by the site's own server, so you'd be able to see from the user's end where they payment is actually being processed.
I've never done a survey, but just anecdotally most sites I've encountered seem to not be using that option. Their payment entry form comes from their own site and posts back to it, where their own back-end handles dealing with their payment processor's API.
Using the method where the user interacts directly with the payment processor does have the advantage that it simplifies PCI compliance. If your systems never even see the credit card, just receiving a token from the payment processor at the end of the transaction that you can use to initiate subsequent on-file or recurring transactions, most of PCI goes away for you.
On the other hand, that also means that you are stuck with that payment processor for on-file or recurring transactions for that customer. Your token from payment processor X is completely worthless for doing charges at payment processor Y.
If I was in a business that has a significantly above average risk of running into payment processor trouble so I might need to change processors, I'd want to store the credit cards myself. That makes it possible to change payment processors without having to get all of your subscription customers to come back and re-enter credit card information [1].
[1] Well...at least for now. I'm not sure if that will still be possible if the Visa stored credential framework ever actually becomes required. Briefly, under the SCF requirements when you store a credit card, you have to send a flag to Visa with the transaction saying you are storing it. On subsequent on-file or recurring transactions, you have to send a reference to the transaction that stored the card.
The problem is that you reference that transaction by sending Visa's transaction number. But Visa's number for transactions is generally not the transaction number you get from your payment processor. The payment processor has its own transaction numbers and those are what you see.
I believe MC is also doing SCF. Not sure about Discover and Amex. It was supposed to become mandatory something like two or three years ago, but payment processors kept asking for extensions.
I'm a developer so looking at what kind of request the application is doing when interacting with anything involving payments. In the case of OnlyFans it was easy as they make direct requests to Stripe. In other cases, I've looked at the data structures stored in the current page by using the JS console and compare it to the API docs of various payment processors.
If this were true 1000s of large companies would not be PCI compliant.
The purpose of PCI compliance is to protect the number/info, so how would Stripe (and similar) get approved if they're creating a payment widget that allows third parties to snoop card numbers?
Is this a PCI loophole, or is there some technical barrier preventing the third-party site from getting access?
Maybe there should be? If it's important to know what site you're looking at in a top level page, the same thing should apply to an embedded one.
Often when I learn about web security, it seems like the user agent abdicates responsibility to be an agent for the user.
Probably a case where it's more obvious in hindsight why this is important, but it could still be retrofitted. Maybe there's a better way, but for example, a browser could make the address bar a breadcrumb widget using multiple URLs to depict the iframe nesting.
How do you prevent a website from faking the address bar? The only reason that you can trust address bars right now is that the website can't draw outside the content frame. There's already attacks on mobile[1] involving fake address bars because the address bar can be hidden, allowing the site to draw a fake address bar in its place. The only secure way to do it would be to opening another window (like when you try to use sign in with google), but that still has the issue that lots of legacy sites won't use this security feature, so users will still happily enter in their credit card numbers.
[1] https://jameshfisher.com/2019/04/27/the-inception-bar-a-new-...
Well, my suggestion was to add additional URL(s) into the same address bar that already exists at the top. (Hence the breadcrumb widget.)
My original motivation was to not wreck the layout of pages that are currently counting on the inside of the iframe to be big enough to hold all the expected content.
But it also protects the additional URL(s) from being drawn over because you already can't draw over the address bar.
That mobile address bar hiding hack is pretty scary, though.
Also there is not only Stripe out there!
Btw. you are in the wrong forum. Look on gfy.com forum for example
Take a look at the requests their frontend is making and you'll see they are indeed using Stripe. At least they were last time I checked.
> Also there is not only Stripe out there!
Indeed, I listed some of the alternatives in my opening question, but is besides the point anyways, here we're discussing Stripe + OnlyFans.
> Btw. you are in the wrong forum.
Judging by the number of upvotes and comments, no, I'm not.
> Look on gfy.com forum for example
Thanks for the pointer, I'll take a look there.
In the adult/porn world, there's a high amount of chargebacks and fraud relative to low-risk industries like SaaS software. If you pass a certain chargeback threshold in the adult industry, your account is terminated, and no payment processor will do business with you.
To reduce the likelihood of passing that chargeback threshold and being banned, OnlyFans uses "cascading payments", which essentially load balances the payments across multiple payment processors in order to reduce their chargeback ratios across their merchant accounts.
The payment is either processed by Stripe, Securion, CCBill(the leading payment processor for adult), or another company.
