Based off what? The option is credit cards or crypto.
They don’t need a valve pay got crypto. They could easily accept something like USDC to accept crypto and not deal with volatility.
For credit cards all that would do is bypass the intermediaries of they directly integrated to a credit card company, and then they’d still be subject to their rules that the intermediaries claim they violate to protect MC etc from having to say it themselves. It’d solve absolutely nothing.
Also a direct integration like that is a multi billion dollar business and all the effort and expenses that would come with that without even solving the root problem.
Are you aware you can just transfer money between bank accounts, usually for free?
Much like with a credit card, you could just transfer money to Valve, which would be credited to your account, and you can then use it to buy stuff.
There’s no need for crypto anything.
That takes time (days) that people don’t want to wait to make a purchase, nor do people want to leave a balance with companies or have to worry about topping it up so they have enough to buy the next game they happen to want without waiting.
For me it takes barely even a minute. What stone age banking systems are you using?
Bank to bank transfers typically show up in under an hour in my country, and you would obviously be able to credit your account ahead of time.
Hours?? Lost of places (see EU, India, Japan) have instant transfers.
Even having to wait an hour is a fantastic way to lose a sale.
You have completely missed the entire point of the number one cryptocurrency in the world. You’ll wish you had done some research. If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.
👍
but that’s slow and realistically not an option.
Neither are cryptocurrencies for most people.
Fuck credit cards they are terrible for your finances.
Only if you’re bad with finances & don’t understand their use cases.
Even if you are good with your finances, they are still more expensive and if you use some kind of bookkeeping or budgeting software, you will have issues connecting the export.
Yes, I know of cashback, but those don’t exist everywhere and exist so you buy more to fund the consumerism going on. Which is actively hurting society.
The insurance part is nice, but often it’s not better than what you get with a normal bank card.
Creditcards in most countries will hurt your credt score because of if you are paying money to pay off a credit card you cannot use that money to pay for your mortgage.
There is also that technical benefit of having to pay later which means you can “invest” that money, but for the average joe that is an irrelevant benefit.
The only benefit to me of having one is that I can use them on American sites that don’t support other payment platforms which is most American sites (including Amazon.com, while the European brands do support Wero etc.)
You might be able to handle the responsibility of the credit card, but a lot of people don’t.
they are still more expensive and if you use some kind of bookkeeping or budgeting software
Not in the slightest (cost me 0), and I do.
cashback
Not the main selling point.
insurance part
That is a good use case: charges easier to dispute & reverse.
A normal bank card spends your real money. Disputing through a bank may take longer. Until the bank returns money to your account, that money is gone.
technical benefit That’s a use case for me: risk mitigation & flexibility to optimize returns on my savings.
Assumptions
Constantly transferring between accounts for every single transaction is inconvenient. Leaving money in the checking account isn’t ideal due to low interest earnings & risk of unauthorized debits.
Solution
The credit card is simply an instrument to allow me time & flexibility to move money I already have to pay expenses. The money is usually earning kickass interest (at least enough to beat inflation) somewhere and takes a non-instant amount of time to transfer.
Always completely pay off a credit card by the payment due date. A credit card is a shitty account to carry a debt (any non-0 balance past the due date): only dumbasses do that.
will hurt your credt score
If it works like in the US, then as long as you make mortgage & all other bill payments on time, completely pay off credit cards by payment due dates, and keep credit utilization low (at most 30% of card’s credit limit), you should be fine.
Taking out a mortgage temporarily lowers your credit score until it recovers with consistent repayments over a few months. Then the added credit mix usually improves credit scores.
Are mortgages not paid there in regular installments with due amounts like in the US?
the average joe
You don’t have an account (maybe savings) that earns better interest? You’re not saving for emergencies, retirement, or goals?
the responsibility of the credit card
It’s usually just slack time (until payment due date) to make a payment you would already make some other way.
Tinidril@midwest.social 5 weeks ago
I think the point is that Valve has the reach to start their own credit card network. It might be far fetched, but I’m old enough to remember when Sears launched the Discover card. It’s totally doable for a company that already has the technical capabilities of Valve.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
That is such a monumental task and valve only has between 350-400 employees.
Stripe has around 8500 employees, and they only integrate with credit card companies.
When sears made the discover card, they had hundreds of thousands of employees, and they didn’t need to deal with all the digital shit we gotta deal with now.
Tinidril@midwest.social 5 weeks ago
They needed hundreds of thousands of employees because they didn’t have “digital shit”. Today, the entirety of Discover Financial Services is around 21k, and probably falling.
If Valve did it, it wouldn’t be under the Valve organization anyways. It would be a subsidiary, and Valve has plenty of cash-flow to build it out.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
The digital shit is so complicated it takes a huge amount of employees. Integrations with hardware (payment terminals), banks, setting up infrastructure so others can accept your payments, automated fraud detection, digital compliance in every country they want to target, it’s huuuuuuge. Thousands of employees.
It used to be do a carbon copy of the card and send us the receipt.
Valves internal structure wouldn’t scale to that size either, and they have no experience running a company of the size that would be required in a different structure.
Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
I wonder if it would be simpler to launch a digital only credit card, IE no physical card exists? If you can load the card onto a device that supports tap to pay, that would be a very useful card.
Gigasser@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I mean…I wouldn’t mind a physical card if it looked cool and shit.