It does not appear to be justified to make claims about what's true of "the majority of sex workers online". This is not an area where reliable numbers exist.
Many payment processors do restrict the business they want to deal with beyond what the letter of the law requires. (And that is their prerogative as a private business!)
> How is refusing to serve legal sex workers different?
As far as I can tell, in the US discrimination is forbidden against certain protected groups / along certain protected differences only. But you are free to discriminate on all other grounds. Eg a restaurant can legally discriminate against people who don't wear a tie.
The UK rules are similar, see eg https://www.gov.uk/discrimination-your-rights
In the British rules, sexual orientation is explicitly mentioned, but your trade ain't. So as far as I can tell, it's illegal in the UK to discriminate against gays but legal to discriminate against sex workers.
(However, a government might come after you, if you do something they don't like, even if it's perfectly legal. Eg the government could just 'randomly' decide to audit your taxes all the time, or 'randomly' apply other regulations and rules more strictly.)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group for a list of the protected groups in the US. Wikipedia lists sexual orientation, but not vocation.
I think the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Iran since the Islamic Revolution etc went for a less legalistic and more moralistic approach.
(Of course, you should still evaluate these policies on their own merit, instead of tarring them guilty by association. To give a counter-example: Nazi Germany was one of the first places to put anti-animal cruelty laws on the books and officials were very concerned about the dangers of smoking. Two stances that are widely popular today, and rightly so.)
(And if the general public doesn't care, why should laws in a democratic country care?)
You might declare marijuana vaguely shady, but as far as I can tell, it's a legitimate product that consenting adults might want to trade in.
Yes, if you buy in person, then cash works. I was more thinking of buying online. And also where a marijuana business would keep their money.
(For the latter, bitcoin isn't very useful, because suppliers won't accept it. But neither is the legacy banking system always willing to serve businesses in weird niches.)
This goes beyond the question of legal risks and statutory limits, CC’s are debt which means someones money isn’t tied up during a dispute.
On the other hand, you can only lose the bitcoins you actually have.
With a credit card you can go into debt.
If Bitcoin transactions involved giving your private key to every entity you wanted to transact with (like how credit card numbers work), then this would be a problem.
You can also choose not to trust any 3rd party. If I'm buying an on-chain digital item, I probably don't need to support disputes, but if I'm buying something off-chain and don't trust the merchant, I might want that protection.
Free speech, no matter how disgusting, is constitutional in the US. This is a legal use case of crypto.
Another is micropayments for content or for upvotes with Lightning Network, for example https://stacker.news
Actually, even in the US communication providers are required to stop people sending certain images to each other.
These people also need to pay their bills and not have their money stolen or otherwise disappear in the “fraud all the way down” world of crypto. Cash solves most of these problems, as well as basic intermediate layers like LLCs.
In an industry where getting fucked by payment processors regularly is part of the business, I think there is obvious appeal to pseudonymous transactions for both buyer and seller. Again, off-ramps are far better in 2023. I can deposit crypto and get cash in my bank account in a working day or two.
This is a common problem in these discussions. The HN crowd tends to have better access to payment infrastructure and reliable income from their industry. Not everyone has those benefits and many people are punished by our existing system for doing completely legal work that some see as immoral.
It’s the people saying “Sex workers should just use crypto, it will solve all their problems!” who are lacking empathy, and not the people listing very plausible reasons why “Magic solution X” doesn’t make any problems go away.
Modern internet finance on hacker news. I pulled a muscle cringing.