PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub
vice.com
vice.com
The number of ways in which someone, somewhere will be offended by products or services for sale is growing, driven by a rapidly improving worldwide communication network and delivery system, and by people terrified of the change that brings.
The response by PayPal and many others has been to cut service. With each case, the circle of people finding themselves cut off from the traditional economy grows.
Bitcoin is often criticized for its lack of use cases. I find a very high correlation between the strength of this belief and lack of awareness of financial deplatforming in its many guises.
When is right / wrong to boycott? And who should be allowed to? (Persons or companies)
Context: in Australia the prime minister (Scott Morrison) is looking into laws to ban boycotts by companies (who are being compelled by people / public opinion)
Legal has nothing to do with it. There is an increasing degree of business that entirely revolves around feelings of people who yell the loudest.
Who could possibly threaten a bank over handling financial transactions for sex workers? And what could they possibly threaten the bank with?
Even if it's some big business like Chick-fil-A...
Presumably they only bank with one bank, and presumably the porn and sex work industry has more money at that bank than Chick-fil-A.
How's this actually work? It's not making sense to me.
Because, indeed, discrimination is illegal, but suing a bank for it is long and very difficult if your account is frozen.
It's criticized because it's useless for this use case, people involved in this scene in practice don't care about it to any serious degree beyond it being a talking point, and because anything for legally working around financial deplatforming still needs strong interfacing with the rest of the system as well as compliance with legal regimes, which BTC has nothing to say on that.
In fact, you can make your own payments platform denominated in USD and that's as useful as BTC for legal activities. So why go through the extra steps?
Building your own PayPal is way harder than building a payout mechanism for Bitcoin.
By contrast, the barrier to entry for a new system denominated in USD is much higher. People can't really start using it until there's a company around to support it, and starting a company to run a payments platform isn't for the faint of heart.
Still, I've been keeping an eye on GNU Taler[0], which seems to be tackling the technical side of that problem. I'm unclear on some of the technical details, but it's the closest thing I've found so far to digital cash.
This technical problem has not been solved and the "lightning network" just turns exchanges like Coinbase into a bank or Paypal that can be shut down or run away with your money, which basically ruins the entire point of using Bitcoin.
Until Bitcoin can scale without "lightning network", I don't see people using it outside illegal activities. And from what I can see, the core concept of Bitcoin (and other cryptocoins) is fundamentally at odds with fast transactions. If you make confirmations 2x faster, then it just becomes 2x easier to fake a transaction. So paranoid merchants will just require double the confirmations.
Good call. These pornstars should just create their own payment platform instead of going through all the hassle of using BTC.
(I suppose one way would be to set up some sort of "western union" where you could deposit cash and someone at the "bank" would change the number in your account balance accordingly... But maybe there are regulations about this?)
This is demonstrably false in the amateur porn industry.
I have never understood the obsession with complying with stupid laws. The solution needed here isn't "legally" working around financial deplatforming; illegally doing so will work just fine - and also probably have the benefit, as widespread disobedience often has, of putting extreme pressure on these laws themselves.
As in you get paid 550$, by the time it's yours it's worth $600 and the next day $250 ?
I wish. But I'm afraid no one will be able to ask him anything, ever.
Videocasettes? Check.
Internet? Check.
Thank heaven for prurient smut, driver of all great technology. Without it we would still be in the stone age.
It's also probably the only thing really using VR/AR right now to any significant degree.
It used to be that there was a porn convention at the same time as CES in Las Vegas. For a lot of years, the porn conference was the better of the two from a technology standpoint.
No firearms, firearm parts, or ammunition. [1]
[1] https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/What-is-PayPal%E...
But yes, you are correct.
The lightning network is a joke--a frankenstein "Engineering UI" layed over a system to route around bad development decisions re:block size.
That's because it is still federally illegal
There was Hatreon but Visa canceled their services for them.
I agree the porn industry is legal and nobody forces people to watch Pornhub, now I doubt the future of Pornhub. I don't use it but I support those who do under the freedom of speech.
There is one absolute in the world: porn will exist.
Look at every technology and one of the first adopters is porn. Porn has chosen the winner of most battles in tech.
Most of the marijuana industry is illegal in the US. States making it legal doesn’t change the Controlled Substances Act. As banking is federally regulated, banks don’t have the freedom to knowingly allow illegal businesses.
