Regarding the Steam and Visa/Mastercard debacle.

Many people probably know I'm very anti-censorship of any kind, so I would like to remind everyone that Steam supports Trustly as a payment method.

While they are of course also a payment processor, it works by paying directly from your bank account, so it at least bypasses the physical card dependency on Visa/MasterCard. Of course it also means the card providers don't get to take a cut.

It works with surprisingly many banks, so I urge you to give it a try the next time you buy something on Steam.

@quad Useful tip. In germany they also support Sofortüberweisung which is a service not offered by the banks directly but still better than visa/mastercard

We obviously need some form of regulation to prevent them from pulling this kind of stuff.

But in the meantime, paying directly from your bank account where possible (not just on Steam) is the best way to prevent debit/credit card companies from taking a cut of any sale, and makes online platforms less dependent on cards as the sole payment method.

@stefan Most countries have their own national payment processor (In the case of Norway that's BankAxept). But it has very low support online.

Unfortunately there's no decent overview of all these things as far as I know.

@quad ye but credit card use is generally very low in germany. If paypal were push such stunts more aggresively as they do now. We might screwed so its still good advice

@stefan Well I think this is more of an online problem. Card usage is very high in Norway, but if push comes to shove cash still exists.

Online however you have fewer alternatives, especially which work online.

For example in Norway many online stores still let you pay by invoice. So you just get a PDF with payment information, then you manually send money there. This removes payment processor dependency ENTIRELY.

However this is an uncommon thing afaik, in most countries, online stores only do invoicing for B2B sales. So it's not a reliable option I can recommend.

Trustly is the only option I know of that works pretty well internationally. (And PayPal, but they're known to be among the bad payment processors)

The point is just to not pay via Visa/MasterCard (Or Amex I guess). Because if Trustly goes bad, they're way easier to replace than Visa or MasterCard, since they do not control your physical bank card.

@quad if only I could

If they just supported raw SEPA I’d probably fucking use it, but for some reason, they don’t

@ignaloidas Hot damn. I know Steam has different payment methods available depending on country, but I've never seen them provide only three of them before. Usually there's at least 5 or so.

And yes, if I could just ship money to them from my bank account that'd be the best.

(Trustly might not be supported in all countries. But it's the non-card one supported in the most countries. The point is that when you buy something online, check if the store supports a payment method that bypasses your debit/credit card.)

@ignaloidas Norwegian payment options for the sake of comparison:

@ignaloidas Wait, I just noticed that yours says "Update Saved Payment" in the title.

You'll need to actually go to the checkout pages. Add something to your cart and go to checkout, check the options there. Generally payment options besides cards cannot be saved to your account.

@quad I really fucking hope GNU Taler ends up actually getting implemented by both banks and vendors, because I’m honestly kinda sick of these monopolies on payment processing.

@ignaloidas I've heard of it, but I dunno. I find it somewhat doubtful since I suspect every country will try very hard to resist losing traceability of their digital currency.

It would be nice though.

@quad oh, wait, didn’t know that, ok, then I got it as option, as well as a couple different ones, nice

@ignaloidas Yeah. You can actually save your details when doing Trustly payments or similar in most cases, but you'll have to do it inside the payment method itself. Because I'm pretty sure cards are the only processors that Steam let you manage directly.

@quad tbh it’s designed to be fairly good from the “make sure taxes get paid” respect - receivers of payments are known, while the senders aren’t. So e.g. gov doesn’t get to know where I’m spending my money, but gov does get to know how much money in total some company is getting. There’s apparently some trials starting in Germany or Austria with approval from national banks IIRC.

@ignaloidas It's not the stores I care about, it's the consumers. While I think some European countries might go along with this, for the majority of the world, they want full tracability, so for every dollar a company receives they want the ability to figure out which account it originated from and who is tied to said account.

But yes, I would still like to see Taler implemented.

@quad @ignaloidas
Poland for the record

@wolf480pl @ignaloidas Well at least you have Przelewy24. That one also bypasses your card from my understanding

@ignaloidas @quad yeah but how does the govt know who's funding terrorists?

@wolf480pl @ignaloidas I for one sure hope they don't figure out I'm funding terrorists

@quad @ignaloidas
Yeah.
So does Blik (it's a contactless payment systems that Polish banks themselves came up with)

@wolf480pl @ignaloidas I've never heard of Blik, but I heard about Przelewy24 when I was in Poland in 2023

@wolf480pl @ignaloidas Norway also has a contactless payment system run collaboratively by banks, called "Vipps".

Unfortunately, I have not even once seen any site support it which isn't Norwegian.

@wolf480pl @quad I mean, you just don’t pay the terrorists out - while transactions happen in taler, the banks have to pay them out with time (and set them up with receiving accounts, even). I honestly doubt that this is that much of an issue for implementation.

@ignaloidas @wolf480pl Do keep in mind that the government often does not find out which companies are shells for terrorists, Russians or drug dealers until they've already been running for months or years.

@quad I mean, EU has a single banking market, so approval in one country is approval in all, and it seems it’s gonna be approved in at least one.

And like, most of traceability requirements are there for taxes, not anything else - if taxes are ensured, the rest of the stuff is more of a bonus anyways.

@ignaloidas Like many thing, traceability might have been implemented for taxes, but now that it's available, I doubt they want to take it away.

But yes, even if I'm Norwegian I wouldn't really mind signing up with a German bank remotely to get GNU Taler support.

In fact I think this is something some people already do with a bank called N26. Not sure why but I've heard that they've got customers from all over the EU or something.

