Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

They could support a stablecoin like USDC and start pushing people to that. No censorship and lower fees. Valve broke ground with Steam, they could do it again.

nah. USDC funds can be frozen by Circle on demand/request.

You wouldn’t be buying or holding any USDC in your account. It would be invisible to you

Would you care to explain the process more? I'd be glad to see a useful application of crypto.

The problem with that is that you usually end up using traditional payment rails (e.g. a Visa debit card) to "invisibly" buy the stablecoin and then you're subject to their rules and fees again.

They also use dollars and credit cards and gift cards.

Early crypto believer here. My first purchase of Bitcoin was at $0.23. I've been through the ups and downs, used the proceeds to buy physical assets over the years (land, and one vehicle), and lost interest in the "community" shortly after Ethereum gained initial popularity. I still hold some crypto, mostly Bitcoin but also Ethereum, Monero, and a handful of altcoins that don't amount to enough to bother withdrawing.

My hot take take: Crypto still fills a valuable role, and will still "take over" the global financial system both at the individual and institutional level. Whether that's Bitcoin, another coin, or something new created by the institutions themselves is yet to be seen.

You're right that it's "tainted", of course. That's why I think we're in a (hopefully) long slump in adoption. I think that will rapidly change if and when the US Dollar loses its place as the world's reserve currency.

At some point there will be a war or significant political disruption. A large part of the world will want to divest itself of dollars, and none of the state-backed alternatives will be stable enough for their needs. That's when we'll see a shift to crypto - first some international institutions that do business across ideological borders, then the rest of the internationals, then individuals.

Unless and until that happens, things will continue to slowly grow. The boom/bust cycle will keep going, getting longer and lower magnitude over time. There's still money to be made in speculation, but that's not what interests me :)

> At some point there will be a war or significant political disruption. A large part of the world will want to divest itself of dollars, and none of the state-backed alternatives will be stable enough for their needs. That's when we'll see a shift to crypto - first some international institutions that do business across ideological borders, then the rest of the internationals, then individuals.

Sorry how would crypto end up more stable than any candidates for a reserve currency? The only thing even remotely stable in the crypto world are stablecoins which... are pegged to the dollar (the actual reserve currency) which is already unstable in your scenario.

Price stability is a function of liquidity and velocity. Both would increase, thereby increasing stability.