That's true for all non precious metal currencies.

They act puritan to help facilitate business in more restricted cultures like China or Vietnam. Allowing everything that is allowed in the most liberal countries wouldn't loose them their marketshare in those countries. Disallowing it though, that opens those foreign markets with minimal negative effect to their processing volume. How many people are going to blame visa for this? Most will just blame Steam who is just conforming to the standards the processors set.

Buying gift cards, which are in fiat currency, defeats the whole point lol

Wouldn't that still falls under steam responsibilities? If China doesn't like porn games, they would/should go after steam allowing the sale of such games in their market, not Visa which has no means to know what games you purchased

A rare L for Steam. Not exactly their fault, but I wonder what changed that made them start caring.

Processors don't even deserve the right to even learn what morals even are. They are business entities, and shouldn't have any rights at all, honestly. They're just there to move money and shouldn't get any say at all in what that means. None. Honestly, (to your last point) fuck anyone who is into that shit in any kind of practical way.(if they wanna goon about it, that's another discussion. But even with adding "step", it's kinda close to that vanta black color on the sunniest day. But if having erotic software keeps them out of their siblings and parents and kids' beds, then more power to em.

Ahh man, Australia have tried DNS blocking websites via our ISPs however running your own or changing your DNS (on your local machine or your modem if it's not locked down) completely dumpsters this strategy. From memory torrent websites were blocked and some rom / game piracy sites.

Obviously I'd prefer to pay in crypto directly but some of the stores I shop in don't accept it yet. In person I can pay in cash but shopping privately online is a different story. Gift cards are the next best option, and thanks to them I can use the self checkout scanner and online stores without my purchasing history being tracked. It also allows me to store my savings in a hard asset that can't be easily confiscated, frozen, inflated or stolen, that I can permissionlessly spend whenever I need to, that no one knows how much of or if I have, that if needs be I can flee the country with in an instant without worry that it will be sized or lost. And it gives me the freedom to not be at the mercy of the banking system and just take their debit card fee, debit card issuance fee, debit card replacement fee, transfer fee, deposit fee, overdraft fee, underdraft fee, too little money fee, account having fee, fuck you what you gonna do fee...

I mean isn’t this effectively the problem bitcoin aimed to solve originally? Don’t get me wrong, crypto is fucked and I’m not advocating for it here per se. But a locally processed, secure, digital version of cash bypasses the need for any of this. Granted it bypasses the need for some of the most powerful institutions on the planet too, and so will never happen in a truly egalitarian sense.

Hate to be a party pooper, but unless you're going thru self checkout (and the store for that matter) fully masked, you've given up way more information than by using Visa. I'll give you the access benefit.

Haha but also last I checked everyone but north Korea uses them and north Korea I'm just pulling out of my ass because it makes sense to me.

Probably the last tweet that was posted on this thread, if PayPal was denying purchases in certain regions than steam would get scared

That was kinda what I was alluding to. Apparently it worked before that, but they decided to make up extra rules or turned up enforcement.