The outcry after a recent marketplace crackdown on games with adult content, seemingly due to pressure from payment processors, prompted Mastercard to release a brief statement Friday pushing back against recent headlines.
“Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations,” the company said, adding, “At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.”
This follows an open letter by the advocacy group Collective Shout addressed to executives at Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, and other companies, criticizing them for allowing the sale of “No Mercy” and other games that depict rape, incest, and child sexual abuse.
They have no place or right to say absolutely anything about anything. They run a skimming scam where in the USA the fees it costs to use their bullshit get normalized and paid by everyone. They are a criminal skimming scam. If you want to use a credit card you should be paying that 4-7% extra, not the retailer and therefore everyone else. That is your problem for choosing to use their ““service””. See how long they last as a business when you actually see the additional cost you are paying for them to exist. They do nothing useful any more. Crypto is literally automation of their reason to exist. I’m no crypto boy, but try ameliorating all the overhead of these shits and their carbon footprint. See how that adds up.
the fee is up to the business if they want to pass it onto the consumer or not. the flipside of the service is that digital transactions dont require having to get a guard truck to transfer larges amounts of physical money to the bank. If a business gets a lot of transactions in physical dollars, they are at a much higher risk of being robbed.
its usually why the businesses that pass on the percentage fee to the consumer tend to be small restaurants. There not typically doing high 5 figure/six figure transactions
I agree with everything you said except:
Sh!tcoins should never be validated; nothing whose value decreases long-term can be a replacement for fiat currency.
You’ve got it reversed. Nothing whose value increases long-term can be a good replacement for fiat currency, because then anyone with crypto will ask “should I buy this today when I know that everything will cost fewer coins next year?” and at the very best you get Japan’s Lost Decades forever.
That’s not to say that the average shitcoin would work better as a fiat currency than baseball cards, but they might not be doomed at the design stage – although they probably were to bring in the initial base of speculators who now need to find a bigger fool willing to trade something immediately usable for the shitcoin.
Bitcoin is a shitcoin. It’s like spruiking a model T as the peak of automotive engineering.
Monero is the closest I’ve seen to date that could legitimately replace cash (being actually private and fungible). You can tell because it’s banned in many western markets.
Are credit card fees really 4-7% in the US? In the EU also Visa and MasterCard are really popular but fees are capped at 0.3%.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/fees-for-card-based-payments.html
I’ve never seen 7%, but yeah, after everyone gets their cut the US is around 3% at the end of the day to process credit cards. We even have gas stations here that have separate advertised rates for credit vs cash.
I’ve owned and operated a few US service businesses and Visa/MC were 1-3%. Discover was 2-3%. AmEx was 3-6%.
Some businesses do it this way. There’s nothing stopping them that I know of.