Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

Well, this coverage identifies two restrictions that Valve is enforcing:

(1) No video footage of humans. Animation only.

(2) No incest.

Onlyfans clearly hasn't implemented restriction (1).

If they've implemented (2), that seems like much less of a problem as applied to onlyfans than to animated content on Steam. But even in the case of Steam, there just isn't a constituency for being pro-incest. This is the last political fight you'd want to get into.

Starting a holy card that doesn’t work at gas stations etc is an extremely uphill battle.

Of course scheme fees are ultimately at least partially paid from interchange, but lower interchange is primarily a problem for issuing banks, not the networks.

The Durbin amendment in particular was also supposed to foster competition between networks (by mandating each debit issuer to support at least two unaffiliated networks per card), but given that only very few places accept only debit cards, that didn't work out quite as well as intended in terms of bringing down both interchange and scheme fees via market forces.

Every hassle the porn industry gets, the gun industry gets too, and that obviously has a very different political footprint. I'd also expect some industries with politically powerful friends (supplements, MLMs in general) to be offended by policies that put some merchants into higher risk/higher cost/higher rejection categories.

I had hoped something like FedNow would take off-- a government-backed payment rail with a formal mandate to service any legal business, so neither side could complain about being deplatformed.

And yet, you can take an averaged vector of all US states and all European countries and meaningfully compare those. Or extract some things that are common through all Europe as compared through all US.

I had a privilege of living for some time in Italy, Denmark, Spain and Switzerland (I still live in Switzerland). They are all really different, and yet there is something common compared to the US.

Here in the UK religion and sex are not part of the national conversation. A politician mentioning their love of god would seem weird to us. The only way it enters the national conversation are when right-wing religious zealots, from the US, try to affect our laws: I'm thinking of abortion laws and trans rights. These are entirely imported issues from US religious hangups. It's quite tedious, because mostly we were on a path of reasonable discourse with relation to sex, sexuality, relationships (marriage), etc. but with the advent of social media you see pockets of society being dragged into it.

I have friends in much of Europe (Sweden, Norway, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Greece) and have travelled to those destinations extensively. I still can't speak for all of Europe, but I think when it comes to sex and religion we're kinda similar. The only one that stands out to me was the Greek Orthodox church used to have an out-sized role, but even that doesn't seem to be the case any more (I just came back from visiting friends in Greece a few weeks back and we discussed this).

So whilst we can't say all of Europe is the same, we can say that it's not causing global problems due to its sexual and religious hangups.

Yes, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, but there is a large fraction that is less sex focused, it's a fair generalization and comment to express that.

> Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity 1662. Many continued to practise their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches.[2] The nature of the Puritan movement in England changed radically. In New England, it retained its character for a longer period.

It's not crazy to think that this could have had an outsized influence on the US given how influential New England was in the early days. Even 120-130 years after the point that the quoted section mentions, when the colonies were transitioning into what's now the United States, close to a third of them were part of New England.

https://www.collectiveshout.org/campaigns includes a number of campaigns against porn in general, so yes, they absolutely are targeting all sex games - simulated rape, incest, and child abuse are merely their first victory.

(It's clear in the article, btw).

Pure leeches, that are now engaged in censorship

Also, on the matter of the latter problem — fixing that is much easier said than done. Cryptocurrencies in a way were an attempt to fix that, but governments around the world do not want this problem to be fixed. And of course they don't. The field is highly regulated, because, as I've said, having control over the payment network is not that very much different from having a physical army to physically beat you up.

As an aside, I was especially surprised by:

> We see this at work with hosting.

Do we, though? It's another topic of course, but I actually share the sentiment that the current trend is the opposite one: good old days of the Free Web are gone, and the reality is that in the days of Gmail (and other major mail providers), Cloudflare (and other major CDNs) the Internet is inherently not a decentralized structure anymore. It takes a few powerful friends to reach an agreement with each other, and everyone else has to follow.

