Technology

I agree with the sentiment, but the reason they're looking at third party apps is to avoid the control that payment processing companies have over censorship following the whole Visa/MasterCard issue.

Because, even if you do have a fully functional credit card which is not a given in many countries, US-based CC payment processors like Stripe are equally horrible third-party companies that gobble up all the data they can get their hands on somehow.

Seriously. You cannot even start "free trials" on US-based websites without handing over everything a bad actor would need for fraud or even identity theft.

Because it most of the world you'll be dependent on Visa or Mastecard, US companies that have been exerting their power to effectively block payments to content they deem inappropriate, such as adult websites.

In a lot of countries you cannot just use your debit card directly on Steam like you would a credit card which includes just entering the numbers and you are good to go. Or in some cases it directs you to the credit card provider where you have to authenticate the payment.

Here in NL we have to use iDeal if we want to pay online with most banks, this requires us to 2FA the payment by scanning a code using their app. iDeal will become Wero and will become an international system since a lot of countries had something similar to the Dutch iDeal.

I mean, I don't want to keep funds in PayPal, but they make a good proxy for a credit card.

Credit card POS systems permit for me to do (reasonably, lack a trusted display or input mechanism) secure transactions. But I can't do that with my computer

I don't have a way to use a smartcard reader and purchase things online. I have to send my actual credentials to a vendor and trust that they're treating them securely.

But if you use PayPal to pay at a vendor and then send that payment to a credit card, you avoid the security problems inherent to direct personal use of credit cards.

I'm not comfortable sending credit card data to sketchy-looking sites. With PayPal, worst case they don't send me whatever I paid for.

The short is that the acquiring bank of PayPal has banned transactions to Steam in all non-Western currencies (exception being Japanese Yen).

or just use Wero which they are gonna use anyway

They could do it with significantly fewer people, for themselves and even for GOG, Itch and potentially others. Their use-case is digital payments for games, which is limited in scope and risk. PCI and compliance is a PITA, but manageable.

PayPal/Visa/MasterCard do way more than just payment processing for one company.

Valve wouldn't need 25,000 employees just to process payments for their own platform.

I actually think ramping up their gift card distribution to more countries might be more effective imo, since people have access to cash or payment systems at physical stores.

I expect the established banking/credit card industry is not likely to let Valve into their systems just to circumvent their restrictions. Valve would need to be able to validate Visa/Mastercard/Discover etc cards issued by any bank and be able to credit/debit them.

The problem is that if you make a PayPal equivalent, you're still beholdent to MasterCard and Visa since you need them for people to actually add money to their account, and if you want to make a direct competitor to MasterCard and Visa, that's basically impossible without government support because they're way too entrenched, why would a business support a random new payment method that nobody is using yet.

I thought that my account was deleted years ago, but recently found out it still existed.

Deleted now!

Monero/XMR or GNU-Taler may be good alternatives. As for Banking, well.... There are OpenSource Core-Banking-Systems like Apache-Fineract

Paypal changed banks and cannot accept currencies from most countries, resulting in the failures Steam is seeing. Source:

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/bpXXUDhPvYgsNn4SsrcdwD-1200-80.jpg