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I don't buy that the attack on Steam was just some Australian cult activist groups. This isn't one off event anyway. They're just a distraction.
What's urgently needed is payment neutrality, like net neutrality. It's absurd that the net was discussed more heavily and way earlier than cash.
Wasn't Crypto supposed to solve this like a decade ago? Genuinely curious, as a 20 something, software developer who never understood why we don't have decentralized/globally neutral payments/transactions systems like internet.
Though for most of my life internet has been getting more and more centralized. At least everything outside of China is centralized almost entirely in US these days.
Rather sad reality of things, but what can we do heh...
You can hear Steam's experience with bitcoin straight from the horse's mouth here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
> transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year, topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week [...] The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of Bitcoin itself drops dramatically.
> [...] the amount of Bitcoin needed to cover the transaction can change. The amount it can change has been increasing recently to a point where it can be significantly different.
> The normal resolution for this is to either refund the original payment to the user, or ask the user to transfer additional funds to cover the remaining balance. In both these cases, the user is hit with the [$20] Bitcoin network transaction fee again.
> Wasn't Crypto supposed to solve this like a decade ago?
In a purely technical "I can send/receive payments without worrying about charge backs or random middleman restrictions", it has solved it. But it hasn't solved the issue of having the vast majority of merchants accepting crypto, the issue of crypto price volatility (or associated risk of stable coins), or the friction/unreliability of turning cash into crypto.
Particularly, the last 2 issues go hand-in-hand as an issue. You can get around cash->crypto friction/unreliability by only having to do it infrequently, but that exposes you to the volatility of the crypto price.
And that's not even getting into the issues of crypto UX as a form of common currency for the average person. It is not a simple process to know how you should create wallets, manage your wallets, what information should you or should you not expose, what networks can/can't you send certain coins over, what coins should you be using, why are there hundreds of different coins, etc, to not fall for scams.
If you can get crypto currency, maybe yes in some cases. Currently available currencies are not anonymous, but pseudonymous. You can track who transacts with whom.
To help with that new laws were passed.
If you want to buy crypto for fiat currency legally, like on some well known crypto exchange, newest laws require naming recipient of crypto you are sending and if that wallet is self hosted or exchange hosted (and which exchange). You either need to provide full name of person or company, or confirm it’s your other account you are sending crypto to.
There is one actually private crypto, it’s monero, but - surprise - it’s nor available on legal crypto exchanges so you cannot buy it by any official means.
It was supposed to be a decentralized digital cash, but we collectively turned it into some weird abomination. Nowadays, if you say "crypto" people will think of investments, scams, transfers that sidestep various sanctions and regulations, risks - anything but a decent payment method. It's sad, but that's what happened.
I assume you're referring to this[0]. I had to go searching.
I do buy it. Collective Shout, Mad Fucking Witches and others have all been trying to cancel media personalities and companies for years by appealing to the advertisers, especially effective in traditional media where they money is drying up. They're hardly a fly by night group, and it's not their first time appealing to payment processors.
0. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/400-vi...
All we need is fast ACH (seconds, even low minutes will do) with no charge back. From there you can develop single-charge ephemeral accounts and you're good to go. Sadly crypto will get us there faster. It just speaks volumes that a pseudo decentralized solution will beat the logical and easier centralized solution because of misaligned incentives
Why not? The celebrated it as their own success.
> What's urgently needed is payment neutrality, like net neutrality.
I thought the EU was working on digital cash? What is the status of that?
No.
Democracy is endangered by the fact that the government likes to use payment processors to stomp on stuff near the edges.
The dogs on the right rallies around when the government tries to pressure gunmakers, the cats on the left don't rally around such threats very well.
We just had a thread on this; probably don't need to recycle 2024 stories for it.
What if people find an endless source of intellectual nourishment in the proxy wars between chargeback ("pay-neutral") culture and puritan culture
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44621081
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44629685
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44629982
https://old.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/1caxsmc/japan...
A handful of US companies take a cut from nearly every payment on the planet, and now they’re caving to pressure from Twitter mobs and puritan lobbies, censoring global content just to avoid upsetting shareholders.
Visa and Mastercard haven’t brought anything new in years. Their infrastructure still dominates out of habit, not merit. Meanwhile, alternatives like stablecoins and European systems like EPI or the digital euro are gaining ground.
