Petitioning people to do something that is against their entire purpose doesn't seem like it would be effective.

Archived page: https://archive.ph/Ttyr5

Just in case.

This is incredibly shortsighted.

If you get Collective Shout to stop, another group might pick up where they left off.

The problem needs to be fixed, what you're suggesting is just making the people currently abusing it stop doing so. That's not a long term solution.

So yeah, being mad at Valve is stupid, people need to be mad st MC and Visa and probably also PayPal.

Being mad at Valve is shooting the messenger.

Fortunately the petition is at least correctly aimed at the payment processors.

But also...

If MC and Visa won't budge on their positions, well, if Valve then makes an alt payment system for adult only games...

MC and Visa go, oh, hey, you're violating our guidelines, we no longer support Valve/Steam, now no one can buy any game.

This is a MAD situation, Valve would have to come up with a comprehensive payment processing system for everything, in secret, and then deploy it all at once.

Replying my same comment from elsewhere to you as well:

Yes but the payment processors didn't say "you're not allowed to sell this game with our service" they said "you're not allowed to sell this game period or we walk".

Or you could just transfer funds to a steam card, then with that, buy all you want.

They would have to roughly make their own form of PayPal, alongside their own bank.

If you didn't know, PayPal technically isn't a bank, it and Venmo use Synchrony Bank... which is an actual bank.

If they did something like that, it could work, but it would have to be at a similar scale as PayPal, that is to say, massive....

Because doing this would/could basically be the nuclear option:

MC and Visa and PayPal would/could drop them.

So, they'd have to basically develop a massive project, in total secrecy.

... Which is something Valve has arguably done a number of times, they are notoriously opaque as a company.

......

Sort of as you mention, they already have a barebones backend framework to scale up from the steam gift card / user gift card balance system.

I am... uncertain if their backend for that already does or does not include an actual legally defined bank though.

...

Problem is that this would necessitate a massively costly undertaking, as well as ongoing maintenance costs, and Valve is also notorious for basically running on what most other firms would consider a skeleton crew for the size and scope of what they do.

Yeah, but SteamPay is the future

Steam does not have to only accept steampay. Tho? You fear visa and mastercard will blaclist steam?

Yeah but PayPal's awful. They literally arbitrarily deny you access to your own funds. At least the banks have rules.

If someone wants to pay me something they can use it literally anything other than PayPal. I don't trust them they've stolen money from me before.

PayPal is almost as pornphobic as MastercardVisa

Yes

Alternatives are not so hard, if you allow everyone to exchange and use every currency. Then, well, you need to pay someone selling in currency A - you pay your B's to buy some A's and you pay with them.

But there are lots of limitations on banking, some in good faith, and some to prevent mobility and make everything tracked. Possibility to track means possibility to decide who gets to do what.

I think that's why gold standard was dropped in the first place. When all money is guaranteed with gold, and gold (still does) buy money, you do have a universal currency hard to track.

With decentralized electronic currencies the problem is - you need consensus. There's no way around it at all. You can devise something to separate one consensus into a tree of subspaces, to make it more efficient in case an operation with a coin "123456" depends only on operations with coins from "123*" subspace, or something like that. Partitioned system. So then you don't need consensus on subspaces untouched by your operation. But you still can't have such an offline currency, because that depends on the finite amount of gold, while with electronic currencies double spending exists.

And I don't know if it's possible to make such an electronic currency anonymous for outside spectators. Zero-knowledge and other buzzwords are good, but I don't know how one can do this.

Money is not printed by the local government at all. Money is created by private banks through extending credit. And it shouldn't be controlled by the government either, that's a terrible idea.

I agree with the rest though.

Yeah, I don't expect the US Federal Government to do anything pro-consumer except to lower the cost of concentration camps and tear gas.

I keep seeing this suggested and while I think that would be amazing I really don't think its likely. These incumbents are set up to make things difficult for new entrants to their market. With political will and engagement it would be possible, but in the current world political environment these payment processors would simply buy the right politicians & court officials to ensure that any legislative challenges would be killed in the nest.

In the world we are in right now we need to instead focus on making the payment processors bend to the will of the majority not a vocal minority.

We also need to start finding strategies to fight back against paedophilia as an accepted permission slip to let the worst people in the world get away with whatever they want. If its not a disqualifying status for the office of president of the US, then why does the existence of paedophiles mean we (vast majority not paedophiles I hope) have to sacrifice our rights, our privacy, and our free speech?