@quad that looks like a payment processor local to your country, I do not have that one. But we have BLIK which is the most popular payment method in Poland, and hopefully will get rolled out to the rest of the EU Region.

Problem with VISA+Mastercard censorship, is, that have monopoly in many countries.

@centopus In Poland you can use Blik or Przelewy24.

I might not have been clear enough about it in the OP. But the goal was not to shill Trustly, the point is to check if there's a payment method available which bypasses Visa/MasterCard (And Amex I guess, if anyone uses those).

I recommend doing this elsewhere as well, not just on Steam. Surprisingly many stores these days let you pay directly from your bank, but many are unaware.

@centopus Trustly was just the payment method I was aware of, and which is available in the highest number of countries.

@quad I hadn't heard of MC/V vs Steam. What's going on?

@book V/MC (And other payment processors like PayPal) are imposing censorship on platforms. Generally through pressure from weird activist groups.

And while I don't care much about the stuff they've gotten removed so far (Mostly incest and rape themed stuff). The fact that a payment processor is supposed to be the arbiter of what your platform can or cannot do, sits very wrong with me.

You can find more details online various places: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/valve-confirms-credit-card-companies-pressured-it-to-delist-certain-adult-games-from-steam/

It's also not just a Steam thing, DLSite (Japanese website selling self-published content) went though a similar issue before. Steam is just the highest profile example of this stuff so far.

@book Basically payment processors are saying "Remove this content that we don't agree with or we will prevent your company from receiving debit/credit card payments" and that doesn't sit right with me, and many others.

@quad I'm now actively not using VISA anywhere where I have the option to.

And for internet payments, we have , as you've said przelewy24 and blik. Those two dominate our market.

The problem remains in countries, where, there is no choice.

@centopus Yeah, unfortunately I do not have an overview of what payment processors exist in every country.

And long term we need regulation to prevent visa and mc from trying to exert control. They are just doing payments, they should be regulated so they cannot enforce restrictions on their users

@quad I’m pretty sure this shit was discussed by Taler and the regulators, and it is actually moving forward, so I’m pretty sure it’s not that much of an issue.

And yeah, there have been a bunch of “indie banks” popping up over the last couple of years, some with stuff like API’s and shit to attract techies https://doc.bunq.com/

@ignaloidas Well, personally I have a Wise account. Because they let me do regular SEPA payments to Europe.

Norway is one of the few (maybe only as far as I'm aware) countries where sending your EUR to another country using EUR, actually imposes fees with many banks.

@ignaloidas For example my bank charges 40kr (~3.50€) per SEPA payment.

So to do a SEPA payment I have to do this stupid thing where I send money from my bank to Wise's Norwegian account number fee-free, then from Wise I can do a SEPA payment fee-free to elsewhere in Europe (As it's supposed to be).

@quad@akko.quad.moe @ignaloidas@not.acu.lt Was it to a company that's based outside of Europe but still accepting EUR? A friend of mine had that when he payed for his framework laptop from France.

@skid @ignaloidas Was what? The last time I sent EUR and paid fees? It was between me in Norway and another private individual in Germany.

If you mean the Wise paymetns I do now, the payments are generally also to other private individuals in Europe as well.

I know SEPA "requires banks to apply the same charges for domestic and cross-border electronic payment transactions in euro", but the banks seem to get around this by simply not offering foreign currency accounts to regular people. (The "in euro" at the end is the key)

I can only open an "International payment account" for sending other currencies in/out of Norway. As far as I'm aware, every bank I've used (four different ones) all let me store EUR, but only send it in/out of Norway, not move it around domestically. As such domestic payments IN EURO seemingly do not exist, and therefor the domestic cost to transfer euros is a NULL

I reckon this is the loophole that lets them charge money for a SEPA transfer.

@quad i wish they would just support SWIFT payments with reference numbers but maybe this is the push they need

@hellpie Perhaps, but I don't want to pay 65kr (~5.50€) for a SWIFT payment or 40kr (~3.50€) for a SEPA payment every time I purchase some 2€ slop on Steam either.

@skid @ignaloidas As far as I'm aware Norway is the only country in SEPA where moving your EUR to another account in SEPA costs you money. But there could be other countries I'm not aware of.

@quad@akko.quad.moe @ignaloidas@not.acu.lt Yeah okay, that specifically i haven't heard anything similar before.

3€ for a SEPA transfer T_T

@quad@akko.quad.moe @ignaloidas@not.acu.lt When you think that we recently got instant SEPA for free here (it usually was a 1€ options in a lot of banks, the standard one was usually free if you do it online)... It's depressing to hear.

@skid @ignaloidas This is typical Norway.

A lot of people are jealous of Norway's EU deal because they think we get all the benefits of EU membership with none or few of the disadvantages.

But in reality it's kinda the opposite, we implement just as many EU directives as other countries, in fact more than many actual EU countries. Yet we can't even vote on them. So we're "The EU's bitch" more so than any other country imo.

The typical Norwegian consumer sees few benefits from the deal. We already had free movement in the Nordics thanks to the Nordic Council. So the EU didn't actually make any direct border crossing easier for us. We obviously don't get the cheap SEPA payments. And if I order something from a store in for example France, it's an import and shipping hell so I'd probably end up paying like 50€ in fees + the actual VAT. We don't even get cheaper food from the rest of the EU either thanks to NorgesGruppen holding a monopoly on food distribution and preventing any of it from reaching stores.

Norway is on paper well integrated with Europe, and I'm sure that for companies it helps them import Poles for cheap labour. But for most private individuals it means we have to listen to the EU while we don't really get the benefits. Except for an easier experience at the airport when going on vacation to Italy I guess.