So, anyway, what I had in mind was exactly that:

> to regulate payment processors like common carriers and require them to serve everyone equally regardless

But, as I've said, I don't quite see how to draw the line here. After all, it would be somewhat unfair to payment networks to trip them from making any choices. Both because formally they are just a business, not a commodity (which may actually be the root of the problem, I think), and they should have some right to choose how they want to operate; and also because different customers and products objectively carry different risks. So they have to be able to produce some policies, these policies just have to… to be restricted to what's necessary somehow.

The US has a weird fetish with privatizing things that the government should handle, like consumer protection. If there were a reasonably robust infrastructure for this outside of payment processors in the US, there would be far less pressure on porn providers to comply with fucked up morals about porn. What we have here is an instance of late stage capitalism, and half the people are too narrowminded to see how it hurts their freedom.

And how many customers you lost in 2010 because of that? Probably more than 90%. Even now people are reluctant to use crypto but tbh crypto crowd is so big that you can perhaps succeed in opening crypto only business.

I never used ecommerce back in the day on the internet but I can imagine that ecommerce fraud was widespread. And that's why excluding other reasons Satoshi invented Bitcoin[0].

I wonder if cryptocurrencies didn't exist would someone nowadays burn the midnight oil to figure out P2P crypto coin since modern payment solutions are fairly good.

Tbh I think Satoshi invented technology around which he wanted to build products unlike Steve Jobs who said that you first need to figure out the product then build technology.

[0] "Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party" https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1150-C06F-4D62-49...

Any entity that uses a CC gateway and has any exposure to either of those risks is exposing itself to all the risk. The CC companies almost certainly told Valve that they would be considered a porn site and face a 1.5%-2% higher processing fee for every transaction.

No nonsense involved, that's how it works.

If Valve was getting a complaint from Visa/Master about charge back rates of certain games, I believe they'd be more forthcoming with that information. What we're seeing here is more consistent with Visa/Master taking offense with what the platform offers.

In either case, I find the lack of communication from Visa/Master deafening. If Visa/Master was seeing high chargeback rates from incest games on steam. Why would they not eagerly offer that data?

Per Wikipedia:

> [Hatred] was shortly removed by Valve from their Steam Greenlight service due to its extremely violent content but was later brought back with a personal apology from [Valve's co-founder] Gabe Newell.

The cost of litigation doesn’t prove the US is more litigious, it only demonstrates litigation is expensive in the US. The fact that Germany is the most litigious and that multiple other countries are more litigious than the US is extremely easy for you to verify.

The Institute for Legal Reform is a group that historically denied climate change, and they are funded by and run entirely in the interests of the US’s largest corporations. Personally, I like clean air and water, and US corporations don’t have a great track record of telling the truth about their impacts on the environment. Forgive me if I don’t readily put a lot of stock in their complaints. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chamber_of_Comme...

And there are plenty of western countries that do not work like that, as well.

It's done now out of basic tradition (father is circumcised, so son is too), conformity (his peers are all circumcised, we don't want him made fun of), doctor advice (fewer infections, easier to keep clean), and plain old cultural inertia. It's slowly dying out but I expect it to stick around another several decades.

The content might be illegal in some countries and thats fair if we can assume the people who pushed for these rules were voted for. No one voted for Visa and Mastercard.

If buying, selling and transacting fees are low enough, I don't see why bitcoin's (to pick one) value changes would matter much.

The currency wouldn't have to meet any particular definition of a stablecoin as long as it is inflationary. It could be exactly like Bitcoin but with a different mining algorithm.

The reality is that, even if the stocks you own are going to the moon, if you need food or want a television, it isn't at all "stupid" to sell some of your hoard to buy stuff.

Not all stablecoins are the same. There exists 2 main categories: Fiat-backed (as initially described), & collateral-backed.

(There also exists hybrid versions, but they're a combination of the 2, and as such will be covered by just mashing the 2 categories together.)

Fiat-backed stablecoins (USDC, USDT) are centralized: Their connection to external cash/bonds requires them to have an accountable name to be attached to.

