There’s merit to the argument that corporate payment processors make moral judgments about legal transactions. They can and do seize peoples’ livelihoods, especially legal sex workers, on flimsy pretenses. There was a bunch of press a year ago about a religious group influencing Mastercard’s policies. It’s true you could use crypto to get around this kind of financial censorship.
I have the same problem with this argument as I have with all the other crypto benefits the author proposed, like solving inequality – these are leftist outcomes and you get them through leftist policies. Payment processing is critical infrastructure that should be socialized and controlled by the state, which has an obligation to not discriminate against legal content while still preventing the horrific stuff. You’re not going to get there through an anything-goes libertarian project with baked-in hierarchies.
Onlyfans notoriously fell into this trap recently. Their payment processors said they wouldn’t accept payment from sex workers. Turns out, cash trumps (fake) morals and they were full of shit.
I would hope a bank would stop payment on obviously criminal activity. Selling drugs, human trafficking, obscene content, tax avoidance, all this stuff will get a bank in trouble if they knowingly participate. Good thing we have Bitcoin!
Exactly why this should have never been legal in the U.S. You couldn’t possibly design a system that’s says Ponzi scheme more than this.
I used to work for a major (top 3) credit card processor a decade or so ago. When a few support calls elevated the visibility of a travel agency type group who used our payment gateway services on their website, someone higher up on the food chain noticed that they were specifically a company that organized LGBT group vacations to Disney parks (I don’t think it’s news to anyone that gay folks fuckin LOVE them some Disney, recent Florida politics notwithstanding).
The agency got kicked off our services within a week of their “nature” becoming visible.
I don’t think that crypto is the solution to this issue, but regressive morals absolutely do lock perfectly okay people out of the financial sector.
That’s really not what I was trying to say, though.
Rather, it’s to point out a way that there are ways for more established elements in this sector to make themselves far more mature trading pieces as time proceeds. :)
(And stakeholders in this space may choose to avoid making it easier to short currencies, too. Which then…yeah, they can fade with the natural hand of the market moving them that way. EDIT: or choose to carry massive cash reserves, which, good luck with that.)
Scrax
3329
So I have an employee who was recently divorced in the past 18 months or so and is kind of having his post divorce mid life crisis. Started spending a lot, bought a Tesla, vacationing in Las Vegas, not overly unusual I guess. Anyways - he’s also gotten into crypto within the past year and that’s basically all he talks about to people given any opportunity. Walk past someone’s office and he’s in there talking about his bots and his dollar cost averaging, and how “he hasn’t made a ton of money yet, but…”. He’s always going on about needing to make more money (he already makes 6 figures), because his ex-wife was a big exec and he needed to bring his life back to a certain standard of living that he was used to.
Anyways, I was chatting with the HR Manager and an exec came in saying that he’s not doing well. He’s sick home depressed and vomiting from the stress of his personal life. We are doing all the things to see if we can get him some help, but chatting a bit with his department lead there seemed to be a change that came over him 2 weeks ago and a part of me can’t help but wonder how deep in the crypto game he’s gotten.
Ugh. This is terrible. Hopefully he can get some help.
I mean, I see a lot of the crypto thing being very much similar to a gambling addiction.
I think that’s exactly right. If you’re into it, fine - don’t gamble more than you can afford to lose. Heaven help you if you have no self control - in crypto, gambling or any other risky behavior.
Scrax
3335
Might explain the Las Vegas trip.
Tim_N
3336
This is how all gambling works, it’s a zero sum game where the house organises the collection and distribution of the gambler’s money and takes a cut in the process. All people who gamble are predators because their winnings come from other people’s gambling losses?
Lantz
3337
It’s not a fair comparison because the structure of most of the crypto scams are based on asymmetrical entry costs. The predators are buying in at little to no cost and then trying to pump the market to exit with the mark’s money.
It’s more like you went to a Casino and bought $1000 in chips and played against a bunch of people who paid $1 for the same chips.
Tim_N
3338
Hmm, I am not sure. In regular gambling the win or lose outcome is determined (more or less) by chance or events outside your control like a sports game, whereas in crypto the win or lose outcome is determined by whether you are ‘early’ or ‘late’ in the ponzi scheme and even if you are early whether you have the sense to exit before it crashes.
Assuming a crypto ‘investor’ has no inside information, this is often just random luck. Even if you buy a token at launch there is extremely high risk that you are already ‘late’ in the ponzi scheme, most crypto tokens out there die in a day or two and the price only goes down (usually because prior to launch they sold quite a few tokens at a fixed price).
If there is inside information, or it is the makers of the token that is pumping and dumping their own token, which happens often, then this is of course not like regular gambling unless the casino is weighting the dice or controlling the random number generator (which I imagine happens too). But even in that case, how can the poor rubes who buy up the manipulated ponzi scheme at peak dollars be a ‘predator’ when they are always going to be the ones who lose money?
wavey
3339
This was interesting - someone created a new shitcoin, attached the name of a Guardian tech writer without his knowledge, and he found there was nothing he could do to convince investors that he wasn’t involved.
All those people deserve to lose all their money.
And yet books make infinity money. I wonder why that is.
Noman
3342
The credit processing fees don’t matter at all when bitcoin routinely loses or gains valuation by 10% on most days.
The incredible price volatility of crypto coins makes them very ill-suited as acceptable currencies for normal businesses.
They matter a great deal if you can’t get a credit card processor to work with your business! I’ll assume you read that part though, and just decided not to quote it here. :)
But yes, the price volatility is an issue, absolutely. Which is why for most folks that accept crypto as a form of online payment, there’s a window for that payment being made (with “breakthroughs” built in if the currency should jump or fall off a cliff in that typically allotted 15-30 minute time window). And then most such creator wallets (at least those who are either smart, or experienced from having been burned) immediate cash out the payment on receipt if they’re smart about how their wallets are set up.
But one other issue not touched upon: many content creators who cannot get paypal, mastercard, or visa or associated processors to work with them will still offer credit card or paypal payments as an option, but then have to work through sometimes shady, 3rd party go-betweens who’ll take their own share off the top. Which only adds to the fees under a general umbrella of “credit card processing” here.