Porn however, is legal, and deplatforming a legal product/business is wrong in my opinion.
To be clear, I am not suggesting marijuana should be illegal at the federal level at all, only that it’s not inconsistent that a bank not serve those customers — after all they would then become criminals themselves by facilitating the moment of funds for a product that is illegal.
In my opinion, IRS successfully killed BTC use in the US by treating it as property rather than currency (for currency FX, transactions under $200 are exempt from cost basis reporting on schedule D)
https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/e-krona/e-krona...
Honestly, the behavior of paypal is abysmal and I wish there to be a real alternative. I despise credit cards and would like to have more options.
I doubt I will ever pay anything for porn, but there are a lot of content creators that can only receive money via paypal/credit card.
I do actually think a government should have some control over its currency, but if the institutions implement their own arbitrary rules, solutions like Bitcoin are the best alternative.
A lot of porn models are becoming the content creators now. The line between your favorite adult actor and your favorite youtuber is growing thinner every day.
Which makes us wonder if one near day we'll see amateur adult content with sponsored products "... brought to you by Questionable VPN!"
Most forms of sex work are illegal in the US and other jurisdictions, and sites like PornHub are compliance nightmares where all manner of sleazy or illegal actions are likely happening. PayPal doesn’t want to be the financier for the next scandalous “amateur” producer.
If it's about this particular industry sub-group having a much-higher-than-normal rate of fraud or returns or buyers remorse or whatever causes more hassle to PayPal's processes than they're worth, then that makes commercial sense.
I tried other means such as money transfer and cash gift cards, but the exchange rate can mean to pay for $100 I have to spend $3-400!!
A proposal: sell btc giftcards. Each card will have a qr code which is a url that allows download of a wallet (with priv key) where the URL is active after payment. You can transfer the funds to your permanent wallet or spend it directly. Maybe you can even use it to pay for IRL goods somehow. Either way, the participation barrier is lowered. I heard of btc ATMs as well but I can imagine carrying one more giftcard is easier for stores than adding an ATM.
That said, I've heard that the ATMs in recreational marijuana shops are themselves significant sources revenue for the shops.
Until Bitcoin is ubiquitous (doubtful this will occur in my life time) we are still vulnerable to deplatforming when we go to exchange btc for fiat.
So this is already a solved issue. They aren't deplatforming me right now!
But the credit card industry is an oligopoly. If Visa or Mastercard don't like you, you're completely screwed as far as online payments go.
The great thing about BTC is you can send it so easily without going through all the hoops other 'systems' need. Sure, it isn't so easy to get started with BTC, but once you are in, it is a breeze.
Are there any payment options that have so far been immune to this issue?
Maybe it's worth setting up alternative payment methods, even if the percent they charge per transaction is much higher, just to ensure stability of access to funds.
Nano is instantly fully-confirmed, secure and immutable. All a model needs to do is display a Nano address (or QR code) in their webcam backdrop, or on their website. They get instant notification of payments, so have the option of instantly reacting to them. So they can be interactive with their viewers in real-time.
Nano is feeless, unlike Bitcoin, and will always be feeless. (Bitcoin's fees jumped to $6.25 on June 28 2019 so saying Bitcoin is currently 'cheap' doesn't really cover that.)
Nevermind the sex industry is probably the biggest attractor for fraudulent charges and overall sketchy business.
The US marijuana industry is, under federal law, entirely criminal, so that's kind of understandable, even if the underlying law is arguably undesirable.
Certainly there is some % of pornhub sex workers that are there against their will, but the dark web child porn networks are what our primary focus should be going against.
Right wing propagandists are rarely deplatformed compared to the other two groups and when they are it's generally for spreading conspiracy theories (remember that people have already died because of Pizzagate and QAnon "truthers") or inciting (racial/religious/homophobic) hatred.
The difference is that right wing propagandists are also a lot more vocal than the other group (or left wingers for that matter), skewing the perception. There's a widely known joke about how many comedians have shows on mainstream platforms with titles like "Cancelled" or "Triggered", complaining about "things you can't say anymore". Also see the "Intellectual Dark Web" whose whole shtick is being "deplatformed" by academia and the mainstream while having a massive mainstream media presence.
