alt Hacker NewsFor specifically sexually explicit stuff, it's because chargebacks are __significantly__ higher for these types of purchases. High enough that it messes with the credit and counterparty risk modeling that processors use. You can use your imagination to come up with many reasons these result in more chargebacks than normal purchases.
Theoretically, they could just split out "explicit" vs "normal" risk categories, but there's two top problems there: 1) it's just fundamentally a smaller-yet-way-more-annoying category than the rest of their payments, and 2) tons of your partners (banks etc etc) have blanket-banned for all of the above reasons.
So... here we are.
Replies
I really struggle with realistic use cases for stablecoin payments (many are more gee-whiz party tricks or they are reinventing the problems of traditional finance but on a blockchain) but adult content / tipping is an interesting one... small transaction size + high chargeback rate, feels ripe for this
> You can use your imagination to come up with many reasons these result in more chargebacks than normal purchases.
No I can't. Can you elaborate?
Then why there are chargebacks in the first place? Allow merchants to have no chargeback policy.
>it's because chargebacks
Sorry, but that's just bullshit. This is nothing more than your standard pseudogovernmental meddling in the "just build your own financial infrastructure" vein, and it's coming from foreign countries this time rather than the US itself (it currently has an administration less hostile to business).
This is the common explanation I see when this topic comes up, but it always made zero sense to me. It frustrates me that people fail to realize the amount of purchaseable things that could qualify as 'explicit'. This is Kickstarter. Do we really think that someone crowdfunding a risque board game or comic is as likely to ask for a chargeback as some middle-aged man trying to hastily cancel a subscription on some porn site?
And there's just so many more things you can pay for. Physical stuff. Art prints and comics. Game mods. Art commissions. Services that aren't just video platforms (social media, hookup apps and so on). There's so much more stuff out there that's not child-friendly, and I bet that all of these categories have different amounts of financial risk atrached to them.
So why are all these different things grouped under the widest net, with the worst offenders being used as reason to deny processing to the entire market segment? Why did they ban all explicit content and not just porn site subscriptions or whatever else has the most chargebacks?
This comment thread is confidently trying to steer around this topic, but there is ideology mixed up in this, and probably to a way larger extent than you think.