Last time I checked the network requests, I noticed it was storing the card on Stripe, CCBill, and Securion, but using CCBill or Securion to process the payment.
I think Stripe is there for models on the site who don't sell adult content. OnlyFans probably does a check to see if the page is adult-related and if it is, then routes it to the correct payment processor.
It's load balancing.
Source: Have a 30M+ people site that has been pinged by VISA itself for chargeback ratios ...
Who knows - I'm just spitballing. But there are signals one could look at.
In a past life I worked for a place who had a few hundred processing accounts to load balance it all out because their chargeback rates were way too high. If an account gets close, you just don't use it for a month, or you throw a bunch of "safe" recurring charges at it to dilute it, or you hold a batch and send them through right before the rollover. Lots of ways to play number games.
Most of the execs did go to prison though, so don't take this as advice, but to be fair, the processors are the ones who told them to use those tactics.
Ironically, they made so much money doing their regular business the owner bought a small US based bank and was running online poker processing through it.
When "black friday" in the poker world happened, the bank failed and everything fell apart, but so far as I know, no one involved was ever charged with anything related.
To be clear, it was a bad company. However, the bank 100% knew what was going on and the merchant accounts 100% knew what was going on. So long as they were making money, and chargebacks make them a lot of money, they were happy. In my opinion the people running the company were just naive enough to not know how to cover their asses as well as the money guys.
In the process two state AG's lost their careers, multiple US senators were implicated, a bank collapsed, there was kidnapping, human trafficking and drug running, and in the end created urban legends of gold bars being buried in the mountains to hide it from being seized by the feds.
I don't know of anywhere that has it all written out, but here's a related NYT story with a fair bit of it: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/business/in-utah-a-local-...
https://www.g2llc.com/solutions/monitoring-solutions/merchan...
In EU they do, and if a string, or image on the site is not 'okay', you get denied for processing. And that's website wide, not just a single page. So in that line, I don't understand how stripe does this 'on the radar'.
Im curious about how to use Stripe to only store cards and let other processors make the charge. Would anyone have more info on this? Greatly appreciate it.
1) Have the user submit their card info on your payment page
2) Simultaneously send the card info to the 3 processors
3) Then process the charge through just 1 of the 3 processors, leaving the others open to be used later
(At least with Stripe) the process of saving a credit card to Stripe and actually charging the card are 2 independent API calls. Nothing stops you from saving card info to your payment processor(s) without actually charging it.
With stripe.js, you send the cc info directly to stripe from the browser. Stripe returns an identifier which you can use in the future to charge the card.
Assuming other payment processors work similarly, you could easily send the credit card details to multiple payment processors directly from the browser to the payment processors, and then store the card identifiers from each processor (not the card number) in your database to charge it at a later date.
They would be upset or bring you into PCI scope if you were modifying or tampering with their single input SDK to send cardholder data elsewhere.
Then you have an option to make the payment on Braintree or the other payment gateway using that gateway's token.
I was thinking of Stripe.js v2 which doesn’t require an iframe / supports custom payment forms.
How would the bank even know that transactions for adult-content pages were routed away from it? Wouldn't they just all come in as "OnlyFans wants $20 from card XYZ?"
> I think Stripe is there for models on the site who don't sell adult content. OnlyFans probably does a check to see if the page is adult-related and if it is, then routes it to the correct payment processor.
Very smart.
We built an adult ecommerce site (purely toys for purchase, no porn) and because other adult toy sites had been successful on Stripe, Stripe assured us this wouldn't be a problem.
Six months and several million dollars processed later, Stripe informs us we're going to be deplatformed because Wells Fargo (their banking partner) had reviewed our account (apparently because of its volume) and determined we violated their standards because of the nature of the toys.
We did a bit of back and forth where Stripe suggested we alter the colors available (seriously) to assuage Wells Fargo's puritanical concerns, and Stripe insisted it wasn't _their_ moralizing, but rather Wells Fargo (paragons of fucking virtue as they are), but we weren't willing to compromise on the nature of our product or have our product's options or colors dictated to us by one of the most corrupt banks on the planet.
We ended up deplatforming and moving to a high-risk processor who was willing to match our competitive Stripe rate. That processor sucks and their fraud protections are weak and their interface is garbage, but they're not telling us how to run our business.
Was mostly disappointed that we went through an arduous review process with Stripe beforehand and received assurances we'd be fine since our chargeback rate is insanely low and we ship actual physical product and have no nudity on our site, but alas.
