Most customers weren't willing to enter their CC information online in the late 90s and early 00s. It took horny trailblazers to get us to where we are today, to the overall benefit of e-commerce. Comparatively, putting CC info in to Coinbase and putting an address to withdraw the crypto in is far safer than what horny people did back then.
It varied by country, but in general CC had risk mitigation built into them in the late 90’s and early 00s limiting their risks vastly below what most people sending money to Coinbase take on. US: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1643
This goes beyond the question of legal risks and statutory limits, CC’s are debt which means someones money isn’t tied up during a dispute.
The expansion of e-commerce was parallel and had little relation to 'horny trailblazers'. The CC issue was solved by services like PayPal that intermediated CC data, better internet security and better CC dispute resolution. I know people who still hesitate before leaving CC information but would not hesitate if there's Paypal (or similar).
If Bitcoin transactions involved giving your private key to every entity you wanted to transact with (like how credit card numbers work), then this would be a problem.
I don't think that really solves the problem... for instance, you can get your money back if the vendor does not render the product or service promised (with some restrictions of course). With Bitcoin, you're on your own.
With something like Ethereum, you can build refunds into your payment model as long as you and the merchant agree on a set of trusted 3rd parties who can handle any disputes. You can choose different trusted mediators for each transaction and can decide the rules (ex: how many of them are needed to decide that a refund has to happen).
You can also choose not to trust any 3rd party. If I'm buying an on-chain digital item, I probably don't need to support disputes, but if I'm buying something off-chain and don't trust the merchant, I might want that protection.
You are right in practice. But it sounds an awful lot bit like the old "I have nothing to hide" argument against encryption, too?
Many payment processors do restrict the business they want to deal with beyond what the letter of the law requires. (And that is their prerogative as a private business!)
Does it? It sounds like they have a credit card with fraud protection and they already understand how it works, and don't want to have to fiddle with some newfangled financial product that doesn't offer those protections and seems vaguely shady, to me.
Many states in the US have legalised buying and selling of marijuana. Many payment processors don't want to touch this, on neither the buying nor selling side.
You might declare marijuana vaguely shady, but as far as I can tell, it's a legitimate product that consenting adults might want to trade in.
How many people do you see choosing to use Bitcoin rather than cash at marijuana dispensaries? I'm puzzled at how this is a rebuttal of "people don't want to use Bitcoin unless they absolutely need to" argument. If the issue is that taking credit cards is inconvenient for the seller, I don't think buyers generally see that as their problem so long as someone else is willing to accept them.
I don't live anywhere with marijuana dispensaries.
Yes, if you buy in person, then cash works. I was more thinking of buying online. And also where a marijuana business would keep their money.
(For the latter, bitcoin isn't very useful, because suppliers won't accept it. But neither is the legacy banking system always willing to serve businesses in weird niches.)
Which government would come after them? There are lots of different governments around the world, with different views and different laws.
> How is refusing to serve legal sex workers different?
As far as I can tell, in the US discrimination is forbidden against certain protected groups / along certain protected differences only. But you are free to discriminate on all other grounds. Eg a restaurant can legally discriminate against people who don't wear a tie.
In the British rules, sexual orientation is explicitly mentioned, but your trade ain't. So as far as I can tell, it's illegal in the UK to discriminate against gays but legal to discriminate against sex workers.
(However, a government might come after you, if you do something they don't like, even if it's perfectly legal. Eg the government could just 'randomly' decide to audit your taxes all the time, or 'randomly' apply other regulations and rules more strictly.)
I understand and am sort of aware of the laws. It seems however very hypocritical to discriminate base upon profession. IANAL but I suspect that if for example airline will not let passenger to board a plane citing that they work "shitty low paying job" as a reason said airline might get in trouble anyways.
I think the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Iran since the Islamic Revolution etc went for a less legalistic and more moralistic approach.
(Of course, you should still evaluate these policies on their own merit, instead of tarring them guilty by association. To give a counter-example: Nazi Germany was one of the first places to put anti-animal cruelty laws on the books and officials were very concerned about the dangers of smoking. Two stances that are widely popular today, and rightly so.)
Other than the data outlier of the US basically no nation considers hate speech to be free speech. The US has plenty of asinine speech restrictions too that no one seems to find a 1st amendment problem with, like broadcasting a recent marvel film on my own personal website.
Who’s requiring them? Nobody in the US if that’s where they’re operating. The issue is that that content is so off-putting to the average person that it kills the platform. Nobody is hanging around a site full of hate speech unless that’s specifically what they’re looking for.
It does not appear to be justified to make claims about what's true of "the majority of sex workers online". This is not an area where reliable numbers exist.
