I ran an online porn website for almost 20 years

All this makes me think of war on drugs and other similar failed attempts at regulation, and of the article "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero". The stronger the zeal to prevent porn the more expensive it gets to do so, and the more they cause legit companies like yours to close, the more profitable it gets to do it illegally. Just cranking on the symptoms without looking at the cause often has the opposite effect to the one desired, not that the people pushing for this probably care.

I'd suggest that foreign investors dictating domestic policy is a huge problem. For a core institution like banking there ought to be a law forbidding them from discriminating against otherwise legal activities except in the case that a different law permits or requires them to do so. That would also absolve them of any PR concerns because "everyone has to; legally speaking we don't have any choice".

> we fell outside of their "risk appetite." If you take that statement at face value (not sure if you should), it's fascinating to think that your business was able to operate for two decades with what I assume are the standard problems people in the porn industry face (e.g. chargebacks from customers unwilling to admit they subscribed in their SO's presence and so pretending it was a scam, etc.) And yet seemingly none of the bank's risk heuristics based on actual transaction profiling ever went off. Wouldn't that mean that, in practice , being in the porn industry isn't as high-risk as banks / payment processors think it is? And would this not then suggest a gap in the market, for an (ideally vertically-integrated) bank + payment processor + card issuer + KYC provider, who is willing to 1. evaluate risk on a customer-by-customer basis (through e.g. continuous dynamic network analysis of…

Thank you for your story. I like to try to imagine what conversations happened behind the scenes. The fact that the suddenly hauled you into the branch, and still decided that you were too "risky" (clearly a made-up excuse) says a lot. Whatever force is behind this is powerful and it's not even remotely explained by a coalition of angry activists.

Two things can be true at the same time, however. The US has a strong stance on freedom, which means that they'll allow most things even if they're against them. Specially when that thing generates income. But that doesn't mean they're not also a puritanical society. They just take more of a "shame you" approach than a "you're forbidden" one to force you not to do stuff. I bet you that American organizations were involved in the societal pressure that led this Canadian organization to do this. They're just not as effective in their own country in comparison to places where it's not all about money, and values do matter.

What aggravates me the most about stories like yours is that banks are effectively public utilities. They are regulated as such, are broadly considered too big to fail (especially in Canada - believe it or not at a domestic scale, their banks are far more important than any US bank is to the American economy) and thus receive an implicit tax payer underwriting, yet are able to act like this when you're not doing any illegal activities. I understand the risk tolerance aspect from a bank, they wouldn't want to give a massive loan to a property developer or oil driller going under water. But when it comes to basic deposit services where nobody is asking them to risk their own money, they should be forced to allow any customer who isn't breaking any laws, such as in your case.

While I'm not big on crypto. This is, in part, why Bitcoin exists and why it was created. I'm not sure if Bitcoin is the right answer due to the 51% attack vulnerability. And a network of miners where everyone can join in principle sounds pretty yolo, but it seems the be the one of the few organizations that exist outside of government? At least, it does in principle, the fact that the whole crypto industry is a mix of scams and recreation of the actual finance industry isn't helping that case, but a part of it definitely still exists outside of it. We need more digital systems that exist outside of governments. I'm not sure if it's feasible, but stuff like this is egregious. I wonder what our view on all of this is in a 1000 years. People in the future probably look at us in disbelief with how we practiced our ethics.