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I think this game censorship row, which apparently is expected to extend to violent games in general, taken with other past censorship by financial companies against Wikileaks, is evidence that finance in general is infrastructure. You can’t have a working democracy or freedom without these being available just like electricity or water are. We need heavy regulation or a public funded alternative, or the nationalization of the largest financial companies. For once, I will call and write my legislators about this topic.

>There's no sense to these systems, you can just be cut off with no warning and the payment processors have no obligation to care or tell anyone anything.

You can thank the Bank Secrecy Act as amended by the PATRIOT act for that. It basically deputized every licensed money transmitter to act as an extension of law enforcement through the imposition of KYC/AML requirements, which is accompanied by the tendency/incentive to de-risk the bank.

Crypto solves this problem.

And yet it doesn't seem to have much adoption as far as this solution goes, probably for reasons that everyone mentions elsewhere / crypto isn't used for these kinds of transactions at much scale.

No, it doesn't solve the actual problem which is both: a) "conveniently pay for whatever is legal" and b) "have some recourse if someone takes my money and doesn't send me anything".

You may argue that current payment processors do a poor job at b) but they do an infinitely better job than crypto since it's a division by zero situation.

I'm a lot of cases the charge back mechanism is totally broken on the large stores. Amazon is happy to just cancel your account if you try it .

Also crypto isn't Bitcoin. There are plenty of other options that are close to "tap to pay"

You are concerned that a vendor who failed to deliver a product you ordered might cancel your account if you place a chargeback on the order?

If that is a fear shared among the general population, shouldn't that be a clear anti-trust concern?

Is losing your Amazon account that big of a deal? Are there really no practical alternatives? Is this fear of displeasing Amazon rational? If so, how come I don't hear any bells going off in government regulators?

I am not the person you're replying to, but I am also concerned about this issue.

This is a concern for people who have a lot of digital content under Amazon's umbrella. I have hundreds of audiobooks, ebooks, music, and movies - and if I lose my Amazon account I lose access to hundreds if not thousands of dollars of content.

As for trying to constrain Amazon to play fair, and treat the peasants nicely? Good luck.

Amazon is a rival to Google in terms of content delivered to people, and, like Google, Amazon performs a lot of services for the federal government. They have lobbyists, legal teams, and even politicians in their pocket.

Your subjective experience, or a lack of interest from legislators, does not mean these issues do not exist.

You have described to me that you are extremely dependent on a vendor that can exercise despotic control. On the one hand you express a total mistrust in the likelihood of them doing right by you. On the other hand you keep investing more and more of your assets into their control.

This indicates to me that the assets you put into their control are disposable for you or that you have no reasonable alternative. The former is easy for me to believe. That latter is difficult for me to believe. Together, it makes me disinclined to feel that the government needs to take any action on your behalf.

In fact there are cases where crypto makes it impossible for you to accept my money unless you send me the thing I'm paying for atomically.

But those are limited to purchasing things where ownership is also meaningfully controlled by crypto.

It solves the actual problem of "it is literally impossible for me to pay for this digitally" with "it is possible, albeit somewhat inconvenient, to pay anyone digitally for anything".

> b) "have some recourse if someone takes my money and doesn't send me anything"

Your recourse is the legal system. Crypto isn't mutually exclusive with working with trusted, legally registered corporations whom you can sue.

> Your recourse is the legal system. Crypto isn't mutually exclusive with working with trusted, legally registered corporations whom you can sue.

I agree with this. The problem is the way from "isn't mutually exclusive" (which I also agree with) to "actually integrated with the legal system". The latter part is nonexistent and likely constitutes 99% of the moat of the current payment providers.

Perhaps more accurately, crypto can solve this problem. Right now it's hard, but if you want a solid permanent solution to this problem, crypto's a better long term bet than "let's hope the banks become less prudish."

Does Crypto have a webhooks kind of thing? To make it scalable?

Say someone pays for something via crypto, do you have to manually confirm each time before giving them the product/service?

Hmm, it could? From a fundamental POV, all the technology can do is act as a public ledger, executing and confirming transfers of money from one "account" to another. There's a whole lot of stuff being experimentally built on blockchains, so what you're looking for is possible.

I will say -- "immutability" isn't necessarily the horror that people make it out to be. Which is to say, oh $500 gets transferred from A to B incorrectly. The fact that you literally can't "undo" that doesn't much matter -- you just transfer 500 from B to A on a 2nd transaction.

I am afraid history would repeat itself, where:

1. Some new or existing payment company helps merchants to transact in cryptocurrency, because it's difficult for the merchants to do it themselves.

2. This payment company now becomes the new target for attacks, and the only change is from fiat currency to cryptocurrency.

An obvious answer to #1 is for merchants to process cryptocurrencies themselves, but that implies that all the problems in dealing with fiat currency (fraud detection, accessibility, scalability, etc.) is somehow easier with cryptocurrency, and I am not sure that is the case.

I’m so tired of crypto bros. No it doesn’t. You can’t replace currency with a speculative asset. Maybe with a stable coin it’s possible, like USDC or USDT. Even then I’m skeptical because the ecosystem is garbage and security is ass.

>payment processors as paid content censor system is absurd

So you don't like it when payment processors blacklist sexual content. What about racist content? Are you fine with someone selling a game mod that for example replaces all people of color in a game with people of European ancestry using something like Stripe?

My example includes none of that. It's clear this duopoly system doesn't work as far as content filtering. Nothing about being a payment processor makes them good at evaluating companies, the individual bits of content they provide, and being a gatekeeper.

I agree, I was just wondering.

Yes? Why would that be Stripe's business? Should Stripe also restrict you from renting R-rated movies or buying condoms?

Yes

If itch wants to become the store that overflows with racism they can go advertise on Rumble and become irrelevant.

But they wouldn't do that, they would moderate the content on their own site.

I trust itchio to decide for themselves what kinds of content they want to host - I don’t like seeing Stripe/Paypal try to blackmail them into censorship.

If it is illegal, there are laws to handle the situation. Otherwise they should focus on enabling financial transactions.

It actually shocks me that anyone thinks that's supposed to be an obvious case for rejection of the concept, we've had similar for free for the longest time.

What are you talking about? Free what? Adult content? Racist mods?

All of the above, and more.

Being able to sell such stuff incentives higher quality, doesn't it? It takes a serious amount of work to dig through all of Baldurs Gate, for example.

I think we're going to have to accept that "payment companies should not be global game censors" means that they shouldn't be global game censors.

If I offer to sell you a copy of Mein Kampf, should the dollar you try to hand me spawn a force field and prevent you from handing it to me?

That's kinda how it works in Germany and many other European countries. Thinking of RAC bands like Landser. Mein Kampf is now legal as long as it comes with a commentary. The game mod I've mentioned, not sure if it would go through. Depends on the details, I guess