Why not? Payment processors have done it to guns just as much as they've done it to porn, both under the Obama administration.

The suggestion is new start businesses that do not need credit card processors.

FWIW https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...

Like I said, that smell like anti-competitive behavior. It basically means the payment processor denies competitors a business opportunity for cases they don't want to service.

It worked for Amazon.com in 1995!

> Bezos: We got an order from somebody in Bulgaria, and this person sent us cash through the mail to pay for their order. And they sent us two crisp $100 bills. And they put these two $100 bills inside a floppy disk. And then they put a note on the cover of the floppy disk, and they mailed this whole thing to us. And the note on the cover of the floppy disk said, "The money is inside the floppy disk. The customs inspectors steal the money, but they don't read English." That shows you the effort to which people will go to be able to buy things.

You can’t realistically target anyone inside the US with it either. USPS is allowed to seize cash in packages if it believes it’s being used for illegal purposes.

Back in the days we used to mail cash in an envelope all the way to Britain just for some RuneScape membership time.

You can't even realistically target people inside the US with this. How many people are gonna mail cash to buy digital games? Gimme a fucking break.

Yes, a small business in the 90s may have been able to make it work, but it's not the 90s anymore.

Fair enough - so in reality they _are_ being pressured directly to remove the content and it has nothing to do with selling the products. A slippery slope indeed!

There's quite a few F2P games requiring high spec machines, Throne & Liberty for example.

I guess from the down votes I'm getting that people don't have the full context here and won't seek it out on their own - something I should have foreseen.

I'm speaking of Hikaru Nakamura, who is one of the best chess players in the world. He is also a streamer on kick, and actually talks in the way I demonstrated. It's not an exaggeration, he actually repeats the same thought ~5 times in the regular.

He is the only kick streamer I know, so that's what I think of when I hear kick.

The text is on there and is very straightforward. As far as I can tell it's a basically good bill.

Historically, payment processors were usually against republicans, which is why you see them acting in support of this.

Debanking is a form of social deplatforming that (for now) mostly targets right-wing causes. That's not at all to assert that the bill is wrong or that censorship is right—I'm just clarifying why it's Republicans on the side against censorship, in this context, when in other contexts the roles are flipped.

You can read the bill's author (Kevin Cramer) discussing that bill and his motives for writing it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250715113010/https://fedsoc.or... ("Debanking: The Newest Threat to Free Speech and Religious Liberty?) (2024)

> [Senator Kevin Cramer] "...I've heard that one from some pretty big bank presidents - but they get a lot of noise in their left ear and you have activist investors and whatnot that are saying, hey, you know what? We don't like coal. We don't like oil, we don't like natural gas. We don't like private prisons, or we don't like ammunition shops or gun manufacturers or whatever the case might be, the entire category or industry and says, "Well, so we're not going to bank them. We're going to debank them. We're not going to bank them. You're disqualified from getting money from us.”, and they're starving these industries out. And all this really is, in my view, you guys is this is a political agenda where they're utilizing the leverage of the financial services sector to accomplish policy goals that they can't accomplish any other way."

> and now I'm wondering what awful shit is hiding in it.

Had to look into it a bit.

From looking at the text of the bill, it looks like the sponsor did not like Operation Choke Point [0], which was specifically targeting banks that did business with Payday Lenders, Ponzi Schemes, and other shady vendors.

This also included pornography, but I'm willing to bet that's not what Sen. Cramer was upset about. More likely, he's simply serving the interest of his donors.

He also might have extremist "small business" constituents that are perhaps selling racist/sexist/homophobic merch, and they don't like being told that their bank/credit card processors are refusing to process payments on that swag.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

> Turns out it's actually an R bill, with exclusively R sponsors, and now I'm wondering what awful shit is hiding in it.

It seems to me like if you thought something was good and then switched to thinking it was bad based just on who proposed it, you need to stop being prejudiced. Evaluate ideas (or bills) for their merits, not based on who originated them.

>Cryptocurrency is a nice idea but there are and have always been too many gas fees for anyone to sensibly use it. I want to buy something not support everyone that get their hands in my transaction chain.

But you're doing this with credit cards already? Different amounts, but still supporting everyone in a chain. If you want to "buy" something without supporting intermediates, then barter is the only way to go. Everything else requires common trust, and common trust comes with operating cost.

> Cryptocurrency is a nice idea but there are and have always been too many gas fees for anyone to sensibly use it.

That's not true, at least not in general. Polygon (and USDT/USDC on Polygon) fees are near zero, Ethereum is lately very cheap, and even Bitcoin fees are no longer outrageous. EDIT: ...and Bitcoin Lightning is cheap.

A lot of p0rn payment processing is done in crypto for exactly the censorship reasons. If you can't use the payment processor, who cares what their fees are? (not saying they are cheaper or more expensive than crypto - I don't know)

This has mostly been solved. Bitcoin's lightning network, ethereum layer 2 networks, etc all have sub-cent fees.

> The US government can break up the duopoly and open up payments processing federally.

Between that and someone actually creating a viable Steam competitor, I will say the government breaking them up and rolling out their own solution would be even less likely. You'd have fights on both sides of the isle and from privacy groups. Not that we have much privacy now under the current scheme, but there's at least a tiny bit of separation between V/MC and the government.

What should happen instead is regulation. They should be held to the same standards as legal tender since they're used in place as such. They shouldn't get to decide how it's used, and that should be enforced.

They actually bother purchasing it? They don't simply pirate it rampantly to around access problems?

Nobody said anything about itch, this is about the whole payment system. You are agreeing with both of us but writing it as argument.

But the lack of reading comprehension on this site is making me lose my marbles.