Valve has enough lawyer money to keep Microsoft at bay.

This puts competitive pressure on Microsoft. Valve’s goal is to turn Steam OS into a legitimate competitor to Windows for gamers, and Microsoft should fear Valve’s success.

Right now, Microsoft has no legitimate competitors in the PC gaming space. They are free to do anything they want to their OS and consumers have no choice but to tolerate it. If Microsoft say “watch these adverts”, consumers open their eyes. If Microsoft says “pay up”, they reach for their wallets. If Microsoft says “suck”, they kneel.

If a competitor arises to Windows, then Microsoft will have to actually start worrying about losing customers to Steam OS. More importantly, every customer who switches to Steam OS is one who isn’t paying for Game Pass and one who isn’t buying games from the Microsoft Store and paying Microsoft their 30%.

Valve is not well meaning. No large for-profit company is ever well-meaning. It’s merely the case that Valve’s best interest happens to align with those of the consumer, and they have decided that their business model is going to be to win over consumers’ loyalty through goodwill rather than milking them for every penny they can get. And they are very successful at this, seeing that there has still not arisen any serious competitor to Steam. That’s entirely because consumers are loyal to the platform. Valve provides a good service, consumers reward them with loyalty. It’s not friendship, but it’s symbiotic, which is as close as you can get to friendship in the harsh world of business.

“Add to cart”

“Check out”

And if you fail the V2, it’ll just take your word on it and let you pass anyway.

Hot take: Global geopolitics within the current rules as we understand it don’t allow for countries to genuinely respect each other as equals. Might will always be right on the global stage regardless of whether it should be that way. So when it comes to picking a global hegemon, the United States is really not a terrible choice compared with the alternatives.

That’s essentially what FedNow wants to be, except the goal is to replace the debit card network.

Trying to start a new debit card network is a chicken-and-egg problem.

See this symbol?

If you have a card issued by a credit union, yours probably has this too. It means you can use any other credit union’s ATMs that have this symbol without fees as if they were owned by your credit union.

There are thousands of credit unions across the US operating tens of thousands of ATMs. 7-Eleven ATMs are also part of this network.

I’m not saying that postal banking is a bad idea. In fact, it’s a great idea, as a way to serve underserved communities and as a way to generate revenue for the Postal Service, if nothing else. But the idea of not-for-profit banking on a national scale isn’t exactly a new concept.

What country is this?

In the US, we have credit unions. Credit unions are member-owned not-for-profit financial institutions that offer the same services as banks.

What is this service?

I really doubt it will be as revolutionary as you claim.

There are a few types of “anonymity”.

The highest level of anonymity is perfect anonymity, where it is literally impossible to prove a transaction occurred or know anything about that transaction without being a party to that transaction. Some private cryptocurrencies are truly perfectly anonymous because it’s cryptographically infeasible to determine who paid whom and how much was paid without being a party to that transaction. Metal coins are generally perfectly anonymous. Paper money is nearly perfectly anonymous. They still have serial numbers that can be traced. It is easy to make arguments that perfect anonymity is undesirable because the drawbacks of allowing criminals, terrorist organisations, or sanctioned states to transact freely and in complete secrecy outweigh the privacy benefits to normal people compared to what they enjoy with lower levels of anonymity. I am not here to make an argument about this.

The next-highest level is what I will call “legal anonymity”, where knowledge of transaction details is tightly restricted by law. If you think of Swiss bank secrecy laws, this is close to what I mean. A CBDC can operate at this level of anonymity. The central bank would still theoretically know all details of all transactions, but the use of this information would be legally restricted and cannot be used for mass surveillance. However, the information is still retrievable by means of some defined legal process, such as a court subpoena or specific search warrant.

The level below that is what I will call “discretionary anonymity”. This is where a third party knows all the transaction details, and the restrictions on what they can do with this information are either weak or non-existent. Hence, your privacy is at the discretion of whoever holds this information. This form of privacy is weak compared to the other forms but a large portion of the population still finds this level of anonymity to be acceptable for everyday transactions. Bank transactions in the USA are discretionarily private. The bank can use and exploit the transaction data it knows with relatively few legal restrictions.

