Creative Title

Time for Europe to get its own payment processor and stop being dependent on companies from Gilead.

Gilead? The Pharma company??

This is why some of us love crypto currencies so much despite the hate it gets from so many who claim there is no intrinsic value, it's a scam, etc.

Stay away from shit coins, no doubt, but the intrinsic value is that you can side step all of the bullshit and spend your money as you choose. No need to get permission first. It's looking to be a much better path forward, and payment processors inserting their own rules will only drive more acceptance of alternative payment methods.

I mean this is a false dichotomy. You can have a payment system that isn't a shit show like crypto or a duopoly like Visa and Mastercard.

Tupã bless Brazil's pix.

At least I can still buy porn from local furry artists.

what even is the point of this cyberpunk dystopia if there won't even be good porn to wank to?

That’s my thought exactly. Boring dystopia indeed.

I wonder how long this will last. The NSFW industry is insanely huge. If the current payment processors cut it off, that leaves a giant gap in the market just waiting to get filled (😏).

If they hold firm on this, it might just be a rare opportunity for a new (and hopefully better) payment processor to enter the market.

Or maybe just wider crypto adoption, idk.

I have no idea why all of a sudden payment processors care bout anything but money. What happened ?
- Collective Shout happened, an australian organisation decided to wage global war on anything NSFW in games (so far), their key talking points are allegedly being feminist and anti-exploitation of women.
  i wonder if they asked the women they're saying they're protecting if they want that "protection", or if they're imagining that women just don't make NSFW art
- Bad press?

Doubt it, how else will Onlyfans funnel money ... elsewhere?

Now imagine someone who is not the last person in Europe, but the last person in the world lol...

Sex art is art

I don't get it. Will they also ban sex shops, adult cinemas and every other offline adult entertainment thing that exist?

Now that weed is being widely accepted legally, porn is the new prohibition.
- two steps forward ten steps back, eh?
Yeah, that's literally what these people want.

Imagine how many more "Thomas Matthew Crooks" are gonna come out of their basements if you ban their porn. Conservatives secretly love their porn. Might wanna rethink the ban.

Or not, I don't mind watching a IRL live movie about a rebellion instigated by...

checks notes

...banning porn 🤦‍♂️🤣

They supposedly love their children too.
- My God... All the "pro life" movements make so much more sense now! They actually don't care about the women, they only want the children around. And worse off the children, the better for them!

I'm not a cryptobro but these things make me want to hodl on some

cryptocurrency is absolutely not going to be a substitute. what happens when your client's money drops in value halfway through working on their commission?
- Easy. Agree on the price in a more stable currency, and pay the equivalent in crypto when the work is done.
- Could use a stablecoin that's pegged to USD or EUR.
  USDC seems relatively safe given how much traditional investment is tied up in Coinbase and Circle.
- Or what happens when governments ban crypo exchanges?
  I think the real answer is for us (the electorate) to start electing officials who aren't puritanical twats. Way way harder to do tough.

Speed running the porn companies making their own payment processor

AFAIK there's pay processing business that will do nsfw transactions but they ask for extra money.
I'd open a KinkPay account, when offered.

This comic goes from 2020 to 1984, was this comic originally about idiots that compared wearing a face mask to wearing a jew star?

Worse, it was when Twitter banned Trump. This is just like when the Savage John asked to be exiled from the World State but the Controller forces him to engage in society to torture him.
There was a reddit sub where they take in unfunny comics (usually sexist) and then edit them to be funny. That's how this actually became a meme.
- I think that was r/bonehurtingjuice

Undoing all the gains made during the sexual revolution. Conservatives taking us back to the puritanical dark ages.

