-------
Japan is a democracy. And yet payment processors from another country are powerful enough to bypass Japans political system.
The American pornography industry has solved this problem by 1. recognizing that there is higher risk, like "oh no honey that $5.99 charge from onlyfans on the statement must have been fraud! do a chargeback." and 2. recognizing that the optics of selling pornography are bad and not everyone wants to assume what is essentially an externality (bearing that optics cost) without being paid extra for it. So there are providers that handle "high-risk" payments like that. Or they take crypto.
One of the cool things about the fact that companies are profit-seeking and really like making money, is that when they turn down what looks like an opportunity to make money you can be pretty sure it's for a good reason.
What does this have to do with Japan?
The fundamental problem addressed here is that these Japanese people, one way or the other, are complaining about how our culture is influencing them. And your response is to tell them to be more American?
Presumably speaking, the Japanese people would want a Japanese solution here.
I don't live in Japan but I think I can at least get the gist of this guy's argument.
> One of the cool things about the fact that companies are profit-seeking and really like making money, is that when they turn down what looks like an opportunity to make money you can be pretty sure it's for a good reason.
Historically speaking, for profit companies of different cultures misunderstand and even abuse the locals. Because you know, profits to the foreigner and reasons that the local doesn't care or even may be opposed to.
For the locals to feel threatened by that (and claiming that democracy is at stake) is... Well, a trope at this point. It keeps happening so we probably should be sensitive to the gist of the argument.
This isn't an "American solution", it's an example of ways around a problem with the industry.
I'm not sure how refusing business (which, if these costs weren't real, would reduce "profits to the foreigner") is supposed to contribute to "misunderstand[ing] and even abuse."
I guess I can understand why they're sensitive, but they have multiple homegrown sets of payment rails they can use. If they want to use the foreign ones they can reasonably accept that a large multinational is "less Japanese" than the Japanese ones.
There's an existing cure for that particular disease: Bitcoin.
The solution is not blockchain currencies. European credit card transaction costs are a fraction of what they are in the US because US regulators just sat back and allowed Mastercard and VISA to establish a duopoly.
In much of the rest of the world it's also possible to near-instantly wire-transfer funds to pay for things, at negligible cost. In the US, everything is forced to go through the federal reserve, is expensive, and slow.
We are the laughing stock of the rest of the world. The banks have tried to set up alternatives. Zelle is a good example, but Zelle's most annoying problem is that you can only have one account per phone number or email address.
This isn't entirely accurate, there is a private clearing house that supports instant payments in the United States.
https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/CHIPS https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp
I mean, you claim a system of voluntary, consensual payments that people can decide or not to use vs. formal channels depending on their need for avoiding politically charged bullshittery and financial censorship of all sorts is somehow worse than... the long arm of major governments and their corporate partners to restrict whatever they please for whatever political reasons they please at any time?
Truly, the irrational crypto hatred by some on this site is the stuff of idiot parody.
Unfortunately, this means it's also a contributory factor in the male loneliness epidemic. Though, good luck changing any actual beliefs and behavior on this topic.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...
2. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02762366241268122?i...
See e.g. https://support.bitpay.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003105543-Ca...
The downside of not using commercial "off-chain" processors for Bitcoin or most true decentralized cryptocurrencies is that latency of a proper, classic, fully secure, "on-chain" transaction is something like up to 15 minutes. At least it was that much last time I looked at it.
From the global stage, America is not some overly puritanical country while everyone else goes along without religious purity concerns. The big view is that the majority of countries censor it or ban it, even democratic ones, with no religious motive required. The Western world is the exception, but that’s changing in the UK, Australia, and now the US with age gating, payment processor refusal, or other restrictions.
[1] though there was the episode that didn't get released in the US where she used a magical item to transform herself into an adult so she could go in a bar and get a drink
It has one of the most weirdest and also defacto the most powerful supreme court globally by authority.
It can pursue its own laws, legislate them, overturn even laws passed by supermajority in parliament if it doesn’t agree with it and thinks it’s not what original constitution makers would’ve wanted.
The Court can take up cases on its own (suo motu) without any petition being filed. This allows it to respond to media reports, letters, or social issues — an almost unheard-of power in most democracies.
