If your Steam account is nine years old, it now [edit to add: should] auto verify.
Doesn’t do me any good, my account is just shy of six years old, and my MC debit card still doesn’t work. I’ll be 60 before it auto verifies unless my debit card magically starts working.
There must be some under 18s whose parents got them a steam account nine years ago who are now verified.
That works with very small and unimportant countries, but Australia has already shown that they are somehow influential enough that MasterCard and visa threaten storefronts for them. It was barely a year ago that steam and itch were forced to temporarily unlist ero games or loose access to most payment providers.
Great way to get into a giant legal battle. Valve isn’t a piracy site owner that can just pack up and run away into a different jurisdiction. They will be brought to court with no way of winning this.
Not to mention that crypto is atrocious to do business with. Even the more stable coins are volatile enough that most of them would require dynamic pricing. And it also doesn’t remove the need for age verification since all non-shady/illegal exchanges require your full identity.
Valve is one of the most customer oriented companies out there (for now), but expecting them to fight a global censorship movement and essentially becoming an underground black market on the deep web is beyond stupid. The only companies nearly influential enough to do anything against that would be Alphabet (Google) or Microsoft.