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It sure sounds like this was forced on them by their payment processors, not that this was a voluntary move. https://twitter.com/danprimack/status/142842077444

It sure sounds like this was forced on them by their payment processors, not that this was a voluntary move. https://twitter.com/danprimack/status/1428420774449266691?s=21 https://twitter.com/danprimack/status/1428420774449266691?s=...

l33t2328 5y ago
This is absolutely ridiculous. What if they decide people can no longer buy dildos or lube or condoms or guns or alcohol or meat on Fridays? There’s no law with respect to “payment neutrality”??
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Why should there be? It seems absurd to MANDATE anyone participate in the sex trade. There are payment processors who specialize in adult content.
  - marvin 5y ago
    At the mercy of Visa and MasterCard, I would guess. Doesn't OnlyFans work with CCBill, who exclusively work with adult content providers? More info is needed to conclude, but it wouldn't surprise me if their upstream providers made demands.
    - bcheung 5y ago
      I highly doubt they are going through CCBill. They are too expensive at volume. Since they are only charging models 20% I suspect they tried to pretend to not be adult, which they probably weren't in the beginning. But not it is almost all adult and CC processors know that and want their higher cut.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      There is this from January, where MasterCard wanted sellers of adult content to have more stringent verification of the age and consent of performers in the wake of the PornHub scandal, which I’ve seen people speculating may be related: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-updates-policy-for-adult-content-sellers https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-upda... These aren’t explicitly linked in the story but it would make sense IMO
  - ardit33 5y ago
    morality is relative.... next stop it is strip clubs, then hooters being banned? Payment processors provide a utility. They should have the right not to process illegal transactions and illegal activities. But as long as the activity is legal, it shouldn't be up to them to police morality. They should be treated like utilities. If we go down this path, the city's water and electric utilities can decide to shut down the new hooters, because it is obscene and against god (according to conservaties), or it uses women and is an oppressor (according to some liberals). Utilities shouldn't be involved in morality policing.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      There are a couple practical reasons why they wouldn't want to: high risk of fraud or chargebacks and difficulty keeping on top of content that veers into illegality spring to mind immediately.
      - gentleman11 5y ago
        Like paying for abortions or gay weddings in certain states? Buying cannabis from somebody on the street instead of somebody in a store 6 months later? Promoting unions depending on the decade? Letting “trespassing” black people buy coffee in shops that banned them in the 60s? Making breaking the law impossible is dangerous
        emodendroket 5y ago
        I'm not 100% sure what you're getting at but most legal dispensaries require you to pay cash.
        JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > Like paying for abortions or gay weddings in certain states? These do not have the high rates of chargeback that adult content does.
        JohnBooty 5y ago
        This is a very legitimate concern -- payment processors could start enforcing that kind of thing based on morality. However, unless something has changed lately, for decades the issue with adult content + online payment processors is not morality related. It's because of the high fraud/chargeback rates associated with online porn transactions. Unless it's SESTA/FOSTA related, but I don't think anything's changed on that front for a while.
  - l33t2328 5y ago
    You know how US Dollars say “This note is legal tender for all debts” on them? It seems to absurd to allow companies with an oligopoly on most of the transfer of those notes to pick and choose what sectors are appropriate for citizens to interact with financially.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - lallysingh 5y ago
      That's not what that means. https://www.quora.com/On-every-US-dollar-bill-the-message-This-note-is-legal-tender-for-all-debts-public-and-private-is-printed-How-is-it-then-legal-for-some-businesses-to-not-accept-cash?share=1 https://www.quora.com/On-every-US-dollar-bill-the-message-Th...