Collateral-backed stablecoins (GHO, DAI/USDS) don't have to be centralized. A primitive form of this is a stablecoin (S) that can take in any other token as collateral and return $X amount of S stablecoins, up to a limit of (total_token_value * collateral_limit). However, it is known that this structure is inefficient capital-wise, when compared to fiat-backed stablecoins.

I think the general idea is that acquiring banks are hopefully large enough to absorb any single merchant insolvency, but there are obviously limits to that. Airlines and event tickets are notorious example of that, since they usually take payment weeks or months ahead of providing the underlying service but want to get paid immediately.

No company or individual should be denied the right to receive funds digitally without due process.

Companies should be free to transact with or exclude anyone, but there should be neutral infrastructure that facilitates the flow of money, with multiple players each with differing rules and risk profiles setup to help people and companies access it.

No one financial institution should be able to dictate the speech allowed on a platform.

What's the status of FedNow?

That point is not the problem though. They could just pressure Valve to refuse credit cards for all or some games. The financial aspect simply does not make sense, regardless of how you look at it (and many people had different takes in this thread).

The only angles that make sense are an ideological crusade and the risk of being sued. The first is unacceptable and the second is an utter failure on the part of the legal system.

If I understood it correctly, Open Payment Host can register as a TPP and offer direct banking to its users. But a customer of lunar bank can't access the API directly?

Are you claiming that the content removed was encroaching on this law?

The ruling ethnic group, of course, as is tradition.

There is TONS of speech that is banned, even in America. There isn't a single place on the planet that has no limits on speech.

That doesn't make sense.

I know at least two of the above used to use a specific US bank for the credit card transactions backing their payment services. For others, if service usage requires a verified credit card or debit card backed by a credit card network, they too use a processor owned/operated by a bank, bank subsidiary, or an entity sponsored by same.

EDIT:

For payment services which do not require a credit card or debit card backed by a credit card network, they almost certainly use the ACH[0] network. This is a more intimate financial relationship and best used with a dedicated bank account not linked to any others, as fund transfers can be bidirectional.

0 - https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/ach-vs-check/

China would never! /s

Bigger problem is that for most real world problems who is Nazi and who is Jewish depends on who you ask. Sucks to be Jewish in a Nazi world where even payment processors hate you.

It's clearly not the case at all. Valve wants to sell third party games. Third party game developers want to sell their games. Customers want to buy third party games through Valve. Do you understand this bit?

A payment processor company is far excluded from the process. Users want to pay Valve money. Valve wants to receive the user's money. All fine, right? Except a payment company somehow feels entitled to tell Valve which products in their product line they can sell. WTF?

Going back to your far-fetched example, it would be like a supermarket selling all sorts of products their customers want to buy, but the Nazi bank somehow feels entitled to tell the supermarket they should not sell any product related with Jews. Does that make sense to you?

Projects like monero (https://www.getmonero.org/) ensure privacy and fungibility of the crypto you hold.

It should still be easier, but let's not pretend this is technology only available to those with deep tech experience.

In any case, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying with crypto I need not ask permission to make a transaction. Whether that transaction should be open to government inspection after the fact is another matter entirely.

The US had more TVs per capita than Congo, and a higher life expectancy. Sending more TVs to Congo probably won't do much for their life expectancy though.

Similarly, I suspect the increase in violent video games and reduction of actual violence is just a side effect of an increasingly technology driven society.

There was no endorsement of Epstein.

There was a callout of multiple types of bank hypocrisy. Contrasting bank's "concerns" about small time erotic material vs. their lack of concern about employees use of erotic material, and the blind eyes they turn for major criminals, include prolific trafficking/pedophilic billionaires.

And of course, even in America, we tend to like our violence and gore more over-the-top and simulated. Most people didn't care for liveleak type content, even fewer for not so hard to find footage from ongoing wars.

The bad news is that essentially ALL such businesses still believe that it is essential for them to accept credit card payments - and that means they must still implement whatever agenda these are pushing. On their entire customer base, even if paying by crypto. For now.

Hopefully this progress continues.

> It has nothing to do with any sort of puritanical premise.