I don’t think indian society or gov should be blamed for banning adult content, supreme court by itself passed the law and gov didn’t wanna contest it as they didn’t feel the point to spend political capital to reverse it.
India is the origin of kamasutra texts after all and isn’t that sex negative as you might think ( it has the highest population for a reason)
I think you’re making a mistake here. It is completely possible to be appreciative of sex, and hate pornography. Even in the US, “Feminists Fighting Pornography” was a powerful cultural force for almost 2 decades.
Only in the Western world is “pro sex” = “pro pornography” in most people’s minds. Everywhere else, these are separate issues, with pornography bans actually being from a pro-sex cultural position (I.e. it shouldn’t be commoditized online).
There were no major protests to ban it, no government ongoing policy, nothing. It was just done because the court felt like it.
People were indifferent after that too, gov didn’t even comment, praise or shun the court. Life just went on and people just used vpns, gov doesn’t even care and doesn’t even enforce the ban outside of the 100 major urls and domain the supreme court itself decided and never revisited it.
India’s supreme court is extremely unusual compared to other countries, it’s as powerful as the executive branch if not more, the legislative branch have no say in electing supreme court judges the previous judges elect the next ones.
it just uses its power very sparingly out of fear that the legislative branch might come after their powers if they use them too much.
banning a few major porn sites, banning electoral bonds (india’s version of superpac), creating new right to privacy laws without consulting the parliament (because the court feared gov isn’t taking digital privacy seriously enough), legalise lgbt rights without any parliament input as it felt it needed to protect those citizens freedoms and rights to self identify and form their own families with legal protection.
are some places where the court has used its ultimate powers
I personally like India’s supreme courts, they are partially the reason why india is relatively stable compared to other south asian nations. Overall they use their super powers extremely responsibly and sparingly. Accounting for both political environment and balancing it against the long term interest of the nation’s citizens
The general problem is that when pornography bans are passed, they're characterized as being against for-profit hardcore pornography, but then they're worded broadly enough to also cover everything from sex education to medical depictions of human anatomy to actual human beings flirting with each other on the public internet with no profit motive, and then enforced against any of those things according to the whims of government officials.
Or worse, the law is written in such a way that it puts liability on third parties who then aggressively ban those things to avoid potential liability whether or not the law should or would have been enforced against them.
I am no legal historian, but I would assume this has something to do with how the British set up the courts.
I do agree what you said shows the risk of such systems and powerful courts if created in a vacuum without considering who’ll control it.
Pakistan uses those powers to do the exact opposite of what indian courts would ever do. Also it’s also because in pakistan military is an independent political actor that serves its own interest unlike in India where military is toothless and just operates on politicians diktats often literally at times instead of following intent.
Indian courts also cannot execute on its laws or fund its own budgets or laws. So even if it creates laws it only does ones it knows that parliament wouldn’t resist too heavily and will actually enforce it for them to avoid a constitutional crisis . Indian courts are deeply afraid of ruling parties especially if they have more authoritative leanings or are more organised.
In pakistan the military helps courts finance and execute on stuff superseding the parliament which is why it’s a corrupting force. In India , parliament under union home minister strongly controls over internal security matters and the police forces with prime minister and his cabinet controlling the military.
it’s not because of british court system, british never had such courts nor is it even a republic the british system is more similar to a constitutional monarchy with a powerful parliament.
India is a republic UK is a democratic constitutional monarchy hence it’s called a kingdom Pakistan is just run by the military most of the time and by elected leaders some of the time. so it’s a system that oscillates between dictatorship and majoritarian democracy (not a republic)
but yea supreme court cannot depose prime ministers in india. india set its own checks and balances out of pure fear of the consequences of what happened in pakistan. it still doesn’t fully trust its military to this day. out of fear of pakistan’s case and intentionally keeps regional ethnic regiments to avoid the military from ever unifying or working together.
* https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...
In Japanese culture there's often an 'official' layer of proper behavior that in some sense is a pretense and in reality people are much more free-wheeling, including in the adult sector where Japan is pretty big globally, which is likely understating it. The country is actually very sexually liberated.
