Government hasn't made entry to this space hard, the banks that Stripe partners with have. Because they don't want to deal with high-risk transactions. They are the gatekeepers here, and Stripe has to bend over backwards to make them happy. They'd much rather burn individual customers, than jeopardize their entire business.
Are we still pretending that USA government is a distinct entity from USA's large corporations? If the banks didn't like the regulations, the regulations would change. If some random elected official didn't like how the banks operated, after the next election she would be an ex-official.
Some of them are due to government regulations like 'don't launder money' and 'don't process money for illegal activities'. Which are, like, basic operations of society 101 level stuff.
Others (adult services) are not due to government regulations, they are there simply there because banks don't want to deal with chargebacks.
And that day was less than 100 years ago. "Money laundering" as a concept was invented during the Prohibition (as were a lot of other private rights violations) in order to not let alcohol sellers - which the government was not able to prosecute directly - to use their money. But most of the current US AML regulations are based on the Bank Secrecy Act from 1970.
> Some of them are due to government regulations like 'don't launder money' and 'don't process money for illegal activities'. Which are, like, basic operations of society 101 level stuff.
Except the operationalization of those rules is: here are some vague guidelines that you have to follow, and if we don't like you we'll retroactively decide you were committing a crime even if you followed those guidelines to the letter. See HSBC for a case in point.
> Some of them are due to government regulations like 'don't launder money' and 'don't process money for illegal activities'. Which are, like, basic operations of society 101 level stuff.
No, that's wrong. Firstly, as others have pointed out, society long predates any such notions.
Secondly, determining what is illegal activity, and putting a stop to it, is ostensibly the job of law enforcement and the courts, not the bank.
