Or you could just transfer funds to a steam card, then with that, buy all you want.

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.

Steam does not have to only accept steampay. Tho? You fear visa and mastercard will blaclist steam?

Alternatives are not so hard, if you allow everyone to exchange and use every currency. Then, well, you need to pay someone selling in currency A - you pay your B's to buy some A's and you pay with them.

But there are lots of limitations on banking, some in good faith, and some to prevent mobility and make everything tracked. Possibility to track means possibility to decide who gets to do what.

I think that's why gold standard was dropped in the first place. When all money is guaranteed with gold, and gold (still does) buy money, you do have a universal currency hard to track.

With decentralized electronic currencies the problem is - you need consensus. There's no way around it at all. You can devise something to separate one consensus into a tree of subspaces, to make it more efficient in case an operation with a coin "123456" depends only on operations with coins from "123*" subspace, or something like that. Partitioned system. So then you don't need consensus on subspaces untouched by your operation. But you still can't have such an offline currency, because that depends on the finite amount of gold, while with electronic currencies double spending exists.

And I don't know if it's possible to make such an electronic currency anonymous for outside spectators. Zero-knowledge and other buzzwords are good, but I don't know how one can do this.

Is that kinda what PayPal is, or was intended to be?

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

Yeah but PayPal's awful. They literally arbitrarily deny you access to your own funds. At least the banks have rules.

If someone wants to pay me something they can use it literally anything other than PayPal. I don't trust them they've stolen money from me before.

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)

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.

Valve please fix

Money is not printed by the local government at all. Money is created by private banks through extending credit. And it shouldn't be controlled by the government either, that's a terrible idea.

I agree with the rest though.

PayPal is almost as pornphobic as MastercardVisa

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.

Honestly, I am kinda expecting that with the way that America is becoming, something like Monero could become legitimized. There wasn't much reason for crypto to be a currency, so long as the world order remained orderly and useful to the everyday person.

Should the American Dollar collapse, there would be a howling void that must be filled - it could be Euros, the Yen, Monero, or something else entirely, but the opportunity would be there for currencies to change.

After reading the article on gamerant.com, the many comments on here and looking at the petition, I really wonder if actually so many people are delusional and/or are just missing the core point here?! (Or it is just a small crowd with much noise?)
IMHO, there are better places in the world to engage and petition for. (Local communities and regional politics, for example.) But if banning that little "funny" child incest game on Steam puts you up the tree, well, ...

Are you really that offended? And why, on point? How in the world can you defend publishing (and selling) games - mostly targeted at young folks - which are quite disturbing, derangend and morally wrong in the name of "freedom" or "independence"? And call that blatantly censorship, when there are instead public guidelines by Steam and their partners?
Don´t you wish for (young) people to develop good values instead of becoming delusional with child pornography, incest, violence, gore and such? What are your values here?

It isn't about the actual games being targeted. It's everything about the implications of having a private company dictate what legal content I can buy with my own money. If they cave to lobby groups once, they will do it again. Next time it might be something you care about instead.

Also games made for adults are targeted at adults, not "young people". You can't even really see these games on steam unless you are an adult and explicitly turn on visibility of porn games. The average gamer is well up in their thirties at this point as well.

The article is saying the petition is targeting steam, but the actual linked petition is addressing credit card companies. The text of the petition doesn't mention steam or valve. I don't know what the author of the article thinks is happening here, and they've explained it very badly.

*Develops an open online payment system that isn't a scam.

Valve isn't who they should be targeting. The payment processors are the ones they should be targeting with their protest. They should be targeting the payment processors who pushed for this. That means canceling their Visa and Mastercard accounts in protest. You have to hit these companies where it hurts.

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.