The pernicious thing is that the US and Anglosphere work exactly the other way around, legally you can say anything but it's the people who chase you around the globe and you have Mumsnet and American soccer moms hound you across the ocean. Which is a moral tyranny any dictator is envious of. The US was the only Western country where Leon was censored, the actually made like a 20 minute shorter version for the US market. Censoring actual art, not just porn or slop, is foreign to anyone in continental Europe or Japan.
As a curious case, South Park: The Stick of Truth had a scene that was censored in a few countries (Australia and Germany among others) due to it's BDSM content...
I will also note the odd case back in the day of Germany having such strict rules with violence/etc that many of the Command and Conquer games had humans replaced with robots. [0]
Or even names of things. FF8 had 'nunchaku' changed to 'shinobu' because nunchucks are illegal in the UK [1] and "Castlevania: Bloodlines" for the Genesis/Mega Drive was named "Castlevania: The New Generation" in europe (although that also had a lot of blood removed).
> UK, Australia, and now the US with age gating, payment processor refusal, or other restrictions.
But also, I should note that Australia has had fairly strict laws on the book for quite some time and has a long history of using Refused Classification when they get the itch, hell the Re-release of Westwood's Blade Runner is RC. And unlike the UK (at least for now) there's not the digital/import loophole [2].
[0] - My Austrian friend on IRC said that at least the voices were really cool.
[1] - Perhaps someone assumed the whole world of FF8 was a British Colony?
[2] - My understanding is that somehow downloads and 'importing' never got covered in the law.
One thing to note is that by design, the US banking system is very decentralized and that makes any sort of migration or mandate like herding cats. There are 141 banks in Spain and 4135 in the US.
US banks are generally not allowed to exceed 10% of deposits through mergers and there are only three passing that threshold; JPMorgan Chase at 15%, BofA at 14%, and Wells Fargo at 11%.
[0] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_pa...
What's urgently needed is payment neutrality, like net neutrality. It's absurd that the net was discussed more heavily and way earlier than cash.
And there's a long history of people taking credit for things they were barely involved with.
It would be an awful shame if free-speech-loving Americans' anger at the action American payment processors towards an American game distributor were diverted to some unreachable, unaccountable group on the other side of the world.
I think this is sufficient to show there are plenty of non-religious reasons to refuse involvement. Framing pornography as a purely religious issue is a misdirection.
Though for most of my life internet has been getting more and more centralized. At least everything outside of China is centralized almost entirely in US these days.
Rather sad reality of things, but what can we do heh...
other reasons are heavy payment regulations, human habits, fraud, network effects and more. tech does not fully solve it.
More to the point, it's still misleading to call a ship the water.
Asymmetric key cryptography is all the same thing. Digital signatures are cryptography. The "secret" being obscured cryptographicially is the information needed to produce a verifiable message.
Your definition of cryptography might make sense to someone more than a century ago, but the state of the art has advanced greatly since then.
The reason why you define cryptography like this, is I think political. For example, I am not sure you would extend the same logic to cryptographic voting schemes. Cryptocurrency is just another application of cryptography to solve coordination problems.
That's the key, not the message.
> For example, I am not sure you would extend the same logic to cryptographic voting schemes.
Isn't the purpose of a cryptographic voting system to keep your vote secret?
> The reason why you define cryptography like this, is I think political.
Yes, it's because people don't want things like end-to-end encryption associated with scams, and they're not wrong.
Crypto's been associated with illegality almost since inception, and that associations lends the power that be carte blanche in ignoring or even blacklisting anything surrounding it
In a purely technical "I can send/receive payments without worrying about charge backs or random middleman restrictions", it has solved it. But it hasn't solved the issue of having the vast majority of merchants accepting crypto, the issue of crypto price volatility (or associated risk of stable coins), or the friction/unreliability of turning cash into crypto.
Particularly, the last 2 issues go hand-in-hand as an issue. You can get around cash->crypto friction/unreliability by only having to do it infrequently, but that exposes you to the volatility of the crypto price.
And that's not even getting into the issues of crypto UX as a form of common currency for the average person. It is not a simple process to know how you should create wallets, manage your wallets, what information should you or should you not expose, what networks can/can't you send certain coins over, what coins should you be using, why are there hundreds of different coins, etc, to not fall for scams.
