Thread

1. havaloc · 1790442549 · focus · HN ↗

   I get why the banks are not happy, but I can tell them that I am not going to use Chase Wallet, Bank of America Wallet, Citi Wallet...just pay the fee and be thankful for the reduced payment friction, which they invariably make money from. PS: Nobody is going to use Paze (yet another half baked wallet), other than to collect the free $10 to sign up for it.

   Somewhat related, even Walmart relented and now supports Apple Pay/Contactless. Every big merchant has now relented (Kroger, Home Depot, Walmart).

   1. radialstub · 1790448131 · focus · HN ↗

      This is the government's problem. I tend to be on the side of less government, but it is so obvious that payment facilitation should be a service provided by the government. The government is just allowing corporations to collect rents, because they are lazy and incompetent.

      1. AnthonyMouse · 1790455278 · focus · HN ↗

         This is fundamentally looking at it the wrong way.

         Why do we need my bank to send money to your bank via Visa or the Federal Reserve or any such thing, instead of having my bank send money directly to your bank? All they need to do is both support the same openly specified protocol for transferring money.

         1. rietta · 1790457284 · focus · HN ↗

            We used to call those checks!
         2. havaloc · 1790457930 · focus · HN ↗

            Listen to the Visa episode of The Acquired Podcast, and you'll change your mind.

            1. AnthonyMouse · 1790494886 · focus · HN ↗

               If you have an open standard decentralized protocol that banks are required to support, that's the network effect solved. Merchants and anyone making the software that merchants use would want to support it because you're getting rid of Visa's fees.
         3. owebmaster · 1790464516 · focus · HN ↗

            That's what Brazilian pix does and the reason visa/Mastercard and the US government want to kill it

            1. hdgvhicv · 1790472573 · focus · HN ↗

               Most counties have such a system, many are more advanced than visa etc (seemless customer-customer payments too for example.

               From NETs in singapore to girocard in Germany, Alipay to UPI.

               1. ValentineC · 1790520150 · focus · HN ↗

                  > From NETs in singapore to girocard in Germany, Alipay to UPI.

                  Singaporean here. NETS is a shitshow of a dinosaur trying to stay relevant. They started as more of a debit card system like EFTPOS [1], but now lean more into merchant acceptance for both credit cards and QR codes. (Singapore is huge about credit card rewards, so few people want to use a debit card with PIN entry and no rewards these days.)

                  I think the problem with them, and many companies that focus solely on a tiny market like Singapore, is that their organisations tend to be full of comfortable dinosaurs that don't stay up to date with financial software engineering practices (I've lost money from government site transactions that were a hassle to get back), and there's a captive market because of their duopoly.

                  The biggest reasons they still exist are because they're a joint venture between the big 3 local banks, and our government likes their initiatives to have some competition to emulate a free market.

                  Pix, from its Wikipedia page, sounds like a bank account aliasing system, just like PayNow in Singapore.

                  [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;EFTPOS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;EFTPOS

         4. SkiFire13 · 1790494336 · focus · HN ↗

            See &quot;What do Visa and Mastercard do?&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49614280">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49614280

            It&#x27;s not something irreplaceable but it&#x27;s not trivial either.

            1. AnthonyMouse · 1790530019 · focus · HN ↗

               The &quot;network&quot; part of what they do could straightforwardly be done in a decentralized way using ordinary DNS (for the parties to discover the servers of the others) and TLS. When your card issuer is Example Bank then your &quot;card number&quot; would be 123@example.com and the merchant or their bank knows to contact the servers at example.com to initiate a transaction for that card.

               It seems like the primary thing they actually do is currency conversion, which a) isn&#x27;t strictly required (e.g. plenty of small US merchants might hardly notice if they only accepted payment in US dollars), and b) could just as easily be transparently provided as an optional service by either of the card issuing bank or the merchant bank for cardholders or merchants who expect a non-trivial number of foreign currency transactions.

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