      - l33t2328 5y ago
        The comment you linked to doesn’t address the point I made. My point was that you can spend your cash wherever you want, in whatever way the seller will accept. My point was not that sellers ought to be forced to accept bags of pennies.
    - tylersmith 5y ago
      That has nothing at all to do with payment processing.
    - thephyber 5y ago
      There is no financial neutrality requirement, but perhaps there should be. Also, that quote on the dollar has nothing to do with your argument. You seem to be projecting a layperson’s interpretation of those words instead of the relevant jurisprudence.
    - travisjungroth 5y ago
      > companies with an oligopoly on most of the transfer of those notes This is an important distinction. Credit card payments are not notes. They are not cash. So these companies have very little to do with the transfer of cash. The point of "legal tender" is that if you try to pay off a debt in cash, they can't claim you haven't paid it and take you to court. If you try to pay for your meal in a restaurant with cash and they refuse, you can just walk out and they wouldn't have a legal case (probably. in theory. not legal advice). What's tricky is this has to be a debt, as in past tense. If you try to buy groceries with cash and they refuse, you can walk out but you can't the groceries with you. Participation in the cash market is mandatory on anyone who is owed money. Everything else on top (credit cards, checks) is essentially voluntary. Merchants can take it or leave it, the processors can come or go. If you want to make an argument about the outsized effect that Visa has on the US monetary system, that's totally legitimate. It just has little to do with the concept of "legal tender".
  - didgfehfocu 5y ago
    Why should it require specialization at all besides that laws pushed by religious conservatives to advance puritan ideals demand it? Don't be a doctor if you aren't willing to help your patient exercise their right to choose and don't be a payment processor if you're not willing to process payments in a neutral fashion. It's rediculous that at a time when equity and #metoo is all the rage that no one is talking about inequity in the law in the form of legal sandbags.
  - adrusi 5y ago
    We mandate that some companies participate in the sex trade, at least to the extent that payment processors can be considered to be participating. The electrical company is mandated to provide power to Onlyfans' datacenters, so long as they are paying for the service. Also there's basically only four payment processors: Visa, Mastercard, Discover and Amex. None of them specialize in adult business. There are downstream processors along the lines of PayPal and Stripe, and some of them specialize in adult business, but they're entirely beholden to the big four.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      I think this is different. If the customer is unhappy with the service provided, their dispute has nothing to do with the electrical company, nor are they going to claw back payments to them.
      - adrusi 5y ago
        If the problem is that customers are contesting payments or other fraud-related issues, the standard remedy is to bump fees, not revoke service.
  - hackinthebochs 5y ago
    Why should internet providers be mandated to participate in the "sex trade" by allowing immoral bits to flow over their wires?
- ozim 5y ago
  That is called democracy and yes there are a lot of things that are not sold. General public agrees that explicit material is bad. Right now we have in Poland shops closed each Sunday - it is annoying for me. Selling alcohol in Norway is heavily restricted and I see more and more restrictions on alcohol sales in Poland. Explicit material is tied a lot to money laundering, there is also a lot of scams tied to it and lots of stolen cards are used to pay for explicit material. It is huge cost for payment providers, all the laws for anti-laundering trump any "payment neutrality". If you want to see naked ladies go to "a place" and risk on your own, pay with cash.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Payment networks should operate according to laws and regulations, not reputation and public opinion. Would you want your electricity turned off because someone did not like who you were or what you believe? That is a road to tyranny.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      No business operates this way.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - kelnos 5y ago
