It all just cements a decision I made almost two decades ago to refrain from ever using PayPal.

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

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.

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.

Also Bandcamp.com refused to accept the payment from my credit card and I contacted my bank and they told me that payments to Bandcamp are always blocked because of security reasons(that is their policy) and they had to manually approve my credit card for use on Bandcamp....which is totally fu*king crazy. Manually approving payment transactions in the 21st century is wrong. How the hell should I know which vendors are on my bank's blacklist?!

Tbh or at least that's my impression all comes down to the problem of fraud and crime. That's why we still have shitty payment providers and processors.

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

There's no need for it to be distributed or any of the other aspects of crypto, steam is the issuing and accepting authority, and no one else matters, as far as steam is concerned

This might be a sensible approach.

Or, if they had some sense, they'd get into the credit business with their own "store card" that doesn't use V/MC. With this, they'd have the leverage to tell credit card processors to "get bent" should V/MC try telling them how to run their business and what content is acceptable.