Their boldness is honestly surprising, especially now that real competition is finally emerging.
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Each country central bank should have its own national payment processing system. Why is this not a thing? Spain has Bizum, for example.
FedNow is relatively new for the US in 2024.
One thing to note is that by design, the US banking system is very decentralized and that makes any sort of migration or mandate like herding cats. There are 141 banks in Spain and 4135 in the US.
US banks are generally not allowed to exceed 10% of deposits through mergers and there are only three passing that threshold; JPMorgan Chase at 15%, BofA at 14%, and Wells Fargo at 11%.
Bizum is for P2P instant payments and it’s operated by a consortium of Spanish banks, not Banco de España.
Totally agree. I wish we have something like Pix in Japan.
Their transaction fee is quite cheap, so small businesses earn more money and reinvest their revenue, rather than having it taken by Visa or Mastercards.
You will have better luck getting people to adopt Monero than to get legislatures to pass payment neutrality. Same with enforcement. The trend in Western democracies is less freedom, more control, more surveillance etc.
Mind you, both odds are negligible.
The only thing that endangers freedom here is the fact that there are centralized payment processors in the first place.
There's an existing cure for that particular disease: Bitcoin.
Putting aside the question of whether Bitcoin is even useful for transactions or if it’s just ‘number go up’ technology, Bitcoin processors don’t let Businesses accept Bitcoin for adult content either.
See e.g. https://support.bitpay.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003105543-Ca...
The cure is worse than the disease
Much evidence contradicts your theory.
Tell me you know nothing about transaction overhead without telling me you know nothing about transaction overhead. All the blockchain currencies require orders of magnitude more power to process a transaction compared to a debit or credit transaction. Bitcoin is primarily used by governments (like NK), hacker groups, and organized crime to launder money.
The solution is not blockchain currencies. European credit card transaction costs are a fraction of what they are in the US because US regulators just sat back and allowed Mastercard and VISA to establish a duopoly.
In much of the rest of the world it's also possible to near-instantly wire-transfer funds to pay for things, at negligible cost. In the US, everything is forced to go through the federal reserve, is expensive, and slow.
We are the laughing stock of the rest of the world. The banks have tried to set up alternatives. Zelle is a good example, but Zelle's most annoying problem is that you can only have one account per phone number or email address.
Other's have said this but it isn't a moral crusade by the payment processors', but rather their capitulation to various moralizing advocacy groups.
People seem to forget that most countries aren’t down with “adult content.” Japan famously has censorship; while it’s outright illegal and censored online in India, Russia, China, and no shortage of other countries. It’s illegal on both sides of conflicts - like Russia and Ukraine (possession in Ukraine by itself is grounds for up to 3 years in prison). Some countries like Australia permit it, but “extreme” content (aka anything not “vanilla”) is technically illegal regardless of the age of the viewer. This is also not necessarily based on religion: China is officially atheist, Vietnam is as well, but both will put you in prison for importing it. Ironically, it is post-Christian countries that are most tolerant.
From the global stage, America is not some overly puritanical country while everyone else goes along without religious purity concerns. The big view is that the majority of countries censor it or ban it, even democratic ones, with no religious motive required. The Western world is the exception, but that’s changing in the UK, Australia, and now the US with age gating, payment processor refusal, or other restrictions.
India’s ban wasn’t legislative, it was done by the supreme court.
It has one of the most weirdest and also defacto the most powerful supreme court globally by authority.
It can pursue its own laws, legislate them, overturn even laws passed by supermajority in parliament if it doesn’t agree with it and thinks it’s not what original constitution makers would’ve wanted.
The Court can take up cases on its own (suo motu) without any petition being filed. This allows it to respond to media reports, letters, or social issues — an almost unheard-of power in most democracies.
I don’t think indian society or gov should be blamed for banning adult content, supreme court by itself passed the law and gov didn’t wanna contest it as they didn’t feel the point to spend political capital to reverse it.
India is the origin of kamasutra texts after all and isn’t that sex negative as you might think ( it has the highest population for a reason)
> Some countries like Australia permit it, but “extreme” content (aka anything not “vanilla”) is technically illegal regardless of the age of the viewer.
As a curious case, South Park: The Stick of Truth had a scene that was censored in a few countries (Australia and Germany among others) due to it's BDSM content...