        Given that payment processors are an oligopoly, and it's incredibly difficult to build another Visa or MasterCard, they should be regulated as utilities (or at the very least, similarly to telecom providers), and be required to be content-neutral. Just like Comcast can't tell me I can't download porn, Visa shouldn't be able to tell me I can't buy it, either.
    - ozim 5y ago
      Slippery slope argument. So you are going to run naked in the city center because public opinion about this does not match what you want.
- _jal 5y ago
  Remember this next time people start pushing going cashless. Doing so means that a third party is involved in every transaction you make, and that someone else will always have veto power over your commercial transactions.
  - l33t2328 5y ago
    That’s an excellent point. Having an electronic alternative to cash would be amazing, but so far there’s nothing close to it with respect to privacy and freedom.
    - missingrib 5y ago
      Is this satire going over my head?
  - bcheung 5y ago
    Crypto will eventually democratize business transactions but it will take some time and it will not be without increased fraud.
    - xur17 5y ago
      What type of fraud? It seems to me that it would make it basically impossible to defraud a merchant with a stolen payment method (much like cash). Do you mean merchants defrauding their customers?
      - kmonsen 5y ago
        Right, but that means it will be a lot easier to scam regular people. The ability to clawback money is a vital way of stopping scams over the internet.
        xur17 5y ago
        As a customer I wish I could have the option (in return for a cut of the interchange + fraud fees the merchants pay).
- boplicity 5y ago
  1. Freedom of Speech extends to all parties in a relationship 2. Freedom of speech includes choosing who I work with 3. It makes sense to have certain restrictions on freedom of speech, especially as it relates to clearly harmful discrimination (i.e. racial discrimination, gender discrimination) 4. It does not make sense to restrict freedom of speech in the case of pornography, specifically, whether a company can choose to work with pornographers or not
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
jpeter 5y ago
Why should payment processors force them to. They will make less money
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Probably the reputational risk to them from being associated with porn is not worth whatever OnlyFans brings in.
  - pell 5y ago
    Why would OnlyFans not simply move to another payment processor then? This all seems a bit strange.
    - sascha_sl 5y ago
      It's not so easy. The obvious candidates all ban adult content, and the ones used by the porn industry are either owned by the same or take cuts that make the AppStore look reasonable.
      - pell 5y ago
        From what I understand OnlyFans has essentially no other product except for this type of content though. So I would have assumed negotiating with one of these processors for a somewhat more reasonable contract despite higher fees would still be more lucrative than giving up what seems to be their core business and revenue stream.
      - skinnymuch 5y ago
        Taking a 30% cut doesn’t seem that bad compared to the alternative. Why lose 90% of your revenue and all your profit just to not give a 30 or 40% cut to shitty middle man? Unless Onlyfans actually has some decent traction outside sexual stuff. I find that hard to believe. If photos are still allowed, that’s something. But still. Maybe I’m completely misinformed though!
      - gpvos 5y ago
throwawaysea 5y ago
We really need an alternative to big payment processors like Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Stripe, etc. Moving money around is so fundamental to basic living that it shouldn't be solely possible through duopolies or oligopolies, and it is morally and ethically unacceptable that these companies seek to impost their own morals and politics upon others who are voluntarily transacting with each other. We've known this was a problem for a LONG time now, going back to when the credit card companies colluded to institute a payment blockade against Wikileaks over 10 years ago (https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-mastercard-move-to-choke-wikileaks/?sh=365e46c32cad https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-m...). I'm disappointed we aren't in a better place yet. We need renewed antitrust legislation to take control of big tech and payment processors. They are as influential as governments, and cannot be allowed to discriminate, just like your water utility cannot discriminate against you based on your personal life or politics.