At a certain point they will start to ask you "where did you get this coins?" because sooner or later you'll have to convert them to real currencies
Cash is still a better option, there are plenty others: rechargeable CC, gift cards, vouchers, etc etc that work better than bitcoin, require no setup, no knowledge and can be used without hassles.
What's next? You get no water/power/whatever if you run a business that the service providers simply do not agree with?
But your general question is an open debate. If you run a hosting company do you have to host things you disagree with? If you run a transaction company doy you have to exchange with parties you disagree with? What if a certain type of transaction is too high risk, do they have to do it anyways?
Personally I'd like to see things lean more towards being agnostic to avoid amplification of the popular opinion but it isn't a cut and dry topic without corner cases or hard to define regulations.
So for instance this would be fine:
- A web hosting company refusing clients, because you can use another one
- Amazon refusing to sell the item themselves, because other companies can sell on the Amazon marketplace
- A bank refusing a client, since you can just use another bank
This would not be fine:
- Apple refusing to list an app on the app store, since no else can do so
- Amazon refusing to allow an item on its marketplace at all, since there is no other way to sell to people who buy on Amazon
- Google banning something from their search engine, since that's the only way to reach people who search with only Google
- PayPal refusing a client, since using PayPal is the only way to easily accept payment from PayPal account holders
ISP/Broadband access
Payment processing
Cellphone/telecom
It's exceedingly difficult to function in 2019 on a strictly cash basis. Just like it's almost impossible to function in society without broadband. On the other hand, I can get by just fine if "hosting" doesn't agree with some questionable content I want to post online. It's more likely to get me a job than prevent me from getting one....
If so, you must accept, by law, all customers/participants/users without prejudice or discrimination, and you may only deny or limit service to same after a written order from a court of law instructing you to do so. Furthermore, this rule supersedes any Terms of Service that a company may wish to enforce.
That's not what we have in the US today—but we should. My money is on the EU crafting legislation to that effect first. I'd normally expect California to implement this kind of legislation first, but given the amount of money donated by the big tech companies, I doubt it'll happen.
[0] A "platform" is any business with a userbase that exceeds 1% of the population (for non-commercial customers, e.g. YouTube/Twitter/Facebook), or in the case of a business-oriented marketplace (such as Amazon's Seller Central), 10% of the specific market the business is targeting with their platform.
I would love to see an adult version of Stripe to help innovate payments in the adult industry. Paging @pc???
Is it too difficult in 2019 to start a payment processor? Is there some legal requirement that is preventing it? Some people said that creating a new car company in today's market would be impossible (too many regulations, expense, etc.) but Tesla seems to be doing pretty well. Is there a "Tesla" for the payment processing industry?
It sadly looks like my favorite hope is still not ready, but I am hopeful that this is due to slow and careful development that will lead to a stable long term outcome. https://taler.net/en/faq.html
The problem is that your CC number is both username and password. Cardsters are looking ways to convert soft credit card money to something without chargebacks. These services are fraud and money laundering magnets. Think it as a same as publishing fake eBooks on Amazon and then sell them to launder your income clean.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/26/crooks-launder-money-using...
This is assuming that banks don't just close your accounts for the same reasons...
https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/26/chase-closing-accounts-of-po...
In what world do wire transfers require 2FA?
The real problem is that person to person money transfers shouldn't be prohibited unless by law. Perhaps Pornhub, in the US at least, could use something like Zelle to mediate transfers between patrons and performers (using their bank account to make Zelle requests, and then distributing that out to performers with Zelle). At least until the Fed gets their ACH modernization act together and we get near real time payments.
True
> They don't actually perform money transfers between individuals.
It is regulated as some sort of money transmitter in every state: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/licenses
This would have been a huge problem in 2012, Now there are realistic solutions to avoid this. Just pay by cryptocurrencies on to a Coinbase Card and you can withdraw the cash and pay anonymously.
Job done.
Imagine if every time you wanted to buy a cup of coffee or a video game you had to buy a special currency to do it? I bet less of both would be sold
It's rare that I'm excited about a service, but this one appears to come with no strings attached, the wallet is even generated on the client-side.
It will have a chilling effect on Pornhub for sure, but porn and commerce speech are already both separately and specifically quite limited in their free speech protections in the U.S. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex... Put them together and it might be difficult to demonstrate that there was much expectation of free speech in this case in the first place.