It's not even conservative any more. It's regressive.
- Always has been
- These conservatives are old, so they are trying to "conserve" ideals that were out of touch in their own time

So, why doesn't some other payment processor step in to fill in the demand gap that the others are willfully abdicating?

the economic moat of regulations and infrastructure that has to be overcome before you even can start acquiring customers. You would need a massive capital outlay just to start in last position to compete. Then you have to pay your sydadmins and sales and help desk and administration for how long before you have enough customers to break even? all on a gamble that the government won't hamstring you on behalf of their corporate sponsors. and who is to say the rest of the financial world won't cut you off; you can't process payments if you can't access users banks, it's all cooperative between entities that benefit from it being a small club.
all of this risk to capture the relatively small nsfw market looks like a bad gamble to me, even though i strongly support the nsfw market myself! I spent decades in e-commerce and nsfw ecommerce and it's trickier than it might look.
- The most likely to succeed at the moment, IMHO, would be a standardization of the various local payment systems in Europe, and there is already some movement in that direction in a growing group of countries, but it probably needs a push from the EU itself, similarly to how GSM was pushed as a standard for mobile communications by European governments as a group and ended up dominating globally (which is also why, for a period and until smartphones became a thing, European mobile telephony companies were wildly successful).
  I'm sorry for Americans who aren't assholes (most here in Lemmy as far as I can tell) but the rest of the World does need to decouple from speed-running-to-Gilead America at all levels before it's too late.
- Yoid be starting in 1st position for all these transactions that just lost a market.
- Crypto it is, then.

I was worried that this could make bitcoin seem useful but other people in here are explaining why bitcoin would still be an awful solution for this.

So... are we going back to cash and checks? Will people need to mail envelopes of cash to furry vore artists?

Bitcoin wouldn't be an awful solution to this, but there's certainly a few better ones, such as
Visa and MC just being the opinionless payment providers they ought to be.
Regulation enforcing all payment providers to be similarly opinionless.
Ethereum, or another crypto more suited to many, fast payments
A layer-2 network over Bitcoin that can enable many fast payments, such as the lightning network.
- Monero for private, almost untraceable transaction, keep furry vore artist under cover and still paid in oppressive country.

Let's make a community run payment processor then. We'll valiantly process porn payments.

Having worked in the payment industry, there is a lot of work to be done.
Even if you use the EMV standard, which almost all of the payment processor are based on, the challenge is to interface with the banks and making sure that every cards and terminals follow your standard.
And that's if you can convince banks to even accept you payment standard in the first place.
Mastercard? No sorry, we only take WokeCoin 🤷‍♂️
- MasterbationCard
So crypto?
- :(
I've been thinking this too. I'll use it everywhere just because

i wonder if this is the shitgibbons in charge trying to drive up bitcoin prices seeing as how they just publicly bought a bunch of bitcoin.

i know the payment processors have always been prudes but they are really doubling down and its only going to drive folks to crypto.

edit: I don't think it's a good idea either but talk to anyone outside lemmy and ask if they understand the environmental impact of crypto and AI and they have no clue.

Bitcoin is really bad for using as currency, due to the fact that there is a permanent, public ledger of all transactions. Why would you want anyone you pay to be able to see and trace every transaction you've ever made? Pay rent in bitcoin, now your landlord can calculate your spending and who you do transactions with. And yes, there are services that aggregate and obfuscate transactions in order to make them less traceable, but now you've just reinvented the same centralized payment processor system that the whole thing is supposed to be replacing... so... what's the point?
Cash is good for using as currency.
- so... what's the point?
  The point isn't anonymity, but independence and autonomy. It's hard to shut down and hard to tax. The banks/governments can't freeze your bitcoins, nor can they simply print more or regulate the value otherwise.
- So monero?
- That's a bad argument. Visa, MasterCard, etc. know who you're transacting with anyway. That is functionally equivalent to just paying from a Coinbase Bitcoin wallet. On the public ledger, it'll only show a transaction from a Coinbase wallet. No one would know it's you other than Coinbase and the porn provider
  Woth crypto you could at least send it to your wallet, throw it through Tornado Cash, then put it in another wallet, making it extremely difficult to track
  In general though, if the government wants to know who made a digital transaction, they'll be able to find out. Doesn't matter if you use a credit card or crypto
  What makes Bitcoin bad as a currency is the slow, expensive transaction times
- You can use a p2p service, like Lightning with onion routing.
- Cash is good for using as currency.
  But so insanely annoying to handle and carry with you.
- You can make intermediate wallets to obfuscate transfers, like throwaways, so the wallet that pays your rent is different from the one ordering a dragon dildo and it's hard to say if it's the same person, but it's a hassle and you'll get extra transaction fees.
If this really does drive people to crypto then I hope it goes to monero or a fork of it. Try blocking or tracking transactions then.
I’ll pass on the tree burning coins
VISA and MasterCard get to build the digital dollar so they don't care how any of it is manipulated so long as their position as middlemen is secure.