rejectedandsad 5y ago
The fact that OF is not all in on crypto payments is a massive indictment of crypto as a payment mechanism.
- serverholic 5y ago
  Or that crypto is only 12 years old which is really fucking young for a currency.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    Or that just the transfer fees would be more than most payments. Or that no one would be able to properly use those payouts.
  - AzzieElbab 5y ago
    Nothing is on crypto payments because you never know how you are actually paying
    - T0Bi 5y ago
      There are stable coins as well, where you know exactly what you're paying.
  - mortehu 5y ago
    That's not young at all. How much trouble did people have accepting Euro in 2011?
    - toast0 5y ago
      A government mandate certainly helps a currency develop.
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      Arguably scepticism towards the Euro as a currency and Britain wanting nothing to do with it after the crisis was a key pillar of Brexit, so I wouldn’t say it went down amazingly. I remember during the campaign there was a fairly widespread notion that an overly Europhile government like Tony Blair’s might irreversibly commit the UK to the Eurozone, which was always an act that polled terribly.
mzs 5y ago
and possibly FOSTA-SESTA too
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
This is why America needs to work beyond it's fascination with creditcards. Your bank can't block shit and has to process whatever transaction you want short of the terrorist watchlist.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > Your bank can't block shit and has to process whatever transaction you want short of the terrorist watchlist. Is that true?
  - pvarangot 5y ago
    No. I'm in the US and my bank even blocked sign in bonuses "just to be sure everyone is ok with it because it's a lot of money". Using plain old inter banking transfers for something like OnlyFans subscriptions is suicide and the new APIs like Zelle or Venmo are subject to even more internal regulations than credit cards regarding percentage of fraud transactions/porn.
    - mopsi 5y ago
      Seems like it's the cost of fraud protection then. The European SEPA has virtually no fraud protection, unless it was a technical error (duplicate payments etc). The upside is that no-one cares who you transact with. All payments are final.
      - guerrilla 5y ago
        > The European SEPA has virtually no fraud protection, unless it was a technical error (duplicate payments etc). The upside is that no-one cares who you transact with. All payments are final. Yeah, I'm used to using that domestically and rarely for business. We usually use Giros[1] for business and now Swish for more personal stuff. I think most areas now have Klarna (even the US according to Wikipedia). I wonder how much they would interfere in things like this. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giro 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment) 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klarna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klarna
miohtama 5y ago
The requirements from MasterCard are here and not impossible to comply https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/1428449662533619728 https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/142844966253361972...
miohtama 5y ago
Here is the story https://www.xbiz.com/news/258606/heres-what-the-new-mastercard-rules-mean-for-adult-sites-producers https://www.xbiz.com/news/258606/heres-what-the-new-masterca... But sounds like OnlyFans could have complied with verification requirements, like PornHub had done?
obviouslynotme 5y ago
You would think that it would be profitable enough for them to become their own bank and processor if no one else would. This right here tells me they knew they couldn't. Why? Who is telling them no? How can we live in a place where LEGAL businesses are purposefully excluded from the market? I think they should start taking Bitcoin or Monero. Fuck MasterCard and whoever dictates what they do. If you are going to be forced into bankruptcy, at least do it in style.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >You would think that it would be profitable enough for them to become their own bank and processor if no one else wou Or just buy a bank. Surely they could have raised the capital.
bambax 5y ago
It may be so, but they won't need payment processors once they don't have payments, or users.