> That processor sucks and their fraud protections are weak and their interface is garbage
I have three guesses and they're all CCBill.
What? Like flesh colored was ok but definitely not green ones or something?
>Our banking partners recently notified us that they are no longer willing to support the sales of realistic sex toys. I understand that your products were designed to depict the body parts of mythological and fantastical creatures, and we have indicated this to our banking partners in an effort to advocate for continuing to support your business here on Stripe. As a result of these discussions, our banking partners have agreed that they are willing to continue supporting your business as long as you are not selling products that are colored such that they might be mistaken for human flesh.
I wonder if this would ever happen in Europe. I somehow feel that we’re more... open to these things. Do you know about Klarna?
Dalenys ( https://www.dalenys.com/ ) -> natixis belgium -> natixis -> bpce group ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_BPCE )
I've had awkward talk with them (mostly around the fact that I should not point out their parent group brand much near the adult content), but never in a million years would they tell me what color a dildo should be.
Adyen lists "Adult entertainment, websites & content (such as)" as not allowed. https://www.adyen.com/dam/jcr:47f292a9-c9e2-4a69-8592-2e15ff...
Klarna lists "Adult, sexual or pornographic products and services, including live web cam" as not allowed. https://cdn.klarna.com/1.0/shared/content/policy/ethic/en_gb...
Both of them expand it more to cover everything possible around adult content and the like.
Whether they fly under "novelty items" or not, idk.
Well, I think it might be the opposite of that:
> I understand that your products were designed to depict the body parts of mythological and fantastical creatures
Not that it matters, but reading the comment you replied to, it sounds like they are not shaped like human genitalia...
What is the threat model, exactly? What eventuality is the bank seeking to avoid?
Are there edge-case regulatory issues at play? Are there moral-consumer groups out there that run public pressure campaigns against banks that transact on adult toys that look too realistic? Is a corporate lawyer somewhere worried about photos of a realistic-looking appendage used explicitly being tied back to the bank -- but if it's painted green they can plausibly argue "hey it's definitely not real, look it's green!"?
This just feels like such a spectacularly arbitrary line that I'm fascinated by the thought process.
<golf clap>
- pretend to fuck a human? No. Don't want to encourage that.
- Fuck a unicorn/dragon/Dionysus? Sure, why not...
Who is conservative enough to want to discourage the one thing literally required for humanity to survive; and yet is OK with mythical creatures?!?
Someone on a moralizing crusade would probably label the company as supporting bestiality.
The boss ten years ago now dead said if it looks like a penis and is the right color of a penis then we can't sell it. Therefore, you gotta change the color. - Wells Fargo, probably.
The threat is that someone in compliance or legal doesn’t have enough real work to do so has to do “something” to keep their cushy job.
I'm crying. This is so ridiculous it crossed the line from appalling into hilarious.
You haven't sued over this which is a shame. Think of the comical email threads that would've been unearthed during the discovery process!
But when I think of people pretending to have sex with dragons ... that’s kinda messed up.
I guess “acceptability” is like pornography... you known it when you see it.
Texas, for example, still has an idiotic law on the books that possession of more than 6 dildoes is illegal.
Because of that, many online sex toy shops simply will not ship anything to Texas.
The law has been struck down in US Federal court, but there have been convictions in state courts despite that.
Talking about the raid on Forbidden Fruit in Austin, TX (Caution: NSFW): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15365042198306...
...the confiscated items were paraded in front of a Grand Jury tasked with determining whether they were obscene...
Real pain because Stripe are one of the better providers to integrate with :(
I also find it surprising the amount of back bending people will do to say that payment processors are only doing it because the transactions are high risk. Your story, the thousands of other public stories, and the payment processors themselves have made it absolutely clear that it isn't about the transaction risk. It's them imposing their religious beliefs upon others.
With sex being such a huge part of our lives, why aren't we bending out backs to _help_ the sex industry thrive, instead of defending corrupt oligopolies?
There are dark sides. It is not the friendly industry oft portrayed. It is an industry that thrives on the young and naive. It is regulated because it needs to be. Most common complaint heard by lawyers in the field: "I did the shoot, the movie is on the website, but I haven't been paid." Followed worryingly by: "They said I had to because I had signed a contract."
The advice I give to anyone going to work on their first porn shoot: Bring a friend. Someone older, with a car, who will be on the set with you at all times.
