milligrade

And if Stripe wanted to, they could've decided to accept nearly all businesses, but restrict some of the businesses to BitCoin only, as Bitcoin does not apply tough restrictions on partners. And many of the other "problematic" businesses aren't banned by Visa or MC at all... Stripe is flat-out lying when they pretend that every Stripe banned business is banned because of their partners.

No, Stripe's actions make clear that they care more about building a big, profitable, us-based company than they care about facilitating these niche "problem" customers. Which is fine.

They have correctly determined that these other lines of business are worth one pandering blog post in which they pretend that there was absolutely no way for them to serve these markets (an obvious lie), and they go about their business.

It's a smart play. I hope I'd make the same play, if I were in their shoes. Build profitable products for the big market, write a blog post for the tiny one. And maybe, someday, once the big market is sufficiently secure, add the incremental revenue from the tiny market.

It is in Stripe's rational self-interest to choose who they partner with; and thus, they chose the constraints related to those partners.

The real message of this blog post is that Stripe's revealed and stated preferences are not aligned. Their stated preference is that they sell to literally anybody. The revealed preference is that they prioritize relationships that facilitate growth over that stated preference.

It's totally rational on their part. They're actively serving the big market, and writing a blog post about how sorry they are that they're ignoring the tiny market. That's the right division of effort, and it's smart too, because many members of the tiny market will (naively) believe Stripe's stated preferences; even though absolutely all evidence is that Stripe wants, more than anything, to build a big, legal, US-based business. And that's fine.