faceh
5d ago
That would be for the government to investigate, ultimately.
But point being if a person isn't breaking the law, then they should not be getting debanked.
faceh
18hr ago
Indeed, I read the exact arguments on lesswrong and elsewhere that humans would dive headlong into AGI because the military incentives to build one, and to build it before the other guys, was irresistible.
Countries throwing billions of dollars at reckless research because they don't want to be conquered is EXACTLY what doomerists warn of.
I could perhaps imagine a rule that provides that no payment processor can deny a customer the right to engage in any 'legal' transaction that is <$500 in a single day with a $10,000.00 total limit on a rolling 30 day basis, which is cumulative for the customer in question across any processors they use.
In exchange, the banks/processors get some kind of 'chargeback insurance' up to that $10,000.00 limit, analogous to FDIC insurance on deposits.
So "basic guaranteed processing" is a fundamental 'right' which any regulated bank has to provide.
I'm certain there would be abuses of this system, and second order effects.
But yeah, the idea is to HOPEFULLY prevent average citizens from being 'debanked,' and allow certain 'sketchy but legal' companies to eke out an existence if they have enough customers and not have to worry about an arbitrary policy change from one of like three major companies putting them out of business.
faceh
5d ago
Well, when you put it like that…what’s the alternative?
I think in the hypothetical ideal in my mind, the payment processors/financial system are 'forced' to be agnostic as to the source of funds they receive, even if they themselves will decline to send money out to certain uses or to take certain types of people or businesses as customers. Money is money when it comes in, as long as all else is legal and fraud protections are cleared.
I suppose it should in theory be 'impossible' to have your funds locked away from you, and your funds should always be withdrawable to some base physical currency or transferable to a different bank, so you will never have to forfeit money sitting in your account because the bank determines it came from some sketchy source.
Government doesn't like this because people will evade taxes and launder money and pay for activities the government dislikes.
Society at large might dislike this because various vices are enabled by an open payment process.
But the point is that if you are operating in sketchy-but-legal industries and you have a contract with a payment processor to help you receive money from your customers, you should not be getting 'debanked' completely without warning and should be able to know you can get those funds out of the bank without too much hassle, even if they ultimately decide to stop processing your payments.
faceh
6d ago
Got some of those in the 'leadership' positions independently wealthy.
faceh
5d ago
I had noticed that under the current regulatory regime, the U.S. government in theory should have information pertaining to literally every large monetary transaction that takes place with any regulated bank attached to it.
So almost all of them.
Also can't help but feel like this will eventually enable an end-run around the need to actually investigate crimes and make arrests to enforce the law. Instead they can just haul you in to ask why you made that strange $5000 transaction on July 23, 2026 when you happened to be visiting a known purveyor of badthink?
Frustrating, but inevitable because there's no way that government would CHOOSE to turn blind eyes to the wealth of transaction data that is now electronically accessible.
Guess I can understand WHY China, Iran, Russia and such would not want to be plugged in as part of the U.S. extended financial network, since that's basically giving them root level control of your citizens' finances, let alone your government's.
And with the implementation of the Corporate Transparency Act, it is also way harder to hide behind corporate structures.
Pretty crazy how while constant culture warring was going down during Trump's term, the Fedgov just quietly picked up all the tools it needs to surveil every aspect of the financial system from top to bottom without any alarm whatsoever.
It definitely annoys me that "access to the financial system writ large" has become so utterly critical to doing anything useful that it immediately has a totalizing effect on what anybody can do, anywhere in the world, even on the internet.
Maybe there's one bank/payment processor that holds out and willingly acts to handle the 'controversial' transactions, but that just removes things one layer back, as other banks and processors will eventually blacklist that bank. And thus rendering that bank mostly useless for any other purpose. If it doesn't shut down it'll struggle to remain solvent.
Lets say that some pornography company was wealthy enough it could 'become its own bank' and processes payments on behalf of users and extends credit and otherwise runs all its own transactions and only has to interface with the financial system to purchase the services it needs to operate. Once it is known as the 'porn bank' it'll probably be impossible to find any other financial services willing to interface with them unless they comply with all the sames restrictions the other banks are working under... which defeats the purpose of 'self banking' to begin with.
It comes down to the fact that the financial system is a tightly connected web, and the main value any bank or payment process can provide is access to the network, so maintaining that access is their primary concern.
From the moral standpoint, it bugs me when there's very little evidence(indeed, I've seen none) that digital artwork depicting heinous, illegal, or otherwise disgusting acts is actually causing harm to nonconsenting parties. The reasons we find CSAM objectionable and worthy of legally crushing are generally not present when it comes to digital art. One party or group wants some art, the artist produces it and gets paid, nobody else even need be aware of what it contains!
It'd be nice to think of our financial system as mostly as set of dumb tubes that transmit the data representing our money around without caring much about the start and endpoint... with a lot of protections in place to mitigate fraud, theft, and user error. But ultimately a financial company is operated by humans who are subject to legal jurisdiction of some country or other, and have to maintain access to the global finance system if they want to take that money to any other jurisdiction, so in reality the 'rules' are set based on what all participants are willing to tolerate.
Anyhow, this is ultimately the impetus for the protagonists in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon to create a private, heavily anonymized bank/data haven in a location outside of the U.S.' sphere of influence. And in order for them to pull it off it required a chain of events that seems even more fantastical now than it did then, such as finding an island nation that is independently wealthy yet also politically stable enough to act as a headquarters for such an endeavor.
The booze-and-meth of the masses. Get 'em all riled up and take away inhibitions so they get distracted brawling each other.
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