Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Defund MasterCard — and any other financial institution who refuses to do business with a lawfully operating business.

The basic problem here is that it's not 'lawful', it's just mostly quietly ignored by the feds because people would riot if they actively did much about it. It's hardly surprising that big financial companies would want to be completely disassociated from the situation.

I disagree. You can buy marijuana openly in a very nice brick and mortar store less than six blocks from the White House, and 8 blocks from United States Capitol. It's openly advertised. This is just a government trying to maintain control.

That might be true but it is still illegal federally- so it's not "lawful".

An un-enforced felony is still a federal crime, you just know your not going to get in trouble for it… The thing is MasterCard and Visa as part of being allowed by various laws, are not allowed to facilitate people making money from committing federal crimes… which the businesses selling (state) legal cannabis are doing.

It’s pretty simple. They either need federal legislation to say it’s ok for them to be doing this, or it needs to stop being a federal crime, otherwise they are legally required to do exactly what they are doing.

By your right about it being government control stuff, psychological resistance to letting go of the War on Drugs is pretty high, and unless it changes it’s going to remain in the current status quo until enough of them get too old to hold their seats in the House/Senate and new people with less fossilised opinions get to vote on legislation regarding the topic.

The law exists in its enforcement. Many laws on paper do not exist. Many laws that are not on paper do exist.

A more cynical interpretation is that normally non-enforced laws are a great way for the government to provide extra pressure when desired. It's not just stodgy politicians, but massive federal agencies with vested interest keeping the status quo. Say the FBI wants info from a person and can use recreational Marijuana procession as a nice leverage point, etc.

Still brand new, but alternate real time rails are available [1] [2]. I know that finding banking in the cannabis space can be...challenging. Hopefully policy gets fixed soon [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491 (FedNow Is Live)

[2] https://www.axios.com/2023/07/20/federal-reserve-fednow-paym...

[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1996

Well, that's the whole problem, from the feds' point of view they are not operating lawfully. I'm no fan of the Visa/MC duopoly but from a legal point of view they don't really have a choice here.

You probably never dealt with payment processing - otherwise you'd know nearly all payment processing reject and close account of perfectly fine legally operating businesses.

And very often without any explanations. Sometimes even without releasing acquired funds, like the last street robber (looking at paypal).

Let aside saying that whole industry is drowning in endless useless KYCs, often requiring documents on your grand grand mother, may gods treat her soul well.

I can go on and on, but that's the gist of it.

To be fair, this is just debt cards. While I don't approve of them blocking this at all, I am guessing there was also a bit of fraud involved, even with the pin numbers.

On a more personal level, I'm not sure why people would use anything other than cash to buy weed... who wants these companies tracking you anyway.

Update: The comments below prompted me to look a bit further into my fraud speculation... quick google search found this:

https://digboston.com/no-more-atms-is-the-smell-of-money-com...

Cash back is a laundering problem.

Nothing in the article indicates Mastercard's concern is fraud nor does it sound like it came to their notice by way of fraud.

Does it need to be stated in the article for it to be true?

No, but random speculation about it is certainly not necessarily true either.

"I am guessing" wasn't clear enough? Is it not ok to express a random speculation opinion here any more?

Thanks for the link. I was scratching my head trying to figure out the evident disparate treatment (Why not Visa? Why not credit cards?) but that explained a lot.

cannabis shops are illegal everywhere in the united states, though. federal law supersedes state law

Try explaining that to the literally hundreds of marijuana shops, even in Maryland, and the District of Columbia openly selling..

theyre running the risk of getting into serious legal trouble with the feds. which mastercard apparently doesnt want to do

Show me in the Constitution where FedGov has the authority to dictate drug law or policy that doesn’t cross State Lines. (Spoiler: it’s not there.)

Not a lawyer, but I’d strongly suspect that funds flows crossing state lines and using Federal Reserve wire transfers for settlement would make Fed jurisdiction quite possible.

Might surprise you to learn there is precedent to refute that. Flow of money isn’t material to the law: flow of good and staying within State boundaries is the point.

What precedent?

Wickard v. Filburn (1942) pretty much blew away any limitation on the federal government’s use of the commerce clause. In that case even a farmer’s subsistence crop of wheat for personal use was found to be in violation of a federal wheat quota because such activity in aggregate could hypothetically affect national prices. If that can be regulated as interstate commerce surely all cannabis production and consumption can as well.

Article III.

What part of the supremacy clause is unclear?

This federal law makes an exception where it is legal at the state level though, via the Rohrabacher–Farr amendment

specifically for medical marijuana. not recreational.

That amendment only covers medical usage, not recreational. And it only applies to the justice department’s enforcement of the laws, doesn’t actually change the law. Federal banking regulators are unaffected, for example.

Do you mean wikileaks, kiwifarms or pornhub?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com