EDIT: I would like to expand my previous comment though. Whenever prostitution is legalized we see massive improvements in the lives of sex workers. It seems clear to me that further reducing the demonization of sex, sex workers, etc would lead to a better work place in those industries for similar reasons. There may be a baseline of evil, for the reasons you point out. I don't think that should stop us from working to at least reach that baseline, rather than just leaving the people and businesses that inhabit that crucial landscape to rot.
What do we mean by "sexism" here? You don't think it's enough that men would like to have sex with attractive women? Or is that fact itself sexism?
Some of it maybe. But not the toy selling business being discussed.
Prohibition creates problems. It doesn't solve them. Prohibiting anyone from using conventional payment infrastructure simply pushes them into the arms of the (sometimes abusive) people who have the resources to work around the system. In this scenario, an individual can't work around the system. The nameless/faceless owners of the large porn groups can.
This situation creates an inherent power imbalance that incentivizes coercion.
In the Snapchat/Onlyfans model, coercion is eliminated by virtue of allowing people to express themselves, when they want and as they want in the privacy of their homes. They are the directors, gaffers, editors etc. and no one else can tell them what they can or can't do.
A decentralized system is better at taking power away from those objectively awful people than any regulation or personal tips or oversight could.
It's little consolation for the vast sex industry that it isn't Stripe et al's fault that they are deplatformed.
Because the "sex industry" is a bunch of corrupt oligopolies?!
I mean, we're talking about a business that thrives on human trafficking and exploitation and preying on the weak and vulnerable and defenseless. We're talking about an industry whose business model depends on an endless supply of defenseless gullible victims that see their lives thrown into the furnace to keep it running for just another instance.
Was it so long ago that one of the biggest porn sites in the history of the internet was caught knowingly hosting and refusing to take down videos of abducted underage girls getting raped?
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/pornhub-petition-ra...
The banking industry is not innocent, but let's not pretend the sex industry is a paragon of virtue in comparison.
This is why banking is a rent-seeking and though we need the financial industry they are ghoulish vampires sucking the lifeblood out of everything they touch.
/rant
This isn't to suggest that WF should run their merchant processing business with no one watching for fraudulent or wantonly scam transactions, but to step in out of nowhere because the volume of actual real charges for real customers for real products was too high and you were busy clutching your pearls over what was being sold is just insane. As if it could somehow splash back on to Wells Fargo and, what, further sully their reputation?
"Sure they may ruin people's lives and spawn fake accounts to hit numbers and silence anyone who speaks up and evict people incorrectly but at least they don't process transactions for flesh colored fantasy sex toys. That, sir, would be a bridge too far."
Do we, though? I don't know whether the answer is distributed blockchains, or the Department of the Treasury creating an API for USD, or both; but the current banking system seems to me like the legacy code of feudal landed aristocrats. (I will never stop being disappointed that we didn't let the financial system crash in 2009.)
The current system has zero privacy, so no change there.
Not seeing the downside.
Federally illegal activity like marijuana wouldn't benefit, but most things would.
Generally speaking, most people would consider "not usable in crime" to be a feature rather than a bug. ;)
Marijuana sales, for example, seem extremely popular.
Just because there’s a law in place at some remote level of jurisdiction doesn’t mean it’s just, or has popular support.
Widespread consensus heavily influences prosecutorial discretion though, which determines in practice what is or isn’t permitted by society.
The law is not a computer program, and it is applied entirely arbitrarily.
Your comment makes no sense at all. For something to be a crime it has to be explicitly defined in law. Consensus has zero to do with it. Either there is a law, or there isn't. The whole point of rule of law is that you don't get to pick and choose which law applies to you in a given day of the week.
Also, Prohibition.
The law is not some inviolate thing in a society. Many millions will happily ignore unjust laws if they feel they shouldn’t be laws. More alcohol was consumed during Prohibition in the US than before it was banned.
If the law is not enforced, then it does not exist. The only real law is the one that you see day-to-day. So shooting black people is fine (in the US), and you can buy weed in shops (in a few places).
The feds are very much into deplatforming people for legal activity, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
I don't understand your train of thought. I mean, you are arguing for a monopoly controlling a centralized service just because one of the many freely available payment platforms you personally choosed may have terms of service you might break?
How is that a solution?
It seems you are not arguing for a solution to the problem you framed. You're instead confusing wishful thinking with a solution to the problem. I mean, your suggestions don't even qualify as unintended consequences: they are only unrealistic and absurd expectations from a reform that has absolutely no relation to the problem.