But I have no problem with the parent poster. I'm here hoping for conversation. The argument though is one we hear now and then and like I point out, how can it make sense? Like many things, it looks more like a vaguely possible, plausible explanation or chain of arguments... which on closer look doesn't fly. How can Valve, a long established, apparently solid merchant, be a serious risk for the credit card infrastructure? Should there be chargebacks, they can handle chargebacks. This is not limited to Valve. Many of us have run into the issue. The credit card infrastructure goes out of its way to refuse solid business.

Yeah. Same thing. Should be ignored. If someone feels an urge to run around raping women and lynching slaves, I'd much rather they were sitting around at home playing videogames than doing anything else in their spare time. What do you want them to be doing, the traditional creep move of figuring out how to get into positions of power and influence?

In addition taxpayers shouldn't be footing the bill in the war on pixels; if the banks are taking a firm moral stand then clearly the government is involved and that means they're probably spending money on expunging victimless non-crimes which is a low.

The ability and the freedom to explore the darkest parts of our psyche in a safe, controlled, and fictitious environment IS important. Even if we find certain aspects or fetishes repugnant and distasteful.

I find the idea that payment processors have enough power to dictate the morality of a game market concerning. Given the number of other NSFW fetishistic stuff that is still being permitted on Steam I don't buy the "chargeback" rational AT ALL.

i mean, i can understand a child porn game would be disallowed but we already have anime games where characters that look like children are nearly naked

Yes and yes. We have worse stuff in literature already.

It _is_ just pixels.

If we are already okay with mass murder in video games, then absolutely yes.

Yeah, right.

The bank collects the information necessary to submit that form at the time of transaction.

You’re also required as an individual to file IRS Form 8300 if you accept >$10k in payment: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

Banks in the US and EU are legally required to report large transactions. I know for a fact that in Europe, that cash handeling over 10.000 euro gets reported.

That includes withdrawals and deposits. The later gets even more questions asked regarding the "origins" of the money.

There are other fun events that we have seen, like transferring 15.000 euro from my wife to her brother (between countries), that had the money blocked as the bank needed to investigate the origin of the money. So the bank starts calling you to figure out what the money is, what is it used for, where does it come from, bla bla bla...

Why are you giving 15.000 to your brother. Is it a GIFT!!! Translation: Can we TAX it! I suspect that banks in some EU countries get a cut from reported money that can be taxed by the tax office (that is just my speculation).

No, it was his money that he loaned to us for a house buying, and that we returned, but they really tried to push the "gift" narrative. Large money transfers (above 10k), triggers investigations.

And as you can guess, large cash deposits or withdraws get even more questions.

Here is a fun tip: Just transfer or deposited money in small amounts, whenever you feel like it. Avoids the questioning like your some kind of criminal.

So ironically, you perform actions like a criminal (will do to avoid detection), just to avoid getting questioned like your a criminal. Hahahaha...

I feel like we have no more privacy in our lives with everything being monitored and checked. Your browser spies on you, your OS spies on you (W11 Recall even worse), your smartphone, you get tracked by Wifi signal in the streets, your customer store card (that they push and push) is to track your buying habits, the banks track your every movement for the tax office, you can not even freaking sell stuff on ebay and get reported.

Like 3000 Euro is nothing. You sell a few piece of PC hardware and you hit that limit. And Amazon/Ebay/... report your behind. And now its about backdoors in encryption because you may be hiding something. What, you do not want to share your talks on XYZ platform to your wife, family. What are you saying, illegal stuff????

We are really moving to a dystopian world and have been for a long time.

I’m not that someone; I don’t think Valve has any moral obligation to platform ”any content, as long as it is not illegal”. They have the freedom to choose what they publish. Petition away, see if anyone cares!

Am I missing something?

The problem isn't technical, the problem is getting people to care.

You already know VISA and/or Mastercard will respond if an activist group raises enough of a concern so what's stopping you?

Ah right, you think if they got one game removed on a petition, they should somehow also be able to remove every single other game that may or may not meet the same criteria even though it probably took them significant effort to the the first game removed and this is some sort of "gotcha" on their moral inconsistency rather than a simple limitation of resources to try to get their will done all at once?