Most smaller shops use some well-known third party to handle the payments, and you can tell as you are redirected to their site when it’s time to enter your card details. Some even use Amazon Pay if that’s the only one you trust.

Ultima Underworld 1 and 2. These are ancient RPG games going right back to the dawn of PC gaming. The first one was the first PC game with a true 3D world where you could look up and down and there were two slopes rather than just steps. The control scheme takes a little getting used to as it was before WSAD+mouse look had become established. Spells are made by combining runes which you find about the place. It also has things like repairable weapons and armour, the need to sleep and eat as well as the normal RPG stats and levels.

Ooh I forgot about this. Elite force is one of the few games that I’ve actually finished. I thought the graphics were gorgeous for the time with lots of believable alien worlds. The characters are engaging and the missions never felt repetitive.

I had a similar thing in Xcom 2 (the only one I’ve played) where I kept getting alerts that I needed more relay stations to contact the resistance, or something like that. Assuming these relays were on the ground, I kept doing missions hoping to find some. Eventually I found out I needed to clear rooms in my spaceship and build them myself. By that time I was seriously behind however.

well, fiat money is issued by a central authority and its value depends entirely on the faith people have in that central authority. Compare that to monetary systems based on the gold standard, where a unit of currency has a fixed value in terms of gold. When the dollar followed the gold standard, it was technically possible to exchange dollars at the bank for a fixed amount of gold. While with fiat, you could say that the market decides how much gold one dollar is worth.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are more like gold or silver than they are dollars or euros or whatever other fiat currency. The value that gold itself has is determined by a lot of things, but ultimately it comes from its rarity. You can if you want go out into the hills and spend time and energy digging up gold. Likewise, you can if you want spend time and energy mining bitcoin. This is why people often say bitcoin is digital gold - it’s rare and it takes time and energy to find.