l33t2328 5y ago

This is absolutely ridiculous. What if they decide people can no longer buy dildos or lube or condoms or guns or alcohol or meat on Fridays? There’s no law with respect to “payment neutrality”??

emodendroket 5y ago
Why should there be? It seems absurd to MANDATE anyone participate in the sex trade. There are payment processors who specialize in adult content.
- marvin 5y ago
  At the mercy of Visa and MasterCard, I would guess. Doesn't OnlyFans work with CCBill, who exclusively work with adult content providers? More info is needed to conclude, but it wouldn't surprise me if their upstream providers made demands.
  - bcheung 5y ago
    I highly doubt they are going through CCBill. They are too expensive at volume. Since they are only charging models 20% I suspect they tried to pretend to not be adult, which they probably weren't in the beginning. But not it is almost all adult and CC processors know that and want their higher cut.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    There is this from January, where MasterCard wanted sellers of adult content to have more stringent verification of the age and consent of performers in the wake of the PornHub scandal, which I’ve seen people speculating may be related: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-updates-policy-for-adult-content-sellers https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-upda... These aren’t explicitly linked in the story but it would make sense IMO
- ardit33 5y ago
  morality is relative.... next stop it is strip clubs, then hooters being banned? Payment processors provide a utility. They should have the right not to process illegal transactions and illegal activities. But as long as the activity is legal, it shouldn't be up to them to police morality. They should be treated like utilities. If we go down this path, the city's water and electric utilities can decide to shut down the new hooters, because it is obscene and against god (according to conservaties), or it uses women and is an oppressor (according to some liberals). Utilities shouldn't be involved in morality policing.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    There are a couple practical reasons why they wouldn't want to: high risk of fraud or chargebacks and difficulty keeping on top of content that veers into illegality spring to mind immediately.
    - gentleman11 5y ago
      Like paying for abortions or gay weddings in certain states? Buying cannabis from somebody on the street instead of somebody in a store 6 months later? Promoting unions depending on the decade? Letting “trespassing” black people buy coffee in shops that banned them in the 60s? Making breaking the law impossible is dangerous
      - emodendroket 5y ago
        I'm not 100% sure what you're getting at but most legal dispensaries require you to pay cash.
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > Like paying for abortions or gay weddings in certain states? These do not have the high rates of chargeback that adult content does.
      - JohnBooty 5y ago
        This is a very legitimate concern -- payment processors could start enforcing that kind of thing based on morality. However, unless something has changed lately, for decades the issue with adult content + online payment processors is not morality related. It's because of the high fraud/chargeback rates associated with online porn transactions. Unless it's SESTA/FOSTA related, but I don't think anything's changed on that front for a while.
- l33t2328 5y ago
  You know how US Dollars say “This note is legal tender for all debts” on them? It seems to absurd to allow companies with an oligopoly on most of the transfer of those notes to pick and choose what sectors are appropriate for citizens to interact with financially.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lallysingh 5y ago
    That's not what that means. https://www.quora.com/On-every-US-dollar-bill-the-message-This-note-is-legal-tender-for-all-debts-public-and-private-is-printed-How-is-it-then-legal-for-some-businesses-to-not-accept-cash?share=1 https://www.quora.com/On-every-US-dollar-bill-the-message-Th...
    - l33t2328 5y ago
      The comment you linked to doesn’t address the point I made. My point was that you can spend your cash wherever you want, in whatever way the seller will accept. My point was not that sellers ought to be forced to accept bags of pennies.
  - tylersmith 5y ago
    That has nothing at all to do with payment processing.
  - thephyber 5y ago
    There is no financial neutrality requirement, but perhaps there should be. Also, that quote on the dollar has nothing to do with your argument. You seem to be projecting a layperson’s interpretation of those words instead of the relevant jurisprudence.
  - travisjungroth 5y ago
    > companies with an oligopoly on most of the transfer of those notes This is an important distinction. Credit card payments are not notes. They are not cash. So these companies have very little to do with the transfer of cash. The point of "legal tender" is that if you try to pay off a debt in cash, they can't claim you haven't paid it and take you to court. If you try to pay for your meal in a restaurant with cash and they refuse, you can just walk out and they wouldn't have a legal case (probably. in theory. not legal advice). What's tricky is this has to be a debt, as in past tense. If you try to buy groceries with cash and they refuse, you can walk out but you can't the groceries with you. Participation in the cash market is mandatory on anyone who is owed money. Everything else on top (credit cards, checks) is essentially voluntary. Merchants can take it or leave it, the processors can come or go. If you want to make an argument about the outsized effect that Visa has on the US monetary system, that's totally legitimate. It just has little to do with the concept of "legal tender".
