Pup Biru

consensus is basically what all modern databases rely on… it’s not unstable; it has properties that need to be well known and accounted for

or i share similar concerns with the person from the quote in the final part of the article…

i’m not sure how bringing up something in the article makes it “clear” that i didn’t read said article

next they’ll probably want to ban LGBT content since it’s “clearly pornographic”

whaaaat? where is doing this? i haven’t seen it, and would ABSOLUTELY boycott the shit out of it

the card NETWORK is the part at issue; not the type of payment

the same is roughly true for europe and the rest of the world too: payment processors facilitate transactions over various card networks which communicate between banks

a single payment probably involves at least 6 different business facilitating the transaction, and only a couple of them are your bank, and the business you’re paying

who would sue who? who is being harmed? the crazies sure can’t: what harm have they suffered by mastercard facilitating transactions between 2 unrelated parties?

i do think they hold some value for things like bank to bank, where each party is kiiiiind of untrusted and unrelated (not on a public chain - it’s just a private consensus between collaborating parties)

it also undeniably provides payment outside of standard card networks and the finance sector (people have been using crypto to buy drugs for decades now), so can be used to circumvent things like this mastercard/visa morality police garbage… i think in that, it’d be useful to have a strongish cryptocurrency somewhere at least to be able to provide uncensorable competition (the alternative to that being some global EU network that everyone accepted in the same manner)

but i think the value in blockchain in general is minimally about currency: that was just the first implementation… it’s a distributed, trustworthy log between untrusted individual entities. the benefits of that are honestly pretty niche, but i think it does solve some valuable problems… just most people should never even know that blockchain was involved

i’ll add an extra to this on the cashback etc

credit card companies charge stores processing fees, and then give consumers cash backs to encourage them to spend using their cards

stores add credit card processing into their cost of doing business… you’re charged that in the cost of things you purchase

if you pay with a credit card, you get some of that back. if you don’t pay with a credit card, you’re still charged the fees - you just don’t get any of the benefits

totally agree re bitcoin, and also am very sceptical of crypto as a mass-adopted currency in general

however there are plenty of networks that don’t use proof of work to validate their chains, and they aren’t bad for the environment to nearly the same degree

afaik it’s not a new policy for mastercard/visa: what’s new is that valve, itch, and even visa and mastercard were just kinda ignoring it

worth noting it’s not all adult content either… things like fisting even are fine, but “bodily fluids” are not. it’s a bit of a weird one all round

i think that they just did a big over-correction

and to be clear, i absolutely DO NOT think even the policy as it stands/stood should hold: they shouldn’t be in the business of morality policing almost anything - if i want to pay for videos/games with bodily fluids in porn then they should facilitate that transaction