Codarobo

Big nerd make stuff

  • They/any 🏳️‍⚧️

Some kinda large possum-dragon thing. I make art and games and worlds and code.

I also make and release music as b.trx!

pfp: uncommoncritter



Lilirulu
@Lilirulu

I keep seeing NSFW artists & consumers be like "Crypto might be the answer" and no it's not. It's really REALLY not. As great as it'd be if it was a lot of crypto is actually centralized and those exchanges are just as susceptible to the pressures of bunch of angry lobbyist as any credit card company. Especially if they want to do business in the US. (Plus the huge amount of other issues that are just inherent to Crypto... sorry is destroying the environment further really worth titty art? No, it's not.)

NSFW artists/Sex Workers can't keep running from the issue forever because the people who want NSFW gone literally WILL NOT stop until they eradicate all of it.

Like IDFK how you actually fight it but Crypto isn't some magical answer that solves all the problems of NSFW artists.

edit: changed the first sentence to add consumers because it's not just artists saying it.


deafhobbit
@deafhobbit

(puts on my job hat)

There are legal, regulated, functional electronic payment methods that bypass credit card processors entirely. They are largely electronic variations of traditional paper checks - direct bank account to bank account transfers - often (but not always) with a 3rd party service provider in the middle handling the details.

In the USA, ACH is the big one. it's slow, outdated, and terrible in all sorts of ways, but it works, and has very low transaction costs. Most of the rest of the world has better, faster, and more modern systems for direct bank account transfers, and the USA is slowly building one of our own.

A single artist couldn't just start accepting ACH payments, but a platform that wanted to serve a niche of artists could absolutely set up an ACH payment channel as an alternative to credit/debit cards. It's also possible that "self hosting" direct transfer payments might be possible with some of the more modern transfer methods available for other currencies today, or that it will be possible with dollars in the future once the USA's fast transfer system is up and running. Not sure.

Even with all that, ACH today is a far more viable alternative than crypto. The pipes are right there, they work, and they move millions (if not billions) of dollars around every single day. Crypto is a speculative asset class with high volatility and tremendous transaction costs. The only things people actually buy with crypto are crimes and other crypto.


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in reply to @Lilirulu's post:

I haven't even seen nsfw artists claiming this, its mainly crypto shills who see whats going on with the situation then pop in and go "wow gee you're having issue with a main payment processor??? you know what you should use???"

"Crypto isn't viable as a payment platform for anything other than extremely illicit goods" has been an obvious thing since like 2015 and I don't know why people still haven't caught on.

I'm probably naively hoping that this wero thing might soon be a viable alternative to credit card payments, at least within the EU. (Basically online payments directly from bank accounts; from* the folks that brought iDEAL to NL and BE; a payment method a surprising amount of non-EU websites support.) Apparently it's launching this year in FR DE and BE 😩

Centralized crypto exchanges are best avoided in general - these can not only change the terms, but also pull a PayPal and pocket your money without explaining themselves.

Swapping something like USDT on a P2P exchange should work, but may result in some hard-to-answer questions from your bank if you're not careful about who's you're swapping money with, so it's better not to.

in reply to @deafhobbit's post:

ACH - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network

FedNow - that future better electronic payments method i mentioned. It apparently actually started up last year! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow

Zelle - a similar modern transfer system that banks have been running in the USA for a few years. It's really more of a CashApp/venmo type of thing though, and not a payments platform - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelle

Instant Payments in general, with examples of how lots of places all over the world do this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_payment

And if you're writing a reply about accessibility/privacy/the unbanked/etc, i get it. I'm not saying these are better than cards, i'm just saying they're an alternative that's at least better than fucking crypto.

FedNow is not meant to be truly a peer-to-peer network by the same token, though having real time gross settlement solutions will make it much more plausible that such a network could exist. The reliance on debit cards is really because no such RTGS system exists for the US.

i really don't know much about FedNow, and wasn't even aware it had gone live until after i wrote the post. it's definitely not a solution for this today, but hopefully it'll at least lay the groundwork for one.

I feel like the real problem is that there are different systems for this all over the world, and a lot of artists depend on being able to take commissions from / sell art to people in other countries than the one they live in. I guess it means that whatever service this is would have to learn how to support a whole bunch of regional systems were it to be feasible.

there are a lot of reasons why cards have won the competition to be the default consumer electronic payments method, and this is one of them. there isn't any easy off the shelf alternative that does everything cards do. i guess i was trying to create a bit of hope by pushing back against the "mastercard has control of all electronic payments" doomerism i'd seen a bit of.