The price volatility seems like a red herring. If you're using it as a currency then you're not holding it for significant periods of time and the entire point is to make it an automated process, so you're buying some cryptocurrency for cash and then immediately spending it. How much volatility do you really expect in the timespan of a fraction of a second?
Meanwhile the conversion shouldn't be a hard problem. You have a service that allows you to buy cryptocurrency with a credit card or bank transfer and then an app that uses that service to buy cryptocurrency and transfer it to a merchant that accepts cryptocurrency, and then any merchants being unfairly targeted by the payment networks can do that. And the cash to cryptocurrency service can be operated by a different party than the app so the former can't be assaulted for having the wrong customers and the later isn't directly interacting with the payment networks.
I suspect the real problem is this: The chargeback process for credit cards isn't compatible with anything where the merchant is delivering fungible goods to the customer that they can't feasibly recover if the customer was using a stolen card or issues a fraudulent chargeback, and cryptocurrency is one such thing. So then the service that allows you to buy cryptocurrency with a a credit card gets screwed, because customers issue a chargeback to them or use stolen cards on their service even though they actually provided the cryptocurrency as promised.
Which is a huge existing problem with the payments system. The payment networks dump the cost of fraud onto innocent merchants and then lose the incentive actually prevent it even though they're the only ones in a position to do it, e.g. by issuing chip cards that could be read by any ordinary PC/phone via open standards and therefore enable "card present" transactions to happen over the internet.
And then if you expect cryptocurrency to solve that problem, it can't do that on the side of the transaction where the cryptocurrency is the thing you're buying.
Maybe I don't understand how people use bitcoin but I wouldn't call your description that of a currency but more like a payment processor.
I want a currency, e.g. USD to be stable enough that I can comparison shop in it, quote prices to customers in it, and hold some as "cash or cash equivalents" on my balance sheet without undue risk from price fluctuation.
USD achieves this, BTC doesn't, which is assume is why people are using the get-in-get-out model being mentioned here of only holding it for as short as possible.
Meanwhile the historical purpose of holding cash as "spending money" (i.e. liquid assets) is from a time before computers could allow you to keep it as actual investments until the instant you do actually want to spend it.
As for using it for pricing, things are typically priced in USD because it's the world reserve currency, or in the dominant local currency in a given country. That doesn't mean that other currencies aren't currencies. Shops in many countries will often accept both local currency and USD even if prices are only listed in one of those, and so what? Anybody can look up the current exchange rate in real time on the internet. Why is it a problem to list prices in USD and then accept that amount of cryptocurrency (or Euros or Yen) at the current exchange rate?
That is the point of me mentioning that points 2 and 3 are linked. If you are only immediately purchasing crypto and then using it for a purchase, your middleman risk has moved from the payment processor to the crypto exchange. Every purchase you make now relies on whether or not you can make the exchange at the moment. Which is point 3.
The alternative is you make larger exchanges of money, which means you need to deal with volatility: point 2.
If the price of crypto was stable (at least about as much as any major currency), you could exchange much of it in bulk, and delays in exchanging it back into cash would be less of an issue. Even less of an issue if more merchants accepted crypto: point 1.
>And that's not even getting into the issues of crypto UX as a form of common currency for the average person.
The conventional banking system is just as complicated and less secure, yet people have adapted to its flaws. What's the difference between FedWire and ACH? Why does it take time for checks to clear, and why does it show that I have a balance immediately? What are money orders? Why are banks only open on weekdays when the entire economy relies on them to function?
because people like having the ability to dispute charges when they get scammed. they also like the ability to access their account by speaking to someone at the bank when they forget their credentials. (the dude that lost his bitcoin hard drive in a dumpster only recently gave up is search of landfills) if you see all these crypto companies end up creating layers that create shittier banks with extra steps.
that's also the reason payment processors don't like certain fields like nsfw/sex work, gambling , etc because a lot of fraud happens in them and therefore they cost more for them, At least that what their stance is, and I have no reason not to believe them because if you try to take online payment that's what you will see with time when your platform get targeted by shady individuals.
also governments like control. how do you freeze crypto like you freeze a bank account ? their wet dreams is people to stop using cash and only use electronic payments, that way they can freeze your whole life with a single order. (the official stance is to stop criminals, but they decide who get designated as such. said something they don't like ? welcome to the list)
to make thing worse, crypto has been almost exclusively used for shady things like gangs money laundering, scams, etc.
and in the end the blockchain does not solve any real problem. it's a technical solution in search of a problem.
