[pc]

I'm one of Stripe's cofounders.

There are a few reasons businesses end up on our prohibited list: they're full of fraud (get rich quick schemes), legally regulated (guns, drugs), or regulated by card companies (pornography).

In many ways, I'd prefer a world where Stripe's prohibited business list was no more specific than that of a web hosting service, and didn't prohibit anything beyond what's required by law.

However, there's an essential neutrality in the routing of packets that's absent in the routing of dollars: credit card networks are emphatically not neutral about the businesses they support on their rails. As such, no matter what stance we might intrinsically want, the outcome is largely determined by what Visa, MasterCard, etc., seek to enforce.

This might seem unfair, and the techno-libertarian in me finds the enumeration distasteful and arbitrary. On the other hand, the card networks have accomplished something very hard: billions of people are willing to give online businesses access to arbitrary amounts of money, sight unseen. This is an impressive achievement, and they pulled it off in part by minimizing the number of bad businesses that exist on their network. So there's a trade-off.

Tl;dr: though we have some influence, we mostly don't get to set the rules.

[michaelt]

    There are a few reasons businesses end up on our 
    prohibited list: they're full of fraud (get rich quick
    schemes), legally regulated (guns, drugs), or regulated 
    by card companies (pornography).

I'm curious about which category "(51) personal computer technical support" and "(54) human hair, fake hair or hair-extensions" fall into?

[pc]

Both are, weirdly enough, replete with fraud. I've no idea why -- human hair seems especially baffling. (Though I've heard suggestions that it relates to human trafficking.)

We can waive these when it seems reasonable (and we're not otherwise precluded from working with the business). If we ever do come across a legitimate business selling human hair, we might try to figure out a way to make it work.

[hga]

I don't completely buy it. Your proscribed list includes "(49) weapons and munitions", yet at least in the US, outside of a few slave states, there's no regulation of ammunition once it's imported or manufactured besides the usual ORD-M shipping requirements (ground). And I know for an absolute fact Mastercard has no trouble processing payments for mail order ammo, and the sites I use say they accept , Visa, Discover and Amex. Ditto for knives (e.g. see how many are for sale at Amazon).

For guns you're refusing to do business with Federal Firearms Licensees, the BATF even has a nice page allowing you to verify them: https://www.atfonline.gov/fflezcheck/

I am not aware of any case where the authorities have gone after a payment processor serving a store selling any of these items. It's certainly not common, we watch this because of all the illicit efforts by them to shut down gun stores and manufacturers.

In the long run you might find this policy politically crippling; e.g. it says something that 42 states, with Illinois joining them in a few months, have shall issue concealed carry regimes.

[throwaway_yy2Di]

This might seem unfair...

If it were unfair, your ToS would categorically prohibit itself, under B.5.56 "any... service... that is... unfair".

[pc]

Touché. We should probably remove that term.

[malandrew]

Perhaps, support on Bitcoin transactions with a caveat emptor notice for those that are full of fraud and regulated by card companies. I'm not sure what you can do about the legally regulated industries outside of operating via a joint partnership with an organization in a different jurisdiction than the US.

[t0]

Do you enjoy being at the mercy of the credit card companies? How hard would it be to remove them from the equation?

[applecore]

They're a company that makes it easy to accept credit cards on the web. How can you remove credit card companies from the equation?

[wmf]

Some payment companies accept credit cards to reduce signup friction and then try to switch users over to ACH to reduce fees.

[greenyoda]

Doesn't using ACH imply giving a company direct access to your bank account? Credit cards offer all sorts of consumer protections that ACH doesn't have, e.g., the customer can be immediately reimbursed for fraudulent transactions, etc.

Not to mention that credit cards allow people to buy stuff they can't really afford on credit. If you remove that ability, you'll be losing a lot of potential customers.

[pc]

It's a bit like asking how you feel about being at the mercy of Linux, or web browsers, or SSL. We work with the technology that exists.

That's a little bit facetious, but though there are lots of aspects of the card networks that I dislike (and suspect will change), they work pretty damn well for most transactions. We could devote ourselves to usurping them, but it feels more interesting to see how rapidly we can advance the state of the art instead.

[t0]

Aaaaaand it's gone. The censorship is a bit high lately.