So, this means a bank that handles EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD isn't afraid of Visa/MasterCard and is willing to process the transactions while the other currencies don't have a willing bank?

Payment processors are being sued by essentially religious fundamentalists. They are anti-porn, have very very good lawyers, and keep winning vague cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl...

Well first certain activities are very difficult to directly police so rather than getting better at dealing with the actual criminal behavior, you instead go after the money which is merely a proxy for the behavior.

Unfortunately tracking monetary transactions and finding the people doing heinous behavior you're supposed to be policing is still pretty hard, so you you hand off that task to someone else. The best way to go after the money is to put tight restrictions on money processors to collect data and high penalties for looking the other way, so they'll do your job for you.

Unfortunately determining which transactions are actually illicit is also pretty hard, so the payment processors go employ intermediate firms which give various buisnesses scores based on how well they comply with the payment processor's guidelines, which is a proxy for transaction suspicion.

Unfortunately scoring businesses on how well they comply with guidelines is also hard, so the intermediates make the businesses adopt operating guidelines and just compare how well those match up to the payment processor's, which is a proxy for how well the company complies. Typically these guidelines have certain moderation requirements.

Unfortunately moderating content is hard, so businesses that handle transactions for 3rd party content put the onus on those using their platform to self moderate, and put in place overly conservative moderation designed to satisfy the intermediates.

Repeat this a few times for a few different classes of behavior and suddenly the financial infrastructure is one of the most powerful tools to manipulate the population at scale in the world, much to the satisfaction of those who came up with the system. It's amazing how much extra you can get done by not doing your job.

The payment processors are complying in advance with laws that don't exist yet but are expected to be made. The Visa Global Government Affairs Department and the Mastercard Government Affairs & Policy Team hire historians and political scientists with years of policy industry experience to assess the political risks of failing to align with the ruling party of the country they are headquarted in.

For example, one of the major banks in Weimar Germany was Mendelssohn & Co., which did not align with the ideology of the post-1933 government. In 1938 the bank was liquidated and the assets forcibly absorbed into Deutsche Bank. The executives of Mendelssohn & Co. who were not already members of the Nazi party were all arrested and later murdered in the Holocaust, with the exception of Rudolf Loeb who fled to Argentina and died in 1966 and Paul Kempner who fled to the United States and died in 1956.

Steam DID accept bitcoins for like a year. They shut it down because of high fees, volatility, and because nobody actually buys things with bitcoins

They did for a while.

https://www.pcgamer.com/50-of-transactions-were-fraudulent-w...