The problem is the account. I do not want an account in the federal reserve or anywhere so closely coupled with the government. Nor do I want an account with a public ledger or any way distributed which doesn’t allow for transaction reversals (theft) which rules out blockchain.
Actual banks are necessary.
In cases such as this one it strikes me as really odd: I would say that as citizens you have much more leverage over the government's actions than over whatever bank does (including handing over your data to the government). Thus, how is it better to have an account in some random bank than in the federal reserve (or whatever)?
With Snowden's revelations of things we mostly already knew, we can see that we don't really have much leverage over government abuse of power to collect and misuse data. The government is already doing broad data collections from private companies using secret courts... it would be a whole lot worse if the government already possessed the data.
With private banks, I can choose which one I use. There is at least some motivation for that bank to be on my side, and I don't have to wait for an election cycle and hope that my issue fits in with my side on other issues and that side gets >50% after 2 or 4 years ... my bank does something I don't like and I can switch today.
I don't trust my government to do a good job doing anything, or for anything my government does to not be vulnerable to political destruction (just look at the post office).
Banks are required to report transactions above $10k, my bank knows when I go out to buy too many gas station snacks at 2am, my government does not.
Our housing. Our utilities. Our communications. Our food. Everything is financed. There is debt financing these companies. Many of whom would not exist. As one of my professors told me - you see a building, I see a mortgage.
Most of our economy would vanish without credit. Take a look at Islamic economies where debt and credit is fairly circumscribe and you see they much much smaller economies (ex-petro-dollar financed economies).
Block chain is just a payment mechanism? It is not even that, yet. There is a LOT more to finance than moving money around. That is maybe generously speaking 5% of global finance. I would say say more like 1%.
Sigh.
Why, yes? Isn't it blatantly obvious? What exactly leads you to believe we don't?
> I don't know whether the answer is distributed blockchains, or the Department of the Treasury creating an API for USD, or both;
I'm dumbfounded how someone even comes close to believe that any one of these ideas comes even close to provide the service that financial institutions provide. Either you have a very specific and very niche usecase in mind, or maybe you have absolutely no idea about the services that financial institutions provide to society.
> but the current banking system seems to me like the legacy code of feudal landed aristocrats.
This comment leads me to believe that you are confusing stuff that has no relation whatsoever. Your dislike of caricatures and ideological strawmen you associated with financial services has absolutely no relation with the services provided to society by the whole banking industry. Just because you don't like Scrooge McDuck that doesn't mean most of us don't depend on loans to, say, buy a house or a car or store our savings or pay for everyday stuff.
And you're sure you're not describing the current day, but instead some hypothetical bad scenario if we had no financial sector? It seems to me that if we have this problem now and without a financial sector, that's not really related to them at all.
Your posts are interesting, reasonable and founded in facts. That said, I think there's an underlying emotion in other posts: fed up with the discrepancy between the everyday slough to improve your life, but then read about the money games that are played between commercial banks, the central banks and government.
Want to look or feel virtuous even though you are a horrible selfish person? Are you not openly having sex with more than one person? With prudity you are qualified! It works by reducing virtue into who you have sex with there by freeing you to commit crimes while considering yourself righteous and decent! Order today!
Sadly mass adoption is a bit more distant.
In other words, Stripe allows OnlyFans because Wells Fargo has been bought off on the side. Ergo, Wells Fargo doesn't complain anymore.
How much would that need to be with Wells Fargo? 10 million per year? 50 million? Does OnlyFans make enough to afford 100 million per year?
I don't follow OnlyFans progress and I have no idea how many "content creators" they got and what is the "fanbase", but if a 20yo nobody with a nice body can take $1m in 24h (then I assume that is with 1-3-6-... months subscriptions)(so she won't bring in another $1m the next day as well). OnlyFans keeps 15-20-25%? And Stripe/WF share a 1-2%? And OnlyFans has 10-20 people of that "caliber" like Mrs Thorne? They won't complain for a long time.
I assume that the OP writing about millions, he/she means revenue, not Stripe/WF profits from the fees.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/26/entertainment/bella-thorn...
Edit: I couldn't remember the site, I DuckDuckGo-ed and this piece of news appears in many sites, I chose CNN as I didn't recognize most other "celebrity news" sites.
She was pretty risqué in her social media photos/videos before onlyfans and garnered quite a following online because of it. Most of her popularity online had nothing to do with her acting career at all.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-08-28/...
