Mastercard’s ties to the esports world have led to more evidence of censorship. A source leaked messages from the Riot Games sponsor to livestream channels during the Valorant Champions Tour. The payment processor asked moderators to delete messages accusing it of forcing the ban of Steam games.
It really boggles the mind why we have to go through private corporations to use our monetary system in the digital realm
If we had to use private corporations then there needs to be enough competition to prevent what is happening now.
FedNow became a thing just two years ago. With transaction fees of just $0.043/transaction, it’s cheaper than every other payment processor out there. Hopefully it can gain adoption and push out Visa/Mastercard.
What prevents them from getting bigger and doing the same thing. This cycle of sadomasochism needs to stop at the root cause.
Enshitification is common. Corps care a ton about social pressures and norms. They get swayed easily by public opinions.
This one is US Gov based so we’ll see how it plays out. They tend to be slower to move… Until someone starts slinging executive orders around to rip things out and tear them down.
FedNow is ran by the Federal Reserve. They are almost certainly going to retain stricter regulation than independently operated payment processors.
I’m. So. Reassured.
Interesting. Good to have a less rent-seeking option, not sure I love the idea of the Fed just (assumedly) having access to all my transactions, though.
You don’t have to. You can use cash, checks, crypto, gift cards, and more. It’s only credit cards (and probably almost all debit cards) that go through them.
I’ve been to places that don’t take check or cash anymore though.
As much as everyone here hates it literally the only way to ever do that is cryptocurrency unless you receive precious metals in the mail.
Steam already tried it, but it was too volatile so they stopped accepting it.
They stopped using Bitcoin when the idiots in control of development/online communities kicked out/banned all the dissenters and scammed everyone into thinking we couldn’t raise the blocksize beyond 1mb, which caused massive congestion and delayed transactions, which resulted in complicated failed payments/refund problems. Their ‘leader’ cheered when transaction fees skyrocketed.
Steam was 100% right to stop accepting it given the problems the congestion caused. Steam wasn’t the only one to stop accepting it after that manufactured clusterfuck. Mainstream consumer adoption which was starting to happen died at that point.
You can just use something like Ethereum instead now and avoid that entirely, and you can avoid the volatility by accepting something like USDC
They tried bitcoin. And also fraud was a concern too.
With Monero, fees are minimal and there’s no possible way to prove fraud thus if you KYCd youd be breaking no laws and it would work quite well. The volatility is still a factor though for sure.
Stablecoins exist but ETH also has large fees at certain times like btc so and other chains like Polygon are trash and not as secure.
Volatility is a factor, but using a different crypto than Bitcoin is necessary to avoid high fees and stolen coins
Fees are no longer a problem on Ethereum if you use one of the sidechains. Sub penny.
They might till be higher on mainnet if some big event is happening, but are otherwise relatively low.