Capitalism is actually the fix for this one for once. Just be the only payment processor that lets you buy anything legal. Demand for your services guarantees your success and the others die out.

Let’s see if republicans still like capitalism now.

Ah, and here is where the commenter learns that “capitalist” competitors have legislated their opponents out of business, bought them out, or colluded with them.
Oh, and it’s not just payment processors.
- It's not "capitalist", it's capitalist. This is what capitalism does.
Capitalism isn't the fix, banks are in cahoots with visa/mastercard and they will absolutely shut down any competition.
- fuck it, crypto.
- Who said anything about banks? Republicans are all in on crypto. let’s play this game.
Lol, that's not a thing. The infrastructure required is too kuch, and most banks are conservative.
Money is now the enemy.

So, this means that pretty much any paid adult content can't accept visa, right? Or are they just stomping in the small creators for not being profitable enough?

Looking at you, OnlyFans..

For now, they are targeting more niche “taboo” kinks like incest and bdsm. But as we’ve seen time and time again with bigoted, puritanical christofascists, they will not stop there. Next, they come for the queer content. My guess is furry stuff is next under the bad faith argument of “bestiality”, then more standard queer content, including tame non-erotic content. Finally, all erotic content.
Remember, everything sexual is sinful and evil unless its a straight white cis Christian married couple having joyless missionary sex for the purposes of procreation only.
- Valve has changed their content guidelines due to the requirements of the credit card processors. Itch.io, too. I wouldn't call Valve niche.
- They're already attacking furry content featuring "animal-esque genitalia", as there were people who thought that was "zoophilic". However, I still remember how much anime fans needed to fight, so that kemonomimi (catgirls, etc.) wouldn't been labeled as "zoophilic", which might be the source for the furry/anime divide in the west.
OnlyFans felt the pressure not too long ago. It's just when they announced they were banning porn, they realized they didn't have anything else. So they reversed course and somehow can still take payments.
- Wait what? OF banning porn? Is it 2021 again?

Gnu Taler sounds like a good idea now

Wow, i didn't know they had made that? Well, never heard about it, but that's cool! I love everything made by/with the GNU Project :p

It's legal until someone challenges it in court and they say it isn't. Sue.

Absolutely. I suspect the courts will find that if you are picky about what you allow, then you are responsible for it. It might force a push back to safe harbor type situations absolving them of caring about processing porn.

Meanwhile the Pirelli calendar from 1984 ...

Is this OC?

so hear me out.

there's an entire continent of payment processors out there that are not American.

just use one of those.

problem solved for a few years.

I'm not American and even I only know Visa and Mastercard. I know there used to be Maestro, but that was also owned by Mastercard. So what else is there that works globally?
- https://thefinrate.com/top-payment-processing-companies-in-the-eu/
  https://fintechmagazine.com/top10/top-10-payment-processors
  some are based in US, but there should be at least 10 from those two lists.
JCB - Japan only

whats a payment processor? something like PayPal?

A middle man between a vendor and your bank, essentially.
- oh, actually, there is a third option - very popular and widespread in Poland - BLIK - let's hope that a) they won't bend to the same bullshit b) they take the chance to go global.
  BLIK is really nifty, you go to your banking app, generate a code, give the code to the website/seller, confirm in the app, and payment made.
  and all you'll have to say (obviously steortyping here) is that if BLIK does the same as Visa & Mastercard, the Witcher & Cyberpunk will have to be banned due to adult content, instant win and security of NSFW media forever