- didgfehfocu 5y ago
  Why should it require specialization at all besides that laws pushed by religious conservatives to advance puritan ideals demand it? Don't be a doctor if you aren't willing to help your patient exercise their right to choose and don't be a payment processor if you're not willing to process payments in a neutral fashion. It's rediculous that at a time when equity and #metoo is all the rage that no one is talking about inequity in the law in the form of legal sandbags.
- adrusi 5y ago
  We mandate that some companies participate in the sex trade, at least to the extent that payment processors can be considered to be participating. The electrical company is mandated to provide power to Onlyfans' datacenters, so long as they are paying for the service. Also there's basically only four payment processors: Visa, Mastercard, Discover and Amex. None of them specialize in adult business. There are downstream processors along the lines of PayPal and Stripe, and some of them specialize in adult business, but they're entirely beholden to the big four.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    I think this is different. If the customer is unhappy with the service provided, their dispute has nothing to do with the electrical company, nor are they going to claw back payments to them.
    - adrusi 5y ago
      If the problem is that customers are contesting payments or other fraud-related issues, the standard remedy is to bump fees, not revoke service.
- hackinthebochs 5y ago
  Why should internet providers be mandated to participate in the "sex trade" by allowing immoral bits to flow over their wires?
ozim 5y ago
That is called democracy and yes there are a lot of things that are not sold. General public agrees that explicit material is bad. Right now we have in Poland shops closed each Sunday - it is annoying for me. Selling alcohol in Norway is heavily restricted and I see more and more restrictions on alcohol sales in Poland. Explicit material is tied a lot to money laundering, there is also a lot of scams tied to it and lots of stolen cards are used to pay for explicit material. It is huge cost for payment providers, all the laws for anti-laundering trump any "payment neutrality". If you want to see naked ladies go to "a place" and risk on your own, pay with cash.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Payment networks should operate according to laws and regulations, not reputation and public opinion. Would you want your electricity turned off because someone did not like who you were or what you believe? That is a road to tyranny.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    No business operates this way.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - kelnos 5y ago
      Given that payment processors are an oligopoly, and it's incredibly difficult to build another Visa or MasterCard, they should be regulated as utilities (or at the very least, similarly to telecom providers), and be required to be content-neutral. Just like Comcast can't tell me I can't download porn, Visa shouldn't be able to tell me I can't buy it, either.
  - ozim 5y ago
    Slippery slope argument. So you are going to run naked in the city center because public opinion about this does not match what you want.
_jal 5y ago
Remember this next time people start pushing going cashless. Doing so means that a third party is involved in every transaction you make, and that someone else will always have veto power over your commercial transactions.
- l33t2328 5y ago
  That’s an excellent point. Having an electronic alternative to cash would be amazing, but so far there’s nothing close to it with respect to privacy and freedom.
  - missingrib 5y ago
    Is this satire going over my head?
- bcheung 5y ago
  Crypto will eventually democratize business transactions but it will take some time and it will not be without increased fraud.
  - xur17 5y ago
    What type of fraud? It seems to me that it would make it basically impossible to defraud a merchant with a stolen payment method (much like cash). Do you mean merchants defrauding their customers?
    - kmonsen 5y ago
      Right, but that means it will be a lot easier to scam regular people. The ability to clawback money is a vital way of stopping scams over the internet.
      - xur17 5y ago
        As a customer I wish I could have the option (in return for a cut of the interchange + fraud fees the merchants pay).
boplicity 5y ago
1. Freedom of Speech extends to all parties in a relationship 2. Freedom of speech includes choosing who I work with 3. It makes sense to have certain restrictions on freedom of speech, especially as it relates to clearly harmful discrimination (i.e. racial discrimination, gender discrimination) 4. It does not make sense to restrict freedom of speech in the case of pornography, specifically, whether a company can choose to work with pornographers or not
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

