But I haven’t played a GTA game in a decade so maybe I’m misremembering..
>The Puritans were a group of English Protestants who originated in England during the 16th and 17th centuries. They sought to purify the Church of England by removing Catholic practices and beliefs. Driven by their religious convictions and facing persecution, they eventually migrated to North America in the 17th century, establishing colonies in New England.
Lula also himself accused the USA of putting tariffs because of credit card companies.
There are too many laws across different jurisdictions that makes it really challenging for companies to offer goods and services.
The only way to circumvent jurisdiction-specific laws is to make them impossible to enforce.
I don't think cryptocurrency has failed. Yesterday I successfully payed with crypto when the payment with multiple credit cards failed.
It's like salting the earth of your garden because nothing will grow in it.
At best they can ask the public to please turn over their private keys, which will go about as well as efforts to stop piracy.
At one point the US gov was building their own crypto currency, and I'm sure it wasn't because they felt the existing options weren't private enough from oversight.
Stopping cryptocurrency is as hard as stopping end to end encrypted messaging or banning porn.
You either allow access to the open internet or you do not.
Well sure, but if you want to actually use it you need the whole keypair. Unless you're really good with you elliptic curve abacus you're going to need a computer for that l.
Any currency that has any political ideology would require some form coercion to be used by those who do not share that ideology. Fiat currencies carry that coercion implicitly, people who don't like the government generally still use their money because they have little choice.
The underlying principle of Bitcoin was consensus. Agreeing to operate on whatever principles the majority of miners are using. Forks are an integral part of that, people choosing a different path and those who agree with them going that way. The perceived value coming from those who accept whichever fork they chose and what they think it should be worth.
The only real "Stick it to the man" kind of philosophy that came with it was as a rejection of unilateral monetary control. That is the antithesis of consensus.
In an ideal crypto world governments would be the majority of the miners. They would negotiate amongst each other to decide on monetary policy by consensus. That's a long way from happening, with no clear path towards that end in sight.
In a sense that too, is an ideology, the distinction is that the ideology doesn't want to do the thing that it can't. It presents an option, instead of forcing people to use it.
The biggest annoyance with it is that uptake is quite variable from country to country.
But if I want to buy online from Germany or some other EU country, I need to use American payment method. Also if I want to buy from China, I need to use an American payment method.
-also introduce new middleman
I don't think that works honestly, its just move a new money into new player everyone want to take a cut
Just because few people make use of their rights is not a valid argument for their removal.
*a negligible minority
which is about the same amount of people that would be interested in buying rape/people-farming games. seems like a match made in (some twisted version) of heaven.
In the USA at least, you can even steal electricity and be convicted of the crime and they still have to provide you with service, they just put your meter up on the pole.
Even this is sort of bullshit. Chargeback fees are paid by merchants and there are already high-risk merchant accounts with higher fees and cash reserve requirements as a solution.
I've also been prevented from sending money by e-check because my bank was concerned the form of payment was too suspicious, so I ETF'd money from another account instead. I don't think the law can force a 3rd party to facilitate a purchase.
Add in some really heavy handed rules that government can't use it to spy and maybe it will work.
Also, these people really should be shamed for their censorship.
Private spending and communication are the beating heart of a healthy democracy and must be run directly by the public and decentralized or aspiring tyrants will co-opt them.
The people will never actually be in charge until we stop letting currency be controlled by governments and corporations.
* PornHub has been only taking cryptocurrency for payment for a while, and they seem to be doing ok
* The US just passed GENIUS Act with somewhat bipartisan support -- probably not even imaginable one year ago
That's a common misconception. In most jurisdictions retailers can set their own payment policies.
It's a tremendous pain for retailers to accept cash, which is why they're willing to accept high transaction fees from online points of sale.
Censorship has a way of pushing people to learn inconvenient technology, just like how most Chinese citizens know how to use VPNs.
I could see CA and FL easily passing such a law given the right push from constituents.
Group Behind Steam Censorship Policies Have Powerful Allies
Possibly by trading with someone who already has electronic cash, I guess – but how do I know I’m not laundering the other person’s money, and/or financing terrorism or CSAM with my fiat money?
Jokes and cryptocurrencies aside. The digital euro is being built and will be deployed in the coming years, enabling offline digital money transfers. I'll have to see it to belive it.
Unfortunately, all such systems are quickly co-opted for the purpose of speculative price schemery. Bitcoin will soon reach a point of no-return, when the smallest fractional has an exchange rate so high that it will be impossible to purchase small goods at all (except in bulk), though in reality that point was reached many years ago. The entire concept of cryptocurrencies might actually be irrevocably poisoned, because even a new system would have to deal with the public perception baggage of the last decade's many Ponzi-type scams and various joke/meme coins. If only Satoshi had been a social genius instead of a technical genius.
