Technology

looking forward to taler becoming a thing

You can't control what we jack off to, Mastercard.

I'm in Europe and following the news of the MasterCard and Visa censorship I activelly went looking for how else could I pay for things online without using their networks, and as it turns out there are plenty of solutions supported by both Steam and GOG which I was just ignoring before because they just looked as lots of "weirdly named" unrecognized payment options.

I'm now using those in my purchases and so far they actually look more convenient than the Visa/MasterCard (for example, with iDEA which is Dutch, I can literally pay from my mobile phone banking app by just taking a picture of a QR-Code on my screen). The problem in Europe is just there being lots of local solutions and no EU-wide one yet, though I'm lucky because I have bank accounts in different countries (having lived in several countries in Europe) so I have access to many options.

Keep in mind that outside Britain, the rest of Europe have long had their own debit card withdrawal and payment networks and not relied on Visa/MasterCard (to me Britain was, frankly, weird in that it relies on mainly VISA Debit and had no local payment solution, probably explained by lack of political will in the UK for that: most such payment networks in Europe were born out of political pressure on banks to come up with a standard and sometimes were even started as state-owned companies) so a lot of these local online payment options are extensions of those existing networks, which is probably why trying come up with an single integrated cross-border payment processor has been slow going.

That said, thanks to it having been mandated at the EU level, bank transfers are nowadays fully cross-border integrated and you can transfer money between accounts anywhere in EU with the same ease and for the same cost you can for local accounts (the banks really resisted that, by the way, as it took away most of their "international transfers" profits) so we're probably not far from a single EU-wide payment processor (or at least EU-wide account support on existing solutions).

rule34 MasterCard. it's the only way.

make it a bottom dollar bitch.

If it was about money, MasterVisa would have already given up. There are people who claim that MasterVisa bent the knee to Collective Shout for the sake of money, yet when a much bigger demographic speaks, MasterVisa tries to ignore it.

This is about the power to shape society.

Why do payment processors have the ability to control morality in our world? Easily the definition of a monopoly. Absolutely insane.

MasterCard lied? No they would never

Anyway, thanks MasterCard for introducing me to porn games a few weeks ago

Oh wow, it's like everyone who said MasterCard was lying to protect their image from reality turned out to be correct. Only someone with a functioning brain could have seen this coming.

Ana Valens recently resigned from Vice following an article about the censorship of games. On social media, she shared communication between Mastercard and Riot Games.

Looks like Vice can't be trusted as a reliable source of information if they're willing to fire journalists after a little outside pressure is put on them.

i have it on good historical authority that the nazis loved mastercard

What about everyone buy a share of thier stock. Then sue thier board for ignoring thier fiduciary duty to the shareholders. Turning down business is bad for revenue... and the games that got removed probably made decent money all together.

Classic streisand effect

Man wtf can we DO about this shit? I'm planning on calling and shit but damn they don't give a fuck.

Is it too late??

Do you have to have assloads of money to file a class action suit? Like would steam or GOG or itch be down to be a part of it or is that just a pipe dream.

I am not promoting it, but I will say that this is the exact reason shit like cryptocurrency exists. Stupid overreaching shit like this.

Stuff like this is going to make people mostly pay in cash and buy gift cards as needed. I already started buying most of my things in person anyway just to avoid paying for shipping. I'm seriously considering only buying steam games with gift cards I buy at the store and avoiding using my card as much as possible.

Man I just wish there were better alternatives to MasterCard and Visa.

I remember during world's a couple of years ago, the stream chat was shouting "TY MASTERCARD" everytime their ads came up