Nibodhika

Steam remembers my card, so I don't have to input it there everytime. I get that you wouldn't want to put your card info somewhere shady, but Steam is not that. Also, most banks nowadays have virtual cards you can use for that sort of thing, some even have one use cards that self destroy after a single purchase. So the safety that PayPal used to offer is not that important anymore.

It's not though, in the current system everything must go through those shitty companies, so they can dictate anything, and if Steam disobeys they essentially block them from receiving money, and it's impossible to jump ships because creating a competition is essentially impossible, no one will be able to handle the Volume of Valve's transactions and it needs to be all done by one entity. Ñ

In the system I'm describing once you're in the crypto space no one can dictate anything. The same people could try to act as gatekeepers, but it's almost impossible because anyone with Ethereum can sell them to you, so if an exchange threatens to not buy Ethereum from Valve they can simply go to any other exchange, hell, they themselves could sell Ethereum to users who would then use the Ethereum to buy games returning the Ethereum to Valve to be sold again, and if not anyone with enough capital can start an exchange selling Ethereum to users and buying it from Valve, even with small initial capital you would likely grow very quickly doing this. And the best part is that Valve can sell their Ethereum to different exchanges in any ratio they want to, so it's essentially impossible for one of them to dictate anything because 1 big exchange can be replaced by 10 smaller ones in a heartbeat without any disruption to the system.

So? Just use another exchange, that's the same as saying paper money is bad because pawn shops might ban specific users.

You're thinking on a very narrow definition of a contract, here's a simple contract example that's currently being censored and wouldn't be censorable on Blockchain: Buy NSFW games.

A simple contract could sell you NFTs for game keys that could be redeemed on Steam/Itch/GoG or even the own dev site. So there's no middleman who could oppose this transaction and say which sort of games can or can't be sold. This whole thing would be completely automated, secure for every part and non-censorable.

You're hearing contracts and thinking on paper legal documents, whereas smart contracts usually refer to programs acting on tokens, the code that acts on those tokens is the contract, in the example above the generation and transfer of the tokens would be the contract.

If Steam still accepted Bitcoin they could use that, unfortunately Bitcoin has been crippled and has been unusable as a currency for years (which is why Steam removed it from the store). No one but Steam and the end user could censor what gets bought, so it's a problem that it's literally impossible to happen with cryptocurrency as money, that is exactly the problem they solve, except people usually don't care about this problem so they think it doesn't solve anything.

Ah, if that's the case then MC statement is kind of pointless, so it's not them putting the pressure, but you still have to go through the people putting the pressure to get to them. I thought that if you put your card number on steam it had some more direct form of charging than going through stripe.

Why less certainty? It's more certain and less censorable than any other digital payment method.

I'll give you a couple examples of use cases for Blockchain technology that no other technology solves.

As currency:

• Payment system without content restrictions. You might say "But MasterCard said they're not blocking it", but they could, they could pressure Valve into removing other games, or something similar. Such a thing is impossible in Blockchain, there's no single owner that can impose limits to what you can/can't buy with it.
• International transactions without restrictions. We talked about how payment processors can stop transactions, banks and governments can do the same and while they use this power less often it's still generally a pain in the ass to move money from one country to another.

As smart contracts:

• International car ownership deeds. In most countries car ownership has to be registered into the DMV equivalent, this means that moving a car from one country to another is problematic. A smart contract ledger would be an excellent solution to this, countries could use the ledger to transfer ownership and that transfer would be understood by any country that already uses the same ledger as a source of truth, without any of the countries having to trust in the systems built by the other countries.
• Something similar for phones could also include known stolen IMEI numbers that can be blocked internationally without any regulatory organization needing to trust one another or rely in a centralized controlling agency.

If this is true then I honestly hope Steam and Itch go "ok, then, PayPal and Stripe are banned from the store as payment forms until we can figure out a way of limiting content you can pay with them". Honestly I don't think enough people use either of those payments forms, and even if they do currently they almost assuredly have a card they can use instead, and are more likely to switch payment methods than to stop buying games.

The most first world problem I ever experienced was years ago, some games show tips and info during load screens, well my new computer was loading the games faster than I was able to read the tips, the moment I voiced my complaint about it I knew it was the most first world problem I would ever experience.

Yes it is. I mean, you should be able to do it later, but if you have to ask how it might be better not to risk it since that would involve resizing your root partition. If however you have a secondary disk you want to use for it it's just a matter of adding a new entry to /etc/fstab (which the UI installer in Mint and others allows you to do with a nice UI instead of having to write the file manually). Although bear in mind that mounting a disk on top of an existing folder will mask the contents of the folder, so you won't be able to access the files that were there before. Long story short you can move the files over to the new disk first, them add the fstab entry and it should work, for future installations you can set this during the installer, same way you create a different partition for /boot, in Linux partitions are mounted to folders and they work as if they were in that location for all intents and purposes.

I know you want to move away from Windows, but trying to choose something completely different might be a bad idea, you're already unfamiliar with the system also being unfamiliar with the way to interact with stuff might be a bit too much. That being said I don't think any of the largest DE mentioned would be a problem, so look at pictures and choose on what you think looks best.

As for distro lots of people recommend Mint and I'll back that up, although I haven't used it in years it was my go to distro to give new users as it was very plug and play.

And the two recommendations I always give new users are:

• Keep / and /home in separate partitions, this allows you to format your system, change distro, or whatever without losing your personal files.

• As much as possible use the package manager, googling a program and downloading an installer is 99% of the time the wrong way to install stuff and a major cause of problems for new users.