The final level is pseudo-anonymity, where transaction data is publicly accessible, but some information (such as the exact names of the payor and payee) is not provided. Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies are pseudo-anonymous.

.gov and .mil are controlled by the American government and they are reserved for use by American government websites and American military websites respectively.

Keep in mind that this is not necessarily a good thing. China’s economy is still mostly driven by Government spending and exports rather than consumer demands. The Chinese government would usually prefer the yuan to be weaker as this makes Chinese exports cheaper when denominated in foreign currencies and makes imports more expensive, discouraging domestic consumers from buying foreign goods.

The article does mention this as well, but the yuan’s exchange rate isn’t a great indicator of the Chinese economy as a whole because the central bank spends a great deal of time manipulating it.

I have a very strong feeling that @paf0@lemmy.world is being downvoted here, not because they make a bad point, but because they phrased it in terms of cryptocurrency which immediately triggers negative reactions from everyone.

What OP has proposed is neither novel, nor a terrible idea. In fact, economists call it a central bank digital currency. And yes, some countries have adopted it. It’s usually not run with a blockchain, but that’s because if you have a trusted central entity to run the system, that being the central bank, a blockchain is inferior in practically every aspect to a normal relational database. That’s why all current CBDCs still use fairly traditional accounting systems.

Your use, however, of the terms “real money” and “fake money” has, I believe, the effect of shutting down intelligent conversation, rather than encouraging it. “Money” is a social construct. “Real money” is whatever the Government declares to be “real” and that the population is willing to use. It doesn’t need to be physical money. And it is unquestionable that in the countries that have adopted the legal framework that allows their central banks to issue CBDCs, the money so issued this way is as real and legally equivalent to paper banknotes and metal coins.

FedNow still relies on banks. The only way we can truly get the commerical banks and financial institutions out of the picture is with cryptocurrency (lol) or a CBDC (central bank digital currency). In short, a CBDC would operate like a Government-run Cash App or PayPal and the balance in a CBDC wallet holds the same status as paper money and is legal tender.

I believe that CBDCs are entirely necessary for a digital future. For the everyday citizen, the only form of “cash”, as in “Government-issued legal money”, is paper banknotes and pieces of coinage. This is wholly insufficient for a system where an increasing amount of business is conducted digitally, and all it does is invite middlemen like Visa to insert themselves like a leech and take profit off every transaction. Banks and financial institutions already have digital cash; account balances at the Federal Reserve are as good as cash to banks as far as the law is concerned, but the everyday layman can’t just go into the Federal Reserve and ask to open an account.

This is exactly that CBDCs will solve. Anyone can hold real money (not just a promise to pay money) in a digital format and exchange it peer-to-peer or use it to conduct business free of fees and middlemen.

The only problem is that conservatives in America think that they can’t trust the Government, so it’s better to trust for-profit financial institutions instead. After all, the banks have never fucked it up before, right?

The free market doesn’t stay free for very long without Government intervention because none of the players in said market want to participate in a free market. They want to gain control of everything and milk it for every dollar of surplus.

Yeah, and eating hot dogs also goes against human nature. That shit didn’t exist in 3,500 BCE.

POV you hid your copy of The Guy Game in your neighbour’s house

The rules of this game specify by that no external oracle is allowed.

But I understand what you’re saying. Leaving law enforcement decisions to AI is problematic in its own right, however I don’t really have the time to go into depth about that. Mostly it has to do with the fact that AI will have the same biases as the data it was trained on, and in many cases, also the subconscious biases of the people who designed or trained it.

This one’s easy.

I’ll pretend not to notice material that violates these rules coming from fascist organisations while applying them with strict scrutiny to non-fascist organisations. When someone objects, I’ll tell them to fill out a long form, wait 6-8 weeks for processing, and then after that I’ll send a warning letter to the fascist organisations telling them that they had better stop breaking the rules or else I’ll send them another letter! !I’ll challenge every source cited by the non-fascists as not independent while accepting low-quality garbage sources cited by the facists.