EDIT: Would love some reasoning around downvotes.
At the end of the day you can't spend cryptocurrencies. When Walmart accepts a cryptocurrency then maybe people will consider actually using it. Paying people in some weird unheard of stable coin doesn't help anyone if it can't be easily converted into real currency that people use and accept.
Maybe the reason PayPal and so many other companies won't service adult industries is that there are laws that put them within arms reach of criminal liability?
On a related note, this reminds me of Operation Choke Point (2013-2017), where the DOJ harassed banks that did business with customers in legal, but "undesirable", industries [1].
[1] https://cei.org/blog/operation-choke-point-targets-porn-and-...
[2] https://reason.com/2014/04/28/doj-operation-chokepoint-and-p...
1) Chargebacks -- people chargeback the shit out of these kinds of transactions. Significant other sees the bill, gets pissed / confused about the charge / whatever and gets it charged back. 2) Fraud -- people use stolen CC's to pay for this kind of thing. 3) Porn operators are, as a whole, rather shady themselves and present their own set of risks to a payment provider. A lot of those chargebacks in #1 are actually valid chargebacks.
You could say "use bitcoin", which would solve the chargeback problem but do nothing for fraud and shady porn sites. If anything it would exacerbate the shady behavior because consumers would have no recourse against fraud.
In short, collecting payment for porn sites a tough, costly business.
Among the chargebacks, fraud is the most common reason code, but the amount of true fraud such as stolen credit cards is astoundingly low to the point of being almost non-existent. I would say 90% of cases were the angry spouse and the man denying it. The most common actual fraud you would see is a relative who lives in the house using it, say a grandson using grandma's credit card or adult children running up a $4k tab after their parent died.
Also I had to find friendly merchant banks, the problem with this is it is very much a two-way trust street. Just as there are tons of shady porn providers, there are tons of shady merchant banks. Some will hold your money for no reason and can jeopardize your whole business, so we always had everything spread across multiple banks but that could still be problematic.
So perhaps offer a payment system without chargebacks? Direct bank transfers also do not offer chargebacks and people use them for payment for goods and services.
Cryptocurrency works quite a bit differently to credit cards. "Fraud" in the usual sense isn't possible: it is not possible for the service provider to take your money merely by falsely claiming that you authorised a payment. Payments can only be initiated by the client.
...is there a logical reason for this?
I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of Kindle revenue and certainly more than half of Kindle profits were just women's porn. Amazon occasionally has half-hearted crackdowns because some conservative finds it and complains.
I had a buddy who nearly did a chargeback against a club that put "E 11 EVN" on his bill... name is Eleven Club.
edit....or so I'm told :)
Are you sure the name isn't "Club E11Even"? Because there is a rather famous strip club in Miami named E11Even (pronounced Eleven).
That's called a hotel room.
But in all seriousness, imagine using the Apple card for this, and then it comes up with a logo which says exactly what it is, heh :)
The best way to tackle that is to own a media company, and have PornHub as one of its' holdings, and then the bill would appear to be a neutral 'Decent Looking Media Inc.' or something like that.
There are other cryptocurrencies (eg Tether) that follow USD (eg 1 Tether is almost always equal to $1.00 USD), to avoid issues with volatility.
I guess another issue is that you'd have to pay taxes on any gains/losses between receiving your crypto and cashing it in for USD, and that would be pretty annoying to calculate manually.
I'm not the biggest fan of crypto but I think it actually solves this problem pretty well. There are probably other solutions too though (like only accept debit cards / payment methods that can't be charged back).
It would also be interesting for the protocol to gain the ability for arbitrage. Or even negotiate whom the arbitrating party would be.
I love the idea of crypto currency and I really do think, one day, some form of it will be out future. But Bitcoin today just doesn't fit that bill at all.
In my recent experience, payments confirm ~5 times within an hour or so.
> too cumbersome for he average consumer
The BitPay wallet is very easy to use. And many sites now use payment URLs, so it's basically just click the link, and hit OK.
> and its value fluctuates so much that you'd have to have dynamic pricing.
I haven't seen anything in recent memory that doesn't use dynamic pricing. Many sellers say something like "this Bitcoin quote is good for X minutes". And the payment URL doesn't work if it's expired.
