this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 343 points 1 day ago (85 children)

We can blame the religious organisation as much as we want, but the fundamental problem here is payment processors. They should be common carriers. Content-neutral middlemen who facilitate payment to anything that isn't literally unlawful. This is no different to an ISP throttling access to Netflix because they operate their own streaming platform. If the storefront, the developer, and the buyer are all ok with a transaction, there's no good reason for a fourth party to stand in the way of that.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 25 points 1 day ago (15 children)

Maybe the idea of BTC was fine. What wasn't fine is the idea of mining.

And maybe payments over the Internet or over PSTN are fundamentally different from messaging, conferencing, downloading files, all that stuff.

But what's important is the ability to pay for a service with something resembling cash IRL in the sense that an ATM machine from which you took that cash can't take it back because you are paying for an adult journal with it.

But at the same time how can there be so few payment processors that they can affect a platform's decision to do a kind of business?

That's where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago (8 children)

That’s where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.

Because you essentially need a global presence to at all be worth using. That is why it is a joke that NOBODY accepts American Express and only the shadiest of international ATMs accept Discover (saved my ass in Germany back in the 10s though)

You are literally saying that we need to look at why there aren't more global mega corporations.

[–] peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm going to be really dumb

Why does a payment processor need to exist?

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I am an artist in OtherCountry. You want to buy art from me. How do you do it?

Physical money? Okay. You now need a way to track that YOU sent 40 bucks in the mail and that I received 40 bucks in the mail and that is (at least) two different national postal services involved. And now I need a way to convert 40 YourLandia dollars into OtherCountry pounds. AND we need to make sure all of that happened quickly enough that exchange rates didn't meaningfully change

Digital money? Who is running the site? How many different sites do I need to have accounts on to accept payment from all the countries I want to sell to?

At the end of the day: For any transaction that is not face to face transfer of hard currency (and even then but...), you need an intermediary that both parties trust. Payment processors are that intermediary. Sometimes they are the person taking my IOU and turning it into money so that you can give me a hamburger. Sometimes that is effectively a courier making sure your money gets to me no matter where on the planet we are.

It is what lets us have transactions that aren't "Okay, you drop your armor and I'll drop my money and then we'll slowly change places and... who the fuck just ran out of the bushes to steal the money I put down while waiting for you to put down your armor? And why are you now both doing the Carlton?"

[–] wellbudyweek@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You seem to know a lot of this, in order for your point to click for me, could you explain why some extra payment processor is needed? Would a simple bank transfer not work? If you give me your IBAN, we could let our banks take care of it, right?

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

You DO realize your banks are the payment processors in that case, right? And they are also working through an intermediary to facilitate said transfer (which has almost all the same problems as above). The money still has to get from Bank A to Bank B which gets even harder if they are in different countries.


And just to preempt "then why not just do everything with bank transfers?"

  1. Credit card companies provide a LOT more fraud protection.
  2. We basically do. You transfer money from your bank to your card (either as debit or credit). Your card then uses Visa/Mastercard to transfer money across whatever barriers to the destination card which then is transferred to the destination account

Hmmm. Something still isn't clicking in my head.

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