I will also note the odd case back in the day of Germany having such strict rules with violence/etc that many of the Command and Conquer games had humans replaced with robots. [0]
Or even names of things. FF8 had 'nunchaku' changed to 'shinobu' because nunchucks are illegal in the UK [1] and "Castlevania: Bloodlines" for the Genesis/Mega Drive was named "Castlevania: The New Generation" in europe (although that also had a lot of blood removed).
> UK, Australia, and now the US with age gating, payment processor refusal, or other restrictions.
But also, I should note that Australia has had fairly strict laws on the book for quite some time and has a long history of using Refused Classification when they get the itch, hell the Re-release of Westwood's Blade Runner is RC. And unlike the UK (at least for now) there's not the digital/import loophole [2].
[0] - My Austrian friend on IRC said that at least the voices were really cool.
[1] - Perhaps someone assumed the whole world of FF8 was a British Colony?
[2] - My understanding is that somehow downloads and 'importing' never got covered in the law.
>Japan famously has censorship;
In Japanese culture there's often an 'official' layer of proper behavior that in some sense is a pretense and in reality people are much more free-wheeling, including in the adult sector where Japan is pretty big globally, which is likely understating it. The country is actually very sexually liberated.
The pernicious thing is that the US and Anglosphere work exactly the other way around, legally you can say anything but it's the people who chase you around the globe and you have Mumsnet and American soccer moms hound you across the ocean. Which is a moral tyranny any dictator is envious of. The US was the only Western country where Leon was censored, the actually made like a 20 minute shorter version for the US market. Censoring actual art, not just porn or slop, is foreign to anyone in continental Europe or Japan.
Japan has censorship as a result of the American occupation.
Definitely going to be "interesting" to see what happens once places like UK+EU commit to age verifying interent users soon.
* https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...
japan has fully legal drawn porn of children and tentacle beasts and whatever else, you just need small bars over genitals and beasts. you can buy it in a bookstore anywhere across the country freely, how is this not “down” with adult content? weird take
The same payment companies are very happy to take payments on porn sites. This manufactured outrage makes no sense. It's scary what a rather small activist group can accomplish.
Not at all. Square, Stripe, PayPal all outright refuse to deal with anything porn. Visa and Mastercard put out severe limitations, and (AFAICT) refuse to process payments to sites like pornhub.
This is not only due to reputation risks (even though these are real), but also because of the higher rates of fraud and chargebacks.
I'd say that anything that by its nature materially hampers the customer's ability to think rationally is risky for a payment processor, because it will always be a fertile ground for fraud and scams. Porn and gambling are obvious examples; alcohol is another, but (strong) alcohol is usually pretty strictly regulated, down to state-run monopolies in a number of countries.
Just use bitcoin
Let's remember that there is no real "democracy" out there, activism and strikes are declared illegal/terrorism/threat in Europe and North America when it crosses the boundaries of the elite oligarchs.
US rail strikes, Canada truckers strikes, anti-genocide protests, anti-deportation protests, etc..
Online crackdown on journalism under the pretext of "graphic" content is an everyday occurrence.
So talking about ban on adult content in that context is naive at best.
How is this a danger to "democracy?" The centralization of payment processing under a surveillance-friendly network that can debank people for socially unacceptable behavior was never on any ballot. Instead, surveillance capability is a regulatory requirement promulgated by governments that despise privacy, regardless of which party holds office. The mistake here is in thinking that there's "democracy" left to save.
> The game director’s statement was most likely triggered by the news that Manga Library Z is shutting down. The platform, which has preserved digital editions of out-of-print manga for the past 14 years, was initially pressured by international credit card companies to remove manga that contained certain words, and then abruptly forced to terminate all of its payment contracts, leaving it with no way to secure revenue for its authors. The cause cited for this was transactions involving adult content.
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Japan is a democracy. And yet payment processors from another country are powerful enough to bypass Japans political system.
> The mistake here is in thinking that there's "democracy" left to save.
There is no democracy, never has been, it is an illusion of choice maintained by the oligarchs to keep people motivated just to get exploited more by whoever wins their next ballot.
I don't care about DVs
The fact we have PSPs endanger Democracy, because we could technically exchange eCash P2P, there is exactly ZERO reasons to keep up the banking systems, and banksters knows that well, https://web.archive.org/web/20240213185758/https://www.cimb.... unfortunately people seems to be unaware of that...