If you have a few minutes and a few dollars in bitcoin, install Breez wallet, and try it with a few sites like yalls.org.
Note: This obviously doesn't solve the value fluctuation problem.
How will you deal with fraudulent / sketchy site operators scamming people into sending them money via irreversible payment channels?
It should be noted that Europe runs on SEPA payment system that has irreversible transactions. It's not that much of a problem.
1. Don't pay more in one go, than you can accept losing with a shrug.
2. Check the reputation.
These companies are seriously important in our lives. If you take away my payment source or my email or whatever you are potentially setting me on a path to ruin.
I don't know what the answer is but I do think these companies should be required to have an appeal process of some kind that's regulated. They have so much power.
Clearly if that time is anything under a number of minutes or hours you can’t possibly be agreeing to the contract and so they should be duty bound to refuse service.
I look forward to a test case where a judge rules a terms-of-service contract unenforceable because the vendor logged that I read it in 3.2 seconds and accepted that as me having read it.
Or maybe it’s time to start being that person again, who reads contracts slowly and in full before signing.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Private companies have no incentive to take a stand for individual freedom and will always bow before the demands of a (loud) minority
"The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) are the U.S. Senate and House bills that as the FOSTA-SESTA package became law on April 11, 2018. They clarify the country's sex trafficking law to make it illegal to knowingly assist, facilitate, or support sex trafficking, and amend the Section 230 safe harbors of the Communications Decency Act (which make online services immune from civil liability for the actions of their users) to exclude enforcement of federal or state sex trafficking laws from its immunity. Senate sponsor Rob Portman had previously led an investigation into the online classifieds service Backpage (which had been accused of facilitating child sex trafficking), and argued that Section 230 was protecting its "unscrupulous business practices" and was not designed to provide immunity to websites that facilitate sex trafficking."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_...
Investigators in EU countries often work with US agencies because our laws are so much stricter, and often urge people under investigation to cooperate otherwise they'll turn over the case to the Feds.
Tom Hayes, of LIBOR scandal fame, spilled his guts and signed a confession after being told he might be handed over to the Americans. Then he tried the aspergers defense, followed by the "I only confessed because they threatened me" defense, but neither swayed the jurors and he got 14 (reduced to 11) years in a UK prison.
That's not unique to the US. Countries own their currency and regulate their banks therefore using them gives a country the right to control what you do.
This is grossly oversimplified but generally speaking, if I lived in France and started a payment service that accessed the Japanese banking system and performed transactions in Yen, I would be subject to Japanese banking laws as well as French laws.
The main difference between pornhub and Backpage is that pornhub is for videos but Backpage was for live meetups (Backpage facilitated the sexual acts; pornhub only monetizes them).
If they run any kind of subscription service aren't they already subject to much of the liability for this stuff anyway?
There is a long history of people getting screwed to the point of having their company go out of business because paypal decides that they will freeze their funds for 6 months or that they no longer want to be their payment platform.
It would not be a big issue if there were 3 or 4 competitors .. but as things are, paypal is what people use to buy things online or to send money to a friend.
See also: Flash video.
Otherwise, I see DAI token being ideal for this coupled with locking your DAI in MakerDAO [2] to earn interest.
The financial industry's policies around sex and pot need a reboot. It's ridiculous what they're restricting.
"I Hope PayPal's Dick Falls Off" https://gizmodo.com/i-hope-paypals-dick-falls-off-1839870796
I can think of an analogy to interest rates, which vary tremendously depending on risk.
It seems it was a common thing for people to buy his service (access to porn), and then a few days later claim to the credit card company that it was an unauthorized charge.
He told a story of an irate wife calling him on the phone one day and demanding the charge be taken off her husband's credit card bill. She was insistent that there was "no way" her husband would sign up for a porn website. Well of course he did (or was it their son?). But he couldn't admit it to his wife. And so she called the office of the porn website to complain.
I'm sure that hasn't changed 17 years later. Credit card chargebacks must still be a huge problem.
Chargebacks make it a customer service nightmare. One of the highest refund rates that credit cards get, the highest incidence of actual fraud (charges that really weren't authorized), undisclosed recurring charges, etc.
