[Nextgrid]

Devil’s advocate: I operate the equivalent of an online lemonade stand, some shitty service at a cheap price offered with little guarantees (“if I fuck up I’ll refund you the price of your ‘lemonade’”) for hobbyists to use to host their blog and Visa decides to use it in their critical path. Then this “lemonade stand” goes down. Do you think it’s fair to blame me? I never chose to be part of Visa’s authorization loop, and after all is done I did indeed refund them the price of their “lemonade”. It’s Visa’s fault they introduced a single point of failure with inadequate compensation schedules in their critical path.

[stronglikedan]

> Do you think it’s fair to blame me?

Absolutely, yes. Where's your backup plan for when Visa doesn't behave as you expect? It's okay to not have one, but it's also your fault for not having one, and that is the sole reason that the lemonade stand went down.

[Nextgrid]

> Where's your backup plan for when Visa doesn't behave as you expect?

I don’t have (nor have to have) such a plan, I offer X service with Y guarantees paying out Z dollars if I don’t hold up my part of the bargain. In this hypothetical situation if Visa signs up I assumed they wanted to host their marketing website or some low-hanging fruit, it’s not my job to check what they’re using it for (in fact it would be preferable for me not to check, as I’d be seeing unencrypted card numbers and PII otherwise).

[mschulkind]

The person above who replied to you thinks you're talking about a proverbial lemonade stand taking payments via Visa. That's the misunderstanding.

That aside, I think the example is good. It's a bit like priority inversion in scheduling. With no agreement from the lemonade seller they've suddenly changed greatly in terms of their criticality to some value creation chain.