Liberty Reserve’s irreversibility was a legitimate and important service

One of the more worrying aspects of the Liberty Reserve takedown was the constant insistence by US authorities that Liberty Reserve was only a money laundering service with no legitimate use.

Regulators were very concerned with LR’s anonymity which was a serious draw to the service for many people. But what was likely an even bigger factor in LR’s success was its irreversible payments. This is a very important feature for businesses that are at risk of payment fraud or chargebacks, and it’s a feature that is not available in the current regulated financial system.

Jon Matonis via PaymentsSource

In the case of Liberty Reserve, It’s not the individual infractions committed by clients of Liberty Reserve that are worrisome to the regulators, it’s the fact that a semi-reliable platform for private payments existed in the first place.

Liberty Reserve provided a service that had a true market demand from legitimate business sectors and from non-criminals, notwithstanding the government’s claim that “virtually all” its business was illicit. If banks and traditional financial institutions still respected basic client privacy and facilitated some form of digital payments that did not always involve harmful reversibility to the merchants, then companies like Liberty Reserve wouldn’t even be necessary.

In addition to transactional privacy (or anonymity), payment finality is important here. Many users of digital currency systems probably wouldn’t object to revealing their identity if they could obtain payment finality. Otherwise known as irreversible payments, or payments without chargebacks, payment finality is required for a large number of merchant categories that aren’t serviced by traditional payment methods. Liberty Reserve satisfied that demand as well.

Naturally, merchants would prefer that all sales were final. But for some merchants, finality is a protection against cardholder fraud. As an industry that suffered a high degree of customer disputes, online gambling is instructive because when certain customers lost in the casino and “changed their mind,” it became necessary for these merchants to accept only payment methods with finality.

Gold bullion and coinage is another merchant category that experiences an abnormally high percentage of customer credit and debit card fraud so these merchants are either ignored by the card networks and PayPal or they are charged significantly higher processing fees. To protect themselves, merchants require payment finality or irreversible payment methods. That means using only international wires or services like Liberty Reserve.

In the early days of bitcoin, exchangers and sellers of the currency suffered because Visa MasterCard and PayPal blocked any transactions involving the acquisition of bitcoin, and for good reason. The purchasing of an irreversible instrument is simply not a good match for a payments industry that offers transaction repudiation, merchant chargebacks, and also has to absorb losses from counterfeit cards. To get their money to the Bitcoin exchanges, customers were forced to rely on expensive international wires and the services of Liberty Reserve. This was done more for the payment finality reasons than any desired anonymity.

Other business sectors that benefit from payment finality include online casino gaming, sports betting, lotteries, adult services, pawn shops, credit repair services, debt settlement services, and virtual currency exchanges that involve the trade of other negotiable instruments or the loading of prepaid cards. Although operating as legal businesses in many jurisdictions, these merchant categories have typically been labeled as high-risk and subsequently restricted by the payment networks. Liberty Reserve filled the market need left by the larger payment networks.

Widely used by foreign exchange traders where domestic central banks restricted bank transfers to foreign entities, such as in Malaysia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Argentina, and Brazil, Liberty Reserve thrived as the preferred payment method. It offered traders a fast and cost effective funding method.

Clearly, identity is not the entire agenda. Any payment service offering payment finality must be “in the system,” because according to the government, payment finality cannot be left to the free market. In the U.S., the government is the final arbiter of what transactions may or may not be reversed and it wants mandatory account identification because it facilitates the targeted enforcement. In the physical world with cash and gold, the power is exercised via seizure and confiscation. In the digital world with electronic accounts, the power is exercised through transaction reversals and account suspensions. At its essence, Liberty Reserve was an electronic value transfer service where payment finality was provided by the operator without judgment.

Choice in currency is a freedom of speech issue. Failing to recognize that fact only serves to strengthen the entrenched payment oligarchies and to undermine personal liberties in the transactions environment.

Today, voluntarily exiting the digital banking system has become a popular method of attaining a relative degree of financial independence and safety. Expect to see a lot more of these voluntary exits especially since the free market has been mostly stripped of digital payment finality and “Cyprus-ed” has become a verb.

Read the PaymentsSource article in its entirety here.

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