To help with that new laws were passed.
If you want to buy crypto for fiat currency legally, like on some well known crypto exchange, newest laws require naming recipient of crypto you are sending and if that wallet is self hosted or exchange hosted (and which exchange). You either need to provide full name of person or company, or confirm it’s your other account you are sending crypto to.
There is one actually private crypto, it’s monero, but - surprise - it’s nor available on legal crypto exchanges so you cannot buy it by any official means.
BTCPay Server[0] seems to be the most popular way to accept crypto payments on self-hosted hardware with no third party processors.
Can you let me know in this thread how it goes and what are your thoughts after doing it?
> transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year, topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week [...] The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of Bitcoin itself drops dramatically.
> [...] the amount of Bitcoin needed to cover the transaction can change. The amount it can change has been increasing recently to a point where it can be significantly different.
> The normal resolution for this is to either refund the original payment to the user, or ask the user to transfer additional funds to cover the remaining balance. In both these cases, the user is hit with the [$20] Bitcoin network transaction fee again.
Besides that, there are other cryptocurrencies (Solana? Stellar?) which have effectively zero fees and are much faster than Bitcoin.
>Besides that, there are other cryptocurrencies (Solana? Stellar?) which have effectively zero fees and are much faster than Bitcoin.
They are faster because they are not very decentralized. The entry costs for vendors to independently audit and verify payments the blockchain is greater.
So I suppose you could accept payment in an anonymous cryptocurrency, and then take that to whatever exchange you want.
It's flawed, but I think the end goal is to create a "circular economy" based on anonymous currrency, so you never have to cash out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payment_System_(United_...
But then the payment networks prohibit merchants from providing the full value of the discount to people not insisting on payment methods that impose those costs, which ought to be an antitrust violation because it's obviously uncompetitive to prevent an alternative with lower costs from actually passing those lower costs on to the customer. And then fraud is rampant, costs billions of dollars, makes certain types of services non-viable, but gets folded into the price of ordinary goods and services to keep ordinary people from realizing that they're still paying it.
Have never used a chargeback and wouldn't want that ability in the vast majority of transactions. If I'm buying something on steam I know what I'm getting and they already have a robust refund capability regardless. If there was a good alternative to CC I'd happily use that.
I use cards because they're the defacto standard for online payment, but that's the only reason.
(side note: This issue becomes more obvious with the addition of the afterpays of the world, which charge iirc 7% fees to the merchant but forbid them from surcharging the difference)
I thought the EU was working on digital cash? What is the status of that?
Haven't heard about the EU version of it being anywhere in the works and I work in places where I should hear it.
I do buy it. Collective Shout, Mad Fucking Witches and others have all been trying to cancel media personalities and companies for years by appealing to the advertisers, especially effective in traditional media where they money is drying up. They're hardly a fly by night group, and it's not their first time appealing to payment processors.
0. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/400-vi...
Democracy is endangered by the fact that the government likes to use payment processors to stomp on stuff near the edges.
The dogs on the right rallies around when the government tries to pressure gunmakers, the cats on the left don't rally around such threats very well.
Mind you, both odds are negligible.
This is not only due to reputation risks (even though these are real), but also because of the higher rates of fraud and chargebacks.
I'd say that anything that by its nature materially hampers the customer's ability to think rationally is risky for a payment processor, because it will always be a fertile ground for fraud and scams. Porn and gambling are obvious examples; alcohol is another, but (strong) alcohol is usually pretty strictly regulated, down to state-run monopolies in a number of countries.
Visa and Mastercard haven’t brought anything new in years. Their infrastructure still dominates out of habit, not merit. Meanwhile, alternatives like stablecoins and European systems like EPI or the digital euro are gaining ground.
Their boldness is honestly surprising, especially now that real competition is finally emerging.
kkfx•4h ago