This is why we need a decentralized Internet payment system, like email.
This was a non-controversial opinion not long ago.
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3 weeks ago, I woke up to a pissed off customer telling me her payments were broken. My startup uses Stripe Connect to accept payments on behalf of our clients, and when I looked into it, I found that Stripe had decided to deactivate her account. Reason listed: 'Other'.
Great.
I contact Stripe via chat, and I learn nothing. Frontline support says "we'll look into it." Days go by, still nothing. Meanwhile, this customer is losing a massive amount of business and suffering.
After a few days, my team and I go at them from as many angles as possible. We're on the phone, we're on Twitter, we're reaching out to connections who work there / used to work there, and of course, we reach out to patio11. All of these support channels give us nothing except "we've got a team looking into it". But Stripe's frontline seems to be prohibited from offering any other info, I assume for liability reasons. "We wouldn't want to accidentally tell you the reason this happened, and have it be a bad one."
We ask: 1. Why was this account flagged? "I don't have that information" 2. What can we do to get this fixed? "I don't have access to that information. 3. Who does? "I don't have access to that information" 4. What can you do about this? "I've escalated your case. It's being reviewed."
I should mention at this point that I've been running this business since 2016, my customers have been more or less the same since then, and I've had (back when it was apparently possible) several phone conversations with Stripe staff about my business model. They know exactly who our customers are and what services we offer, and have approved it as such.
After a week of templated email responses and endless anxiety, we finally got an email from Stripe letting us know that they had reviewed the account and reactivated it. We never got a reason for why any of this had happened, despite asking for one multiple times. Oh well, still good news right? Except nope, this was only the beginning.
This morning I woke up to an email that about 35% of my client accounts had been deactivated and were "Under review", the kicker here being that one of those accounts is the same one they already reviewed last week! This is either the work of incompetent staff or (more likely) a bad algorithm. No reasonable human could make this mistake after last week's drama.
So currently, my product doesn't work for 35% of my customers. Cue torrent of pissed off customer emails.
And the best part is, this time I have an email from Stripe this time: Apparently these accounts are being flagged, despite the notes on our file, and despite the review completed literally last week, as not in compliance with Stripe's ToS. They suggest that if I believe this was done in error, I should reach out to customer support. Oh, you mean the same customer support that can't give me literally any information at all other than "We have a team looking into it"? The same customer support that won't give me any estimates as to how long it's going to take to put this fire out? The same customer support that literally looked into this a week ago and found no issues!?
I feel like I'm going crazy over here. These accounts have hundreds of thousands of dollars in them being held hostage by an utterly incompetent team / algorithm that seems to lack any and all empathy for the havoc they wreak on businesses when they pull the rug out from under them with no warning, nor for the impact they have on customers when they all of a sudden lose all ability to make money. And all that for an account that has been using Stripe for nearly 7 years without issue!
This goes so far beyond "customer support declining at scale." If lack of customer support means that critical integrations start to fail, that's not a customer support failure, that's a fundamental business failure.
We have many such systems being developed, but you get downvoted on HN for promoting them, since people assume you are a scammer, a criminal, etc.
However, that’s different than a singular actor, but more importantly, nothing is stopping a counterforce from coming in and correcting that regime. It’s possible we may see email revert to a less centralized form over time as various people choose to prioritize working that problem (and can make headway, because of how email works.)
There's definitely a space for 'digital cash', for sure, but consumers will prefer the former.
When it comes to money, there are just deeply inherent issues of dealing with fraud, spam, goods not delivered etc. etc.. which adds significant overhead to the whole system.
Most people playing above-above board don't have a problem.
Usually in these cases, it's because something semi-shady is being sold, and it usually contravenes one of the T&Cs of Stripe.
The OP here didn't tell us what line of business they were in.
What people forget is interfacing with systems designed to operate in the real world is at best an abstraction over this difficulty and eventually it gets exposed for the mess it actually is.
This isn't a hard problem for technical reasons, it's all political. It's about preventing money laundering and trying to fight crime via financial instruments. But it also means any payment system that doesn't implement these restrictions will almost instantly be overrun by criminals because they are highly motivated to find ways of moving money.
Democratic systems won't change these laws because there is no popular support for change - there is a reasonably large 'law-and-order' and 'corruption-as-main-concern' voter demographic who strongly support these laws, and the niche of HN techies and libertarians who'd oppose them is insignificantly small in comparison; and authoritarian systems won't change these laws because their leadership supports them even more.
I understand the idealistic benefits of freedom of payments, however, the KYC/AML restrictions are there for valid reasons that simply have much more magnitude of importance (for example, the scale of corruption and its social harm is so big that even a slight decrease in that due to KYC/AML enforcement far outweighs all the current social costs of KYC/AML) and removing them would mean that in aggregate the bad guys have won. I'm not saying that you're a bad guy, but you are an "ally of convenience" to them as achieving your position would let the bad guys win and I would consider it immoral to allow that.
We definitely should strive for better, more accurate AML/KYC implementations that have less impact on legitimate trade. But arguing for removing AML/KYC just because of that is effectively throwing out the baby with the bathwater.