1154
Blamed for Steam games ban, Mastercard encourages censorship during Riot Games VCT livestreams
(www.notebookcheck.net)
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
1154 points (99.6% liked)
Technology
76138 readers
2586 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Man I just wish there were better alternatives to MasterCard and Visa.
It really boggles the mind why we have to go through private corporations to use our monetary system in the digital realm
If we had to use private corporations then there needs to be enough competition to prevent what is happening now.
FedNow became a thing just two years ago. With transaction fees of just $0.043/transaction, it's cheaper than every other payment processor out there. Hopefully it can gain adoption and push out Visa/Mastercard.
Interesting. Good to have a less rent-seeking option, not sure I love the idea of the Fed just (assumedly) having access to all my transactions, though.
What prevents them from getting bigger and doing the same thing. This cycle of sadomasochism needs to stop at the root cause.
FedNow is ran by the Federal Reserve. They are almost certainly going to retain stricter regulation than independently operated payment processors.
I’m. So. Reassured.
Enshitification is common. Corps care a ton about social pressures and norms. They get swayed easily by public opinions.
This one is US Gov based so we'll see how it plays out. They tend to be slower to move... Until someone starts slinging executive orders around to rip things out and tear them down.
You don't have to. You can use cash, checks, crypto, gift cards, and more. It's only credit cards (and probably almost all debit cards) that go through them.
I’ve been to places that don’t take check or cash anymore though.
As much as everyone here hates it literally the only way to ever do that is cryptocurrency unless you receive precious metals in the mail.
Steam already tried it, but it was too volatile so they stopped accepting it.
They stopped using Bitcoin when the idiots in control of development/online communities kicked out/banned all the dissenters and scammed everyone into thinking we couldn't raise the blocksize beyond 1mb, which caused massive congestion and delayed transactions, which resulted in complicated failed payments/refund problems. Their 'leader' cheered when transaction fees skyrocketed.
Steam was 100% right to stop accepting it given the problems the congestion caused. Steam wasn't the only one to stop accepting it after that manufactured clusterfuck. Mainstream consumer adoption which was starting to happen died at that point.
You can just use something like Ethereum instead now and avoid that entirely, and you can avoid the volatility by accepting something like USDC
They tried bitcoin. And also fraud was a concern too.
With Monero, fees are minimal and there's no possible way to prove fraud thus if you KYCd youd be breaking no laws and it would work quite well. The volatility is still a factor though for sure.
Stablecoins exist but ETH also has large fees at certain times like btc so and other chains like Polygon are trash and not as secure.
Volatility is a factor, but using a different crypto than Bitcoin is necessary to avoid high fees and stolen coins
Fees are no longer a problem on Ethereum if you use one of the sidechains. Sub penny.
They might till be higher on mainnet if some big event is happening, but are otherwise relatively low.
That's good to hear. I know it's very popular, but I've been avoiding it for a long time because the fees were so high the last time I used it.
With how things are going, I'd be happy to support an EU-based alternative.
I read that this is actually coming. I forgot what it was called though. Fingers crossed.
GNU Taler?
Wero.
I have seen it mentioned quite a few times on websites. Can you actually pay normal shops using that?
I'm afraid it's not expanded to many countries just yet :(
Maybe a few in Switzerland. I haven't seen any news about it specifically.
We have our own system, Twint. Wero was based on it, but so far they're not interchangeable.
I don't think so to be honest, I have never seen it here :-( Maybe in a couple years
AmEx & Discover. I don't know if steam takes them, though.
Does anyone take them anymore?
That's good to hear, just haven't noticed their logos for years while visa/mc logos seem to be everywhere.
apparently Steam according to other commenters.
A lot of places won't take them because they both of those cards have higher fees.
I wish they weren't a duopoly. There isn't really any other options even if they would be better, just because of the marketshare hold they have.
Discover? Not that much better but works fine for me. Good cashback too.
Isn't Stripe one of the growing alternatives?
Stripe bans even more stuff https://stripe.com/en-de/legal/restricted-businesses , recently they banned payments for online dating platforms in the US.
Yeah, Stripe is the reason itch.io had to pull all paid NSFW games.
However, it isn't exactly their fault, either:
This is why it's so hard to fight this, every company blames another one but never by name, I'm sure it's by design
In the Itch.io incident, Stripe laid the blame for that on “banking partner” rules, claiming they were looking for ways to fix it.
Stripe is a payment processor. It has different payment methods it supports. Which are MasterCard and Visa. But it does also support(if you can use it and the merchant accepts it): Giro card, other card options, Revolut Pay and other options. Those avoid the MasterCard, Visa ecosystem.
Regardless, not everyone wants to use or uses Stripe. And it's a bad thing for everyone to use Stripe just because of their interoperability because that then gives stripe too much power.
Plus, for a company like Valve, the fees of Stripe would severely affect their revenue.