Shame that PayPal is one of the worst ways to pay for anything. Their dispute resolution is crap, and because they act as middle-men you lose some of your rights with chargebacks and other disputes with the card issuer.

Unless it gets regulated and reputable banks start supporting it though, I can't see it getting very far. People aren't going to want to give their money to BitBollox Cyber Exchange to buy some crypto that they don't know how to properly store, just to use Steam. And Valve probably don't want to deal with it either, since there will be endless complaints about theft and unauthorized transactions, and no standard process for handling them.

I wonder how genuine the bankruptcy was. If they actually ran out of money because the business model was not sustainable, then the consumer has a choice between an unsupported and possibly dead (if it needs cloud stuff to configure/work) product, and the option to pay a subscription. If they engineered it to give legal justification for changing the business model, that's basically fraud.

The less for the consumer is always the same. Make sure it has full local only operation. Ideally open source firmware. Don't install firmware updates unless there is some critical security issue, at least for a few months so you have time to see if it's sabotage. If you can't disable/control firmware updates, don't buy it.

Maybe it was different where you live, but the locals used to object to shops selling adult stuff near them back in the day. There was far less choice than the internet offers.

Nobody has come up with a good solution to this. Bitcoin is volatile, an environmental disaster, and slow. None of the other crypto currencies have really gained any traction for general spending.

The people behind it claim that they first asked Steam to remove the games, but Steam ignored them. They probably get a lot of requests like that. So then they contacted the payment processors. They say they asked only for specific games to be removed, but Steam just removed all the adult stuff. They probably hit the nuclear option when Visa and Mastercard queried potentially illegal material on their website.

As for how potentially illegal it is, it depends on jurisdiction. In some places the depiction of characters look too young, even if they are canonically adults, can be illegal.

People will never learn, just like before the internet when people never learned not to tell their cousin.

Next time they'll tell somebody in a different part of the internet. Just like before. They didn't learn not to tell people things they wanted secret, they just learned not to tell Joey. They told Frankie instead. And result never stopped surprising them.

I heard on the internet that the fappening is still happening, so it doesn't seem to have helped that much.

I'm imagining nobody caring?

Except the guy without a marker, who might go into the gas station and ask for one for free, instead of buying one. He thinks she's really great! So great that he also bought a beer. She's craftier than you imagined.

That's not actually a void, it's just the giant open space under Cowboy Neal's hat.

Monero uses a public ledger blockchain, it's not actually anonymous.

Note that the IRS has paid out bounties to two different contractors for creating tools to trace Monero transactions.

If it became more popular, it would also be easier to trace.

Good news: They only deleted games with "incest" or child abuse words in the titles.

There are still lots of Steam games with shitty CGI furries.

Though in fairness the CGI quality looks a bit higher when it's cartoon animals than 3d people from the Uncanny Valley.

They're also relying on the belief that call centers won't learn how to share blocklists.

If they push hard enough, call centers will probably figure out how to make a clearinghouse. And for a lot of these neckbeards the worst part will be when they also add people who call up and shout at them to the list...

This is exactly that "and similar" though, because this is mostly about games with titles that have the word "incest" in them, and a few that actually had words describing child pornography.
Note that Steam didn't delete games like "Tropical Monster Girls," "Buttbangers," or "Sex House: Orgy Party." They deleted games that claimed to be about incest.
Incest is illegal, and depictions of incest are also illegal in many states.

Games that are about your sister will simply have to change their name from "Neckbeard Incest" to "That's Not Your Sister's Neckbeard" or something.

Banks and payment processors are not allowed to handle transactions for things they know are illegal. They don't give a rats ass if you play a game called A Rat's Ass where you fuck rats.

Neckbeards want to plot-lawyer it, but that's not useful.

Let me explain it more concisely than the person above.

This is about games that have words like "incest" in the title.

There is nothing actually happening in regards to things being "questionable." That's a word that websites use because they don't want to type out "incest."

You're obviously a shy pedophile. This isn't like taking somebody's cigarettes away, it's like having a store and choosing not to sell cigarettes. Or really, having a store and choosing not to sell illegal cigarettes, for example ones that don't have a tax stamp.

Why do you want feel that credit card processors should be required to process payments for depictions that claim to be of incest, when that's illegal in many states? It's a stupid and absurd position that directly contradicts your faux libertarian phrasing.

I remember in the 80s when "sleep learning" was going to be the new way of learning.

It turns out that listening to lectures in your sleep doesn't teach your subconscious any new skills, you just wake up tired because you got shitty sleep.

Will "prompt engineering" really turn out to teach a student more than the source material would have? I don't see the learning mechanism. At least sleep learning had a plausible mechanism.