Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?

Post by kinakomochidayo » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 6:52 AM UTC

hugs wrote: post #172

Nextgrid wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the fraud hinges on the fact that all you need to drain an account is a static card number. A lot of hacks are subsequently piled on top of that to try and make it harder (SCA/3D Secure, captchas, etc), and a lot of busywork is spent tidying up the consequences of that (chargeback handling, etc). You could eliminate a lot of the fraud by moving off a mostly-static identifier to merchant, amount and time-limi…

> You could eliminate a lot of the fraud by moving off a mostly-static identifier to merchant, amount and time-limited tokens the user generates with their bank (or the merchant redirects them there). This would address a lot of the issues - the tokens are useless when leaked... This almost sounds like a subtle recommendation for the Lightning Network. It's based on single-use invoices that are locked to a specific r…

Post by konschubert » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 7:28 AM UTC

jahabrewer wrote: post #212

konschubert wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a merchant myself, I sell e-paper calendars. Last year I paid about 4% of my revenue for transaction costs in various shapes. That’s very roughly 20% of my margin. (!) Some of these are hidden as very bad, but non-optional, currency conversions. The hard one here is acceptance by customers. No merchant wants to clutter their checkout page with a button that nobody understands. Or worse, have customers get trapped…

Another way to think about this is in terms of how many marginal customers you get from being able to accept payments over the Web. 4% starts sounding less bad

Post by nasmorn » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 7:42 AM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #231

CyanLite4 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is no different than chip+pin for physical purchases. There are still other major areas of fraud that has to be addressed. It doesn’t cover credit risk-even on a debit card, there can be a “hold” period of an arbitrary amount before the final transaction clears. When you swipe a card at a gas station, they often run a $50 authorization hold on your account. It also doesn’t cover merchant fraud—- Visa/MC covers y…

> When you swipe a card at a gas station, they often run a $50 authorization hold on your account. Safeway gas stations upgraded their pumps to have tap-to-pay. But with increasing gas prices (and not getting into that), they upped the auth hold to up to $125. Except many card issuers limit contactless payments to $100... rendering tap to pay useless on the pump because it'll deny the preauth and require chip inserti…

Post by fsflover » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 7:55 AM UTC

Post by _w1tm » Sun, Aug 18, 2024, 8:26 AM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #231

CyanLite4 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is no different than chip+pin for physical purchases. There are still other major areas of fraud that has to be addressed. It doesn’t cover credit risk-even on a debit card, there can be a “hold” period of an arbitrary amount before the final transaction clears. When you swipe a card at a gas station, they often run a $50 authorization hold on your account. It also doesn’t cover merchant fraud—- Visa/MC covers y…

> When you swipe a card at a gas station, they often run a $50 authorization hold on your account. Safeway gas stations upgraded their pumps to have tap-to-pay. But with increasing gas prices (and not getting into that), they upped the auth hold to up to $125. Except many card issuers limit contactless payments to $100... rendering tap to pay useless on the pump because it'll deny the preauth and require chip inserti…