I have an extremely heretical idea on how to reform the payment industry.

People should be allowed to pay and receive payment for any kind of goods or services whatsoever, with the sole exception of a proven criminal activity, and by “proven” I mean a valid verdict by a court of law.

Now, I know that this will come as a shock to people, for two different reasons. The majority of people will be shocked because they think they live in a free society and they think this is exactly how things do work today.

The other group are the Nazi scumbags that actually control the payment industry, and who imposed the regulations demanding that every participant in the payment industry polices himself and others, completely outside any form of a legal system, and decide who can be allowed to receive money for goods and services, based on completely arbitrary lists that are based on all kinds of political and religious restrictions. Most of the time it’s cloaked under the guise of “risk aversion”, but honestly, the things that are on those “high risk” lists are in reality among the lowest-risk things you can imagine. I had webshops selling cameras, dating sites, tourist sites renting apartments in vacation resorts, gambling sites, gaming sites and, basically, everything else you can imagine, rejected by the banks as “high risk”, in spite of the fact that “high risk” is defined through probability of incurring a high rate of chargebacks, and that in my entire history of working in the payment industry since 2004, with hundreds of merchants, I only encountered two or three seriously high risk merchants who actually committed fraud and/or produced chargebacks. Essentially, the whole “high risk” concept is a ruse, it’s a deceptive label for something else: imposing American control over the global markets, with questionable goals. Why American? Ask yourselves, who owns the greatest credit-card companies? And that’s where the rules come from.

What I can assure you is that the entire thing is completely extralegal. You can be forbidden from selling goods and services online, and you cannot appeal the decision in any way if you think you had been wronged. If there is any validity to the crypto-currency thing, it is evading this massive project of controlling what people do with their lives and money, silently, extralegally, behind the curtains, without any outsiders being aware.

I understand that someone will say that allowing anyone to receive money for anything will facilitate all sorts of boogeymen, such as terrorism, pedophilia or the famous “money laundering”, but I say it’s bullshit. The real criminals already own the banks and the criminal transactions are whitewashed there into looking so pretty one would never suspect them. Bin Laden successfully financed his projects in spite of all American attempts to suppress him. Rich people launder money with ease. However, if you want to stop such things, you need to resort to conventional investigations and courts, after which blocking the assets never poses a problem. The way to stop terrorists isn’t preventing them from receiving money, it’s arresting both them and those who financially support them. So if those policies intended to suppress online crime, they failed miserably. What they succeeded at at is evading legal methods of fighting crime (because “they don’t work”), and impeding normal economy by banning more than 75% of everything by declaring it “high risk”. I don’t know where those people learned their statistics, but if you’re dealing with 75% of something, it cannot be high risk, because normally you would have a Gaussian distribution of risk and you would have high risk on the extreme right, normal risk in the middle and low risk in the extreme left. If you place 75% of commerce on the extreme right, it means you either just failed at math, or you are hiding some very nefarious political agenda as Basel II risk management. After all, is it so difficult to accept that a court of law should be the only judge of whether something should be allowed or prohibited? And if someone vehemently opposes that, you should look for real criminals at his address. The criminals of the kind that historically used to wear black uniforms, turn their own state into a prison and surrounding states into graveyards. Those are the people you should fear, not the terrorists, not the pedophiles or other “immoral people”. It’s the highly moral people intent on maintaining order and discipline that you should fear, and remember that it’s supposed to be about freedom, not about security, or avoiding risk at all cost, because if you remove risk from commerce, you remove commerce from the economy. Risk needs to be managed, by quickly figuring out who is causing problems and blocking him, not proactively removing anything that resembles anything that could be imagined to pose a problem; if that was permissible, then we might all as well end up in some prison because we all have the potential of being murderers, thieves and rapists. We can all do it. It’s not who is capable or even likely to do something, it’s who actually does something. When you start judging people not for what they actually do, but what they look like, or what you think they are capable of, you get the Third Reich, and honestly, we’re very much there. And when you start preventing people from doing business not because it’s illegal, but because you think it’s immoral, it’s called the dark ages. And yes, we are very much there, too.

And if that isn’t enough, remember that it was the highly moral people of the Sanhedrin who had Jesus killed, because his continued existence was deemed to be “high risk”.