Payment processors' bar on Japanese adult content endangers democracy (2024)

In practice, Bitcoin transaction fees are much lower nowadays. I've never spent more than $1.00 in fees on relatively large sums.

Besides that, there are other cryptocurrencies (Solana? Stellar?) which have effectively zero fees and are much faster than Bitcoin.

Cryptocurrencies are volatile specifically because they are used as a speculative investment rather than a means of exchange. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

>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?

> 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.

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.

Crypto was always a stupid name anyway because people confuse it with cryptography. Come up with a different name for the thing where you use it as a digital payments system instead of a speculative bubble machine.

The premise is that the thing consumers want is "chargebacks and various other consumer protections" but in practice the problem is that those things are really hidden costs, i.e. merchants have to pass on the cost of chargebacks and fraud to honest customers. In a normal market this would result in the merchants passing on those costs to the customers who require a payment method that incurs them, i.e. there would be a 5-10% discount for using a different payment method, or more than that for industries with a high rate of customer chargeback fraud.

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.

"Transaction is irreversible via automated system" and "transaction is irreversible via court order" are two different things. The first is a problem when you have merchants that legitimately provided a service (e.g. adult content, buying fungible commodities that themselves can't be clawed back) because customers issue chargebacks against merchants that didn't scam them, e.g. because the spouse disputes a charge for adult content that the person who made the purchase doesn't want to admit to buying. But the second is the thing you need to prevent scams and ransomware.

Who is saying that it was AUS alone? The signatories are majority Australian then UK and one or two US depending on how you count (UK working in the US).

The majority of the world censors or bans pornography, not just America. In Vietnam, China, Russia, Ukraine, just to name examples, you can go to literal prison for possession, not just pay a fine. Ukraine considers possession alone grounds for up to 3 years. This is despite Vietnam and China all-but-requiring atheism to run for positions.

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.

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Really. The only good thing crypto has going for it is that it is litmus test for unresolved anti-social behavior[1][2][3]. Thus, it serves as a warning beacon to avoid when engaging in the dating pool.

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...

3. https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/14475

Nope it’s not just power that builds decent stabilizing systems but how people/their culture use that power. India’s unusual supreme court stabilises it from executive overreach or other risks because its court judges control their own elections and are far more liberal than indian society or its politicians so it tends to use its extra powers to stabilize rather than compromise the system.

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.

> 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).

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 know for a fact they don’t hate pornography, i’ve been around their culture. They banned it because the judges felt like it.

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