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Blamed for Steam games ban, Mastercard encourages censorship during Riot Games VCT livestreams
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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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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.
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.
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
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.