The only "positive" thing in her towards contributing to a better humanity is the words of donating to charity (aka tax breaks).
Having sex in front of a camera is a profession, I get that, but she is still a nobody. A nobody with money. But still a nobody (in my book). I am not forcing anyone to have the same criteria of what I consider as "decent human being" that I have developed as my silly(?) standards.
Nothing negative for her, but definitely nothing positive for her either. Just a zero.
Are people going to stop using Wells Fargo because they very indirectly help in the commerce of sex toys?
A cynic would probably say that, like many such issues, it's ultimately about maintaining control over women.
I'm genuinely mind blown by this.
What are the ownership restrictions? Is it blanket or just to certain categories or sizes of toys?
> State Representative John Rogers of Birmingham has repeatedly introduced legislation to repeal the ban, but each bill has been defeated.
> Exemptions exist for "bona fide medical, scientific, educational, legislative, judicial or law enforcement purposes."
It looks like they're sold as educational devices or something equally absurd, fake pretext and all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_obscenity_statute
> In Burleson in 2004, Joanne Webb, a mother of three and a former schoolteacher, faced up to one year in prison for selling a vibrator to two undercover police officers posing as a married couple at a private party.
> In 2007, a lingerie shop in Lubbock was raided, and items "deemed to be illegal by the Texas Penal Code" were confiscated. The clerk on duty at the time was arrested and may have had to register as a sex offender.
What the fuck?
Texas one seems like it was ruled unenforceable in 2008.
Looks like its never been enforced though. Really though laws that are not enforced are a bad thing because some day they could selectively be enforced. Also because they are not enforced and hence not affecting anyone, no one cares to get rid of them.
"The Obscene Device Law is a Texas statute prohibiting the sale of sex toys. The law was introduced in 1973, and was last updated in 2003. While the law was never formally repealed, in 2008 a U.S. District Judge released a report declaring it to be "facially unconstitutional and unenforceable"."
Given the context I thought this was a humorous typo for 'farcically'. but it appears to refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_challenge
If that is the reason for the former, it's probably the reason for the latter too.
Thanks for sharing
very few people or orgs have principles. What they say are principles turn out to be just a blob of preferences that change with the direction of the wind.
And quite frankly, Stripe is big enough these days to push back hard against Wells Fargo, if they really wanted to. Wells Fargo definitely does not want to lose the Stripe account. As most things in life there is shared responsibility there.
Rules like Stripes (+ Wells Fargos) are not interpreted like code, everything is open to negotiation and degrees of freedom depending on the relationship established.
Seriously that is why honor based lending died to banks centuries ago. Relationship driven is a fucking stupid way to do finance.
I know they'll do all sorts of shit for me because of the hard (account age, $$) and soft (personal) relationship.
But my point is more broad - API agreements come to mind as an example, just because that is a space I've played in prior jobs. "But the API Ts&Cs say you can't do xx but they are doing xx". Yeah, they have a relationship and got a dispensation.
Not enough market housing, offer public/subsidized options. Not enough low- or no-cost private education, offer public schools. Too little affordable healthcare/insurance, offer Medicaid, a 'public option', single-payer. Public transport.
Should the government offer a 'public option' payment-processor of last resort, with guaranteed service for all legal but unpopular businesses? A service that couldn't reject camgirls, weed-sellers, Alex Jones, gun shops, etc?
The problem is that people want the convenience credit cards use, and don't want to wait for the check to clear to get their stuff.
Then, on top of all of that, you can't run a business through a personal account. So you still require a business type bank account, and the above options are terrible for any eCommerce site, which is pretty much the only kind of business that will be discussed here on HN.
You can also cash a money order without a bank account.
The market is afraid to provide them to unpopular, but legal services. Earning a living is an important human right.
So perhaps the government – maybe the Department of Health & Human Services, or the Fed – should provide a alternative to protect this human right.
Also see Bank of North Dakota: https://bnd.nd.gov/. Municipal banking is also starting to come back in vogue. And why not? Why should Wall St. earn interest from our tax dollars? That's just silly.
Ever heard of CCBill?
Bisq for exchange will get easier over the next 5 years or so, too.
I have to admit I don't fully understand how it handles disputes. I probably need to look a bit closer.
Is your industry one that you could start pushing for cryptocurrency for payments? You'd be basically reducing your risk to zero and by using a stable token you would also have no volatility.