jpeter 5y ago

Why should payment processors force them to. They will make less money

emodendroket 5y ago
Probably the reputational risk to them from being associated with porn is not worth whatever OnlyFans brings in.
- pell 5y ago
  Why would OnlyFans not simply move to another payment processor then? This all seems a bit strange.
  - sascha_sl 5y ago
    It's not so easy. The obvious candidates all ban adult content, and the ones used by the porn industry are either owned by the same or take cuts that make the AppStore look reasonable.
    - pell 5y ago
      From what I understand OnlyFans has essentially no other product except for this type of content though. So I would have assumed negotiating with one of these processors for a somewhat more reasonable contract despite higher fees would still be more lucrative than giving up what seems to be their core business and revenue stream.
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      Taking a 30% cut doesn’t seem that bad compared to the alternative. Why lose 90% of your revenue and all your profit just to not give a 30 or 40% cut to shitty middle man? Unless Onlyfans actually has some decent traction outside sexual stuff. I find that hard to believe. If photos are still allowed, that’s something. But still. Maybe I’m completely misinformed though!
    - gpvos 5y ago

throwawaysea 5y ago

We really need an alternative to big payment processors like Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Stripe, etc. Moving money around is so fundamental to basic living that it shouldn't be solely possible through duopolies or oligopolies, and it is morally and ethically unacceptable that these companies seek to impost their own morals and politics upon others who are voluntarily transacting with each other. We've known this was a problem for a LONG time now, going back to when the credit card companies colluded to institute a payment blockade against Wikileaks over 10 years ago (https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-mastercard-move-to-choke-wikileaks/?sh=365e46c32cad https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-m...). I'm disappointed we aren't in a better place yet. We need renewed antitrust legislation to take control of big tech and payment processors. They are as influential as governments, and cannot be allowed to discriminate, just like your water utility cannot discriminate against you based on your personal life or politics.

rejectedandsad 5y ago

The fact that OF is not all in on crypto payments is a massive indictment of crypto as a payment mechanism.

serverholic 5y ago
Or that crypto is only 12 years old which is really fucking young for a currency.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  Or that just the transfer fees would be more than most payments. Or that no one would be able to properly use those payouts.
- AzzieElbab 5y ago
  Nothing is on crypto payments because you never know how you are actually paying
  - T0Bi 5y ago
    There are stable coins as well, where you know exactly what you're paying.
- mortehu 5y ago
  That's not young at all. How much trouble did people have accepting Euro in 2011?
  - toast0 5y ago
    A government mandate certainly helps a currency develop.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    Arguably scepticism towards the Euro as a currency and Britain wanting nothing to do with it after the crisis was a key pillar of Brexit, so I wouldn’t say it went down amazingly. I remember during the campaign there was a fairly widespread notion that an overly Europhile government like Tony Blair’s might irreversibly commit the UK to the Eurozone, which was always an act that polled terribly.

mzs 5y ago

and possibly FOSTA-SESTA too

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

This is why America needs to work beyond it's fascination with creditcards. Your bank can't block shit and has to process whatever transaction you want short of the terrorist watchlist.

guerrilla 5y ago
> Your bank can't block shit and has to process whatever transaction you want short of the terrorist watchlist. Is that true?
- pvarangot 5y ago
  No. I'm in the US and my bank even blocked sign in bonuses "just to be sure everyone is ok with it because it's a lot of money". Using plain old inter banking transfers for something like OnlyFans subscriptions is suicide and the new APIs like Zelle or Venmo are subject to even more internal regulations than credit cards regarding percentage of fraud transactions/porn.
  - mopsi 5y ago
    Seems like it's the cost of fraud protection then. The European SEPA has virtually no fraud protection, unless it was a technical error (duplicate payments etc). The upside is that no-one cares who you transact with. All payments are final.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      > The European SEPA has virtually no fraud protection, unless it was a technical error (duplicate payments etc). The upside is that no-one cares who you transact with. All payments are final. Yeah, I'm used to using that domestically and rarely for business. We usually use Giros[1] for business and now Swish for more personal stuff. I think most areas now have Klarna (even the US according to Wikipedia). I wonder how much they would interfere in things like this. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giro 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment) 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klarna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klarna

miohtama 5y ago

The requirements from MasterCard are here and not impossible to comply https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/1428449662533619728 https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/142844966253361972...

miohtama 5y ago

Here is the story https://www.xbiz.com/news/258606/heres-what-the-new-mastercard-rules-mean-for-adult-sites-producers https://www.xbiz.com/news/258606/heres-what-the-new-masterca... But sounds like OnlyFans could have complied with verification requirements, like PornHub had done?

obviouslynotme 5y ago

You would think that it would be profitable enough for them to become their own bank and processor if no one else would. This right here tells me they knew they couldn't. Why? Who is telling them no? How can we live in a place where LEGAL businesses are purposefully excluded from the market? I think they should start taking Bitcoin or Monero. Fuck MasterCard and whoever dictates what they do. If you are going to be forced into bankruptcy, at least do it in style.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>You would think that it would be profitable enough for them to become their own bank and processor if no one else wou Or just buy a bank. Surely they could have raised the capital.

bambax 5y ago

It may be so, but they won't need payment processors once they don't have payments, or users.