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Is this going to affect similar practices for all payment processors? I feel almost any payment processor refuses to deal with "vice" business (porn, gambling) due to high risk of fraud. This will be very interesting if they are no longer allowed to do that.



They'll just make the fees be 110% of the transaction or something similar. That's how credit card processors do it now.

They charge a variable rate based on the nature of the business and the risk it involves. Porn sites get charged 10-20% in credit card fees because of the high number of chargebacks.


What about the discrimination against gun dealers?

I'm speculating that fraud would be lower than average for such transactions, because there's such a strong paper trail from the instacheck system and all.


I can't speak for gun dealers but for defense companies that also sell to consumers, think high end gun optics, there is fraud. And law enforcement is just an interested in investigating it as any other business ( Not at all) But I don't think any more fraud than any other online business.


Isn't that discrimination too if we go by this precedent?

IceCreme? We can't refuse you, but it's $4500 for you!

Where do you draw the line? Litigation is expensive!


It’s not $4,500 for “you”, it’s $4,500 for a specific line of business that experiences higher losses.


I'm curious about this too. If your business has high risk than raising your fees for select people sounds like discrimination. Raising them for your whole platform could really hurt your business


The fees are raised due the riskier nature of the business, not due to “select people”.


Stripe has a list of restricted businesses too. I been toying with the idea of building a new virtual world, but still very early... And sounds like getting the whole economy system is going to be a huge pain, plus other rules too. However there's plenty of other things to tackle first anyways.

Sounds like offering VOIP related stuff would also be a no no with them, so I guess if you made a chat app with features similar to Skype, couldn't use stripe either.

It sounds like some of these rules might be passed down by one of the major credit card processors, but I know there's other providers out there who allow this stuff but maybe higher fees or more vetting for a merchant account.

https://stripe.com/restricted-businesses

As for the virtual world idea, I have debated about using blockchain since I know some other virtual worlds experimented with doing blockchain based payments, so could probably mix decentralized and centralized but I think not having a stable value kinda sucks, then non technical users setting up a wallet and other considerations, especially if multiple devices is kinda a UX nightmare. Well I guess you could make a wallet on your phone or desktop app, and try to enter the seed words in your VR headset too but probably be strange to most people. Micro transactions where speed matters is also a hurtle...




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