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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

If you operate a website outside UK and that's it, you may not care. But if you offer paid servies, collect money from UK citizens, you must have a business representation in the UK, which is bound by UK laws, can be fined, dragged to a court, etc. If you have this vulnerability, or you don't but your holding company has other web properties that do, the UK government has a way to make you listen and comply.

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> But if you offer paid servies, collect money from UK citizens, you must have a business representation in the UK

I don't think that's true at all. You be taking payment by credit card, which doesn't require you to have any local presence.

I think your bigger risk is that you get a judgement made against you by a UK court, which a court that has jurisdiction over you is willing to enforce. I'm not sure under what circumstances that is the case, but I believe that it being the case with libel judgements has been an issue for a while (since plaintiffs can 'forum shop').

> You be taking payment by credit card, which doesn't require you to have any local presence.

But you're offering an online product, plus you are taking money from people from all over the world, whose governments have different regulations and points of view, your own business charges differently for different countries, and credit card providers are bound to different fees and/or extra charges for international transactions.

It's not a simple solution.

You ship me money, I ship you product. I don't need presence in your country, you don't need presence in mine. If your country doesn't like my product, they can enforce against you (or block it at the border).

I broadcast radio from my country, according to the rules of my country. If you tune in, and your country doesn't like it, they can enforce on you or broadcast something else on the same frequency if that's allowed by their rules.

> collect money from UK citizens

This is quite obviously incorrect. I am a UK citizen, but live in the US. No company needs a UK presence to collect money from me.

And to be clear, that’s still true for selling services online to UK citizens who are also UK residents, it’s not a quirk of you having moved away from the UK - it’s just not true that you need a legal presence in the UK to serve customers from the UK.

Indeed, I also believe that to be the case but went with the trivial counterexample! Probably best to be explicit though.

It may become an issue if you expect the British government to help you collect your debts, retrieve your stolen property, enforce your contacts etc. I'm all in favor of governments restricting how the it citizens can make money, or how you can make money on their citizens.

But we're clearly far beyond that here.

The example website in this case doesn’t take any payment, it appears.

Why don't people just build decentralized smart contracts these days? Why worry about all these liabilities?

Because crypto is a liability itself and nobody normal likes interacting with it.

Is there no way to improve the user experience for this?

Company A sells cryptocurrency in country A. Company B is a payment processor in country B. You in country A go to the country B merchant's website and enter your card info to buy something. Your card gets charged by company A to buy cryptocurrency, the merchant gets the money through company B and the transfer of cryptocurrency from company A to company B happens in software on a server somewhere and the user doesn't have to do anything.

Why is this either not happening or not sufficient?

You are right and HN has no answer other than “crypto is bad”.

We are building exactly this at Intercoin. I hate that most of crypto is zero-sum games. https://intercoin.org/currencies.pdf

Also Stripe is launching Tempo blockchain, USDC is launching Arc blockchain. Cool things are coming!

It's not even that crypto is bad, it's that it's not good. The user experience is bad universally. I say this as a tech person that didn't care about it as a technology and had to deal with it anyway and I can't stand it. The first crypto service to actually, God forbid, go study Stripe, Shopify, Google Pay, Apple Pay, please understand, actually understand how people pay for things and compete with their actual competitors in a real way, is going to steal the show I'm sure. Until then it's crypto scammers competing for crypto users and crypto dollars and again no normal people want to put up with this shit at all because it's a stupid game and we're just trying to buy things.

EDIT: I clicked on the PDF out of a sense of good faith interest and curiosity and I regret it. I hope you find something else to do.

Because one of the functions of government currency is keeping things like prices stable for the sanity of normal people buying food and gas, against the type of upheaval and reactionary change that a global currency is susceptible to. Bitcoin/crypto enthusiasts have historically pretended that stable prices are not important, keeping alive the traditional HN-lauded attitude that any insufficiently solved social problem is merely awaiting heroic overhaul via a Messianic technical spec.

Simple answer: gas is expensive, cashing out is, too. Not prohibitively, but credit cards are so much easier, while also possibly cheaper to accept.

PLEASE NOTE: the parent comment, made by me, is largely incorrect.

You only have to have presence in the UK if you do some larger-scale commercial activity there (like X/Twitter), but of course you can easily sell goods and services to UK citizens without all that. But sites like 4cahn and SaSu don't even sell anything at all.

Please downvote the parent comment into oblivion.

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