Still, cutting off service to the models seems unfair. But refusing to deal with the websites themselves actually has underlying business reasons other than morality.
Family Guy sums it up nicely.
One of the factors in determining your interchange fees as a merchant is your risk profile. It is why a grocery store has a different fee structure than a gas station or a restaurant.
Almost the entire industry is driven by risk profiles.
(1) I buy a camera online, but the store mails me a brick. The payment provider steps in (at their own cost) to investigate and resolve the fraud, which is costly.
(2) The technology of the payment provider itself is subverted. For example, someone clones the mag stripe on my 1980s credit card and goes on a spending spree. Again, the payment provider picks up the cost of hunting down the malefactors, and they also compensate me. Cost cost cost.
When the payment system is cash, fraud is avoided by using vendors with good reputations, or at least with verifiable business names and addresses to allow legal action if they sell me a 24 megapixel brick. Protecting against subversion of the payment mechanism itself is up to me (keep my wallet safe) and the treasury (fancy holograms on bank notes.)
With modern online payment systems, are they legally obliged to always be on the hook for the first type of fraud? Is the obligation because they are providing a credit line? (I think this is the case in UK law at least, with the Consumer Credit Act.) If the payment provider didn’t want to have to deal with that sort of fraud, do they just have to avoid looking like they are offering credit?
I hope that we can assume that in any modern online system, the only occurrence of the second type of fraud is from insiders, as at launch (or at least, over time) the crypto is unlikely to be breakable on the wire / with card cloning / etc.
Payment providers earn a fraction of a percent on transactions, so they must have extremely high volume in payments to be sustainable. It takes hundreds of millions just to be able to afford some workers and office.
Which can't happen because trust and fraud. A legit customer, especially with any amount of volume, would never adopt a small or unknown provider. Corollary, the provider only attracts low grade or fraudsters, assuming they ain't the fraudster themselves.
In a business like that it may be quite difficult to detect exploitation. If they don’t strive do a good job at it (which doesn’t especially align with maximizing revenue), PayPal’s decision may be hard to criticize.
>"Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences"
>"en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope_fallacy"
Nothing is out of the order.
https://twitter.com/PornhubHelp/status/1189445175929647104
That will probably give a pause to any payment provider.
It's great for personal transfers, and many in Kenya already use it to pay sex workers (usually cam girls selling nudes).
Corporates can have numbers (called paybill) where payments are made, though they are vulnerable to government interference. Safaricom (the network carrier running the M-Pesa platform) has already been ordered to shut down accounts belonging to betting firms. But for personal transactions, regulation is hard since nobody can tell why you sent a certain person money.
M-Pesa has never quite gained traction outside Kenya though.
What is their incentive to do this? Is PayPal in the business of randomly hassling people? Is it for the entertainment of some executive?
In their case it is actually phrased in a way that makes it seem like you are not even allowed to pay for pornographic content with Revolut, not just receive money for it.
Not a problem for me personally but why would payment card providers make such restrictions?
It had some other weird restrictions as well.
I hope blockchain payments will come soon as possible to destroy these slow, old school, opinionated payment gateways.
We are not free, we cannot have opinions or say publicly anything against the system.. We are living like any other communist country.
Sad sad situation !
They're modelling?
Whether that will realistically happen or not I have no idea, but that's the promised land held onto for true believers.
...or just for PH to support stable coins internally.
As weird as it sounds I honestly think they should pair with one/more exchanges to support low friction onboarding/exchange - who knows, maybe some of them will convert to traders! :)
A decade is an eternity in the tech world. If bitcoin had a use case, we'd all be using it by now.
-- because it was impractical for most prospective light-bulb users to generate their own electricity and it took decades to build out a network for distributing and metering electricity.
An improper metaphor since it was the performers who got screwed, not Pornhub.
But, in the end, Pornhub _will_ be screwed (no pun intended).
The new flow I suggest is: BTC -> Coinbase -> PayPal.
Withdrawals are instant & only subject to standard fees. The can funds can also be instantly converted to cash, via the PayPal Business Debit Card.
References: [1] https://blog.coinbase.com/instant-paypal-withdrawals-now-ava... [2] https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/295995... [3] https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/210... [4] https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/business-debit-card
The flow still can be censored. As a matter of fact, you now have two opportunities for your payment to get nixed.