5 ms·

"We’re building business infrastructure that, like electricity, should be available on tap to use however the world sees fit. While we may personally like some

"We’re building business infrastructure that, like electricity, should be available on tap to use however the world sees fit. While we may personally like some businesses on Stripe and disapprove of others, we want to make as few judgements as possible as a company." And then the last category is "Brand risk" including pornography. I once worked for a startup that had an opportunity to boost its revenue by %100 by simply accepting the business of an online porn place (all we were was a recommendation engine). The startup turned them down because "ew porn, yucky!". If its legal, you shouldn't be passing arbitrary moral judgements. That startup later failed. And I won't be using stripe, even though I have no interest in doing anything related to porn. There are too many moralizers (particularly the government "regulating" "money laundering" which is so broadly defined that they could prosecute any one of you successfully for this "crime" if they wanted to. EG: you take money from your checking account to pay a credit card, that's "money laundering" as the law is written.) The government's bad enough, we don't need companies like Stripe preventing perfectly legal businesses for reasons of political correctness. And this is a totally slippery slope. If my hosting company ends up accidentally hosting someone who takes advertisements from Torrent sites, is stripe going to cut me off? What if one of the sites I host is a blog that reviews porn sites? Am I now in the porn business? Here they are signaling that they cannot be trusted.

FreeFull 10y ago
From reading the blog post, I got that they personally want to support those businesses, but financial partners like Visa and Mastercard stop them from doing it.
- desdiv 10y ago
  I brought both porn and guns with Visa and Mastercards. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find a porn store or a gun shop that doesn't accept at least one type of credit card. And yet Stripe prohibits both pornography and firearms. Not just Stripe, all the other major payment processors i.e. Paypal/Braintree, Square, Amazon Payments have similar prohibition clauses.
  - swang 10y ago
    while you were easily able to buy porn and guns, on the flip side the people who sold you the porn and guns had to go through a high-risk payment processor just as if they'd try to sell porn/guns online. you don't notice anything because if you had to deal with that hassle, would you have bought your guns/porn from that shop? no. stores eat the cost of high-risk payment processors because customers want to pay with credit card. you are mistaking visa: the credit card, with visa: the payment network.
    - hga 10y ago
      You can't buy guns online as such, in the usual case of out of state customers they've got to be shipped to a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL) in their state who then does the normal retail song and dance including a NICS background check. But of course the big money part of the transaction will be done before that, and almost certainly as a credit card transaction, as was the case for my last gun purchase (see e.g. http://www.gunbroker.com/ http://www.gunbroker.com/ where I half-bought that one, and how many firms on it offer payment by credit card (the flip side of course is that if you're an individual selling a gun, or a bare receiver as I did once, you of course are going to have to go the cashier's check/money order/personal check route (no PayPal, of course))). And I've never heard that firearms and their accessories including ammo being a fraction of financially risky like porn, e.g. no one dancing to the tune Operation Choke Point cites that sort of risk, vs. it being a purely political decision. Plus it's just plain more serious of an industry, e.g. no one needed a Federal background check to buy porn (!). And there are many merchant banks that have affirmatively decided to provide credit card processing services to such companies at normal rates, for references to one offered in part as a enticement to join, see http://nssf.org/didyouknow/?iurl=payment-provider-offers-services-to-nssf-members http://nssf.org/didyouknow/?iurl=payment-provider-offers-ser... from the nation's gun industry association (the NRA is the gun owner's one).
deleted 10y ago
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FreeFull 10y ago

From reading the blog post, I got that they personally want to support those businesses, but financial partners like Visa and Mastercard stop them from doing it.

desdiv 10y ago
I brought both porn and guns with Visa and Mastercards. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find a porn store or a gun shop that doesn't accept at least one type of credit card. And yet Stripe prohibits both pornography and firearms. Not just Stripe, all the other major payment processors i.e. Paypal/Braintree, Square, Amazon Payments have similar prohibition clauses.
- swang 10y ago
  while you were easily able to buy porn and guns, on the flip side the people who sold you the porn and guns had to go through a high-risk payment processor just as if they'd try to sell porn/guns online. you don't notice anything because if you had to deal with that hassle, would you have bought your guns/porn from that shop? no. stores eat the cost of high-risk payment processors because customers want to pay with credit card. you are mistaking visa: the credit card, with visa: the payment network.
  - hga 10y ago
    You can't buy guns online as such, in the usual case of out of state customers they've got to be shipped to a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL) in their state who then does the normal retail song and dance including a NICS background check. But of course the big money part of the transaction will be done before that, and almost certainly as a credit card transaction, as was the case for my last gun purchase (see e.g. http://www.gunbroker.com/ http://www.gunbroker.com/ where I half-bought that one, and how many firms on it offer payment by credit card (the flip side of course is that if you're an individual selling a gun, or a bare receiver as I did once, you of course are going to have to go the cashier's check/money order/personal check route (no PayPal, of course))). And I've never heard that firearms and their accessories including ammo being a fraction of financially risky like porn, e.g. no one dancing to the tune Operation Choke Point cites that sort of risk, vs. it being a purely political decision. Plus it's just plain more serious of an industry, e.g. no one needed a Federal background check to buy porn (!). And there are many merchant banks that have affirmatively decided to provide credit card processing services to such companies at normal rates, for references to one offered in part as a enticement to join, see http://nssf.org/didyouknow/?iurl=payment-provider-offers-services-to-nssf-members http://nssf.org/didyouknow/?iurl=payment-provider-offers-ser... from the nation's gun industry association (the NRA is the gun owner's one).

deleted 10y ago

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