they’ve actually paid me after I was scammed by fake stock broker. without fussing about it too. Really easy to get payments reversed.

Either way I’d be happy to also switch to another method of payment if it were an option.

I don’t trust them they’ve stolen money from me before

Same. They stole a small amount (~10 USD), but at that time that was 2-3 days worth of groceries where I live (which would have helped a lot)

Steam removed games because visa and mastercard threatened to blaclist it, so yeah. That’s the whole point.

There is already a PoW crypto that is actually private called Monero. It uses ring signatures to sign transactions and rotating public keys to keep public keys private. It also happens to be relatively stable since it’s basically the only crypto that people use as a currency (generally to buy illegal contraband online). It’s PoW though, so has the energy consumption issues.

Since it’s PoW, though, it still consumes buckets. Something I thought looked cool was Chia coin, which somehow uses hard drive space as a consensus algorithm which saves a ton of electricity, but I haven’t read the whitepaper on that, so I don’t fully understand it.

I think the idea is to pressure the partners of Collective Shout, per the url in the comment. Those might not necessarily agree with what they’re doing in this case, and if they see it’s making waves, reconsider their partnership.

Not only that, they’ll get louder claiming they’re being oppressed. Ignore them.

No, Valve has something that MasterVisa doesn’t: being liked by people. If Valve stopped taking payments and yelled to the rooftops that MasterVisa was responsible, people from all walks of life will stop, listen, and then get their pitchfork. Through the platform of Steam, people browse through the things that make their days happier. If MasterVisa threatened to take that away, people will respond.

Also, Europe and other blocs will be inclined to oppose MasterVisa. It would be a very public case of where America is dictating how the people of other lands must live. That would almost certainly make systems like Wero take off, due to sheer nationalist fervor. America is easily painted as the enemy if it allowed MasterVisa to continue abusing people on such a huge and international scale.

Money isn’t the only currency a person has, their opinions and agency are even more important, if they acted on using them. History books are filled to the brim where motivation is the greatest driving force of all.

Valve is basically a small business one bad Monday from going bankrupt compares to payment processors.

Few quick searches around the internet says that (measured by revenue) Mastercard alone is roughly 3 times bigger than Valve. So even if Valve is pretty big player it’s not even close on major payment processors. And they’re not playing on the same rules either, any payment processor can vanish payments for anyone with just ‘fuck you, that’s why’ -reasoning buried in their contracts. There’s almost no one who could afford to fight with them even in theory and much less in practise.

I would go further and say they shouldn’t have the ability to block any transaction consumers are making, regardless of legality.

I basically want them classified like utilities (or the Internet), and the money they’re processing should operate like digital networked cash. If I hand you a dollar bill, it doesn’t arbitrarily decide to stop being money if it thinks the transaction might possibly be even tangentially related to crime. That’s how you end up with these corporations becoming so invasive in the first place, with their overbroad policies blocking entire groups/categories from being in the economy.

Don’t think that I’m pro-crime – but only actual crime is crime. A transfer of funds itself is only sometimes a crime. You don’t see the federal reserve trying to foil small-time drug deals in cash, and for good reason – legitimate crimes should be investigated by law enforcement, not “prevented” at the whims of overeager corpos. It’s not the payment processor’s right or responsibility to prevent or they to predict crime, especially once they’ve built such a system as to become indispensable for most of us. If they are allowed to do that they will always do it the easy way – blanket bans with massive collateral damage to non-criminals.

These companies should be disbanded and their systems should be handed over to the public. Hot take, I know, but I’m of the mind that transaction processing (much like air and water) should not be privatized. You may think at this point that I’m a crypto-head, but not really. It seemed promising at one point and may be still, but now it’s perhaps permanently associated with unsavory types. I’ll use it if it fits the purpose, but expecting the general public to use it as money is insanity. Crypto brought us part of the way there, but such a system can’t really flourish in furtherance of the public good in the current environment – even disregarding the bad PR.

Absolutely. I’d switch to other payment methods that aren’t those, if you can.

*illegal shit would not be protected.

They can push for some law that makes certain groups or their depictions illegal. Then it’s their morals becoming a law.
If there’s corruption lobbying, there’s a way for them to twist “immoral” into “illegal”, which is fucked.

If they are dealing in US currency then the wording on the bill says it all. Legal tender for a debts public and private. When they print currency they don’t say, “and this one can’t be used for porn.”