Which begs the question: Is it true, that there are such games? And how would one defend its availability to the public? Is w#nking off to such content considered free speech?
We are discussing blocking of legal content by the payment companies. If they do not like this games or GTA or metal music they should make laws.
But they are concerned by virtual incest while in USA cousin marriage is still legal in many states.
If i believe in this stupidity that music and games are harmful then I would use the big money to do some studies to prove this and then make laws, not force my ideology by abusing the payment monopoly this companies have to push my stupidity to the entire fucking world.
According to wikipedia 24 states have it banned and then 7 more apply restrictions such as a minimum age or infertility
Not true at all. Just because it is legal doesn’t mean it is considered socially acceptable [1].
> but not considered incestuous in most of Europe
Not according to the catholic church [2].
[1] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_prevalence_...
[2] https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/docume... (see CIC 1091)
And... are you really being served internet ads for candy?
Right-wing groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media (the groups behind the shutdown of Xtube, and the all-but-shutdown of Pornhub[0], as well as the short-lived ban of pornography on OnlyFans) are definitely the driving force behind these bans, but fundamentally the card networks are ambivalent at best when it comes to anything that could be remotely considered pornographic.
[0] Pornhub still operates, but they removed all "non-verified" content, so it mostly serves as an marketing outlet for studios and OnlyFans creators, and all of the older content that was never verified was removed entirely.
"Allegedly" is a very operative word there. Pornhub was actually extremely aggressive about removing CSAM and nonconsensual content, to the point where Facebook was actually a far larger problem for those actually concerned with stopping CSAM[0], with three orders of magnitude more instances on Facebook than all Mindgeek websites (including Pornhub) combined.
However, groups like the ones I mentioned only targeted Pornhub, because they don't actually care about CSAM. Their goal is to eliminate pornography and all "immoral" content, where "immoral" is defined according to an explicitly religious, right-wing interpretation of the term. That's not a secret; that's how they advertise themselves, and that includes the group in question here, Collective Shout[1], although the latter is now trying to hide that tie via futher censorship[2].
Because going after Facebook doesn't fit into an agenda of banning pornography, you'll never hear them mention one word about CSAM or other horrendous abuse that happens on Facebook and is facilitated by the platform.
> Furthermore, material considered a brand risk is also not allowed but payment processors a step down are the ones who make the guidelines on what that means in practice.
That's not quite true. Processors can set their own restrictions, but so can Visa/Mastercard/etc, and they absolutely do police perceived brand risk, which includes not just pornography, but also completely nonsexual content as well.,
[0] https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebook-a-hotbed-of-child-sex...
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/After-payment-processors-promp...
[2] https://bsky.app/profile/acvalens.net/post/3lufjdqmhxs2v
just kidding. this is the first i've heard of that, though.
i don't think it totally makes sense. your card transaction will still say "STEAMGAMES.COM 7264823" or similar, regardless of the content purchased. on top of that, all sorts of shady porn & dating websites that you would NOT want leaked use the credit card companies.
Every time you buy an over the counter medication at the pharmacy with a credit card, the data brokers know by combining information sources, and sell it to insurance companies.
Yes indeed, a huge success like this will give them a big boost in motivation and funding for many, many years to come. IMHO we need to regulate away the credit card processing companies ability to discriminate like this, and while we're at it we should stop letting them heavily tax the entire economy
Book burners don’t have any morals, they just want to burn books, and they’ll come for yours sooner or later.
And the payment processors aren’t “book burners.” They’re acting to restrict an unsavory market that potentially hurts their business. They have no agenda or incentive to promote censorship as such.
If you would prefer, I’d say it’s an “affront” to human dignity.
My opinion is that sexuality is something that shouldn’t be commodified in any way, shape, or form. When we package it and promote it as a commodity or for entertainment, that practice as such is harmful. There’s simply no such thing as “healthy” pornography because the very preconditions for pornography to come into existence are rooted in an unhealthy and disordered understanding of human sexuality. I think MacKinnon and Dworkin were absolutely right on this front.
I’m far more afraid of the world we currently live in, where we treat sex/sexuality as something that exists for entertainment value and can be commodified — than I am of this form of censorship. At least our overlords are making the ethical call here.
But what’s been happening lately with onlyfans and other things is a recipe for a disaster in my mind. We’ve made it hard for younger generations, made paths to success much less atrainable and instead have enabled black markets while the economy suffers because of it. I imagine we’re stuck with a deranged and broken society of people moonlighting to make ends meet by doing soft porno in far greater numbers than before. And yes of course that’s what strip clubs are for but that was way less of an issue than this.
perihelions•4h ago
"Vice" shut down last year[0]; its brand was recently purchased and is now run by a hedge fund based in Nashville. I think this incident very clearly sums up the difference between what's news journalism, and what's a vapid content farm operated by financebros.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39476074 ("Vice website is shutting down (writing.exchange)"—459 comments)
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