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

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

#341

Post by Nextgrid »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #316
azthecx wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Portugal like many European banks already has a working solution to this for 20 years where you can create temporary card numbers and use that instead or, as of late, pay directly through an app that enables this same behaviour. The Netherlands had a similar system where they used physical totp (I believe) terminals which generated them from your bank card + pin, completely offline. Nowadays everyone uses iDEAL ident…

We have had this in the US too for at least a decade, people just don't use them, probably because of convenience.

Unless you can cap the amount it’s indeed pretty useless. Most systems like this that I’ve heard of do not allow you to do that.

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

#342

Post by aguaviva »

Muromec wrote: post #236
aguaviva wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their tech is years ahead of US. Can you elaborate? (Am new to the topic, so your perspective would be appreciated).

Let’s just say I get an iPhone notification when the court case in which I’m a party had a hearing sceduled. And if I want to write a petition in this case, I log into the web portal, write it down, click send and blink into the app twice to Electronically sign it. Which produces your normal CMS ( pkcs#7 ) signature on a pdf file. It’s also not a special court app for a specific locality, but a nation wide government…

Would this be the єСуд app, then?

That's certainly an interesting use case. And yes, difficult to see being pulled off anywhere in the US, the way it tumbles along with such things.

Re: paper checks: they're far from bullshit -- being time-tested, perfectly easy to use, and best of all, not requiring a device of any kind. Provided, as concerns ease of use, one has spent enough time in an environment where their use is ubiquitous. So I can certainly see they might appear as a nuisance or just weird at first, for the rest of the world).

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

#343

Post by Workaccount2 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #341
Workaccount2 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have had this in the US too for at least a decade, people just don't use them, probably because of convenience.

Unless you can cap the amount it’s indeed pretty useless. Most systems like this that I’ve heard of do not allow you to do that.

With citi bank I can cap the amount and set the expiration.

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

#344

Post by digitcatphd »

Most of these fees go to the banks for using their cards, with the exception of PayPal. As a merchant I fucking hate PayPal, but you need to accept it since users are accustomed to it. They own the distribution channels which is convenience and habit from the consumer. Fraud doesn’t impact them and most have minimal to no real preventative methods in place, again this is the card company not the merchant processor filing disputes. Venmo already did this getting the furthest and still couldn’t overthrow the empire. The amount of funding you would need without a revenue model would force you into this model anyway so you would end up with the same business model. So no. Probably not.

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

#345

Post by EasyMark »

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…

I would never recommend anything as volatile as crypto for a payment system.

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

#346

Post by immibis »

immibis wrote: post #266
l3x4ur1n wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know from where you are, but in my country this is considered generally a bad or not safe idea. When you send money directly to someone, if they are fraudsters, it is very hard to get that money back. On the other hand, it's generally easier when you paid with your debit card. And even easier and safer if it was a credit card.

The victim is identifiable by their bank and therefore traceable by the law enforcement agencies. If they're fraudulent, men with uniforms and guns come to their house and put them in jail. It's a clever system, really.

I meant to say the recipient, obviously.

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

#347

Post by mgraczyk »

fragmede wrote: post #275
mgraczyk wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason Facebook is printing money and X is not making any (and essentially never has). It's actually not the user generated content that primarily matters for ad revenue. Time spent on the site is necessary but not sufficient

> essentially never has Twitter generated $3.4 billion in revenue in 2023. That's a helluva money printing machine. About a fourth the size of Facebook's. I don't know how big yours is, but thats bigger than mine. The problem is that, even with such a big money printing machine, if it costs more to operate than it spits out, you don't make money. Twitters problem wasn't getting money, they were getting huge piles of…

By "making money" I mean profit. If you add up only Twitter's good quarters prior to Musk, it's less in total than Meta made in a single quarter in 2016, or roughly 1 month in 2024.

Put another way, Meta makes more profit in a week than Twitter was making per quarter at its best

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

#348

Post by [deleted] »

jahabrewer wrote: post #213
abeppu wrote: post #111

You're naming these companies that facilitate money moving in specific ways, but you could also zoom out and include a lot of banking which either serves to move money between parties or across space or time. So I guess one question is: as credit unions are to banks, what missing organization type needs to exist as a counterpoint to payment services, which could return excess to owner-users?

I'm a credit union member and... idk I've become disillusioned. Their products and rates are consistently worse than national banks. I won't feel like I'm sharing in anything. The execs seem to get good comp though.

[deleted]

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

#349

Post by plokiju »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #17
jppope wrote: post #15

This was something that was supposed to be solved by the original internet they just never got around to it. You are not wrong though... the issue as many people pointed out is that you are focusing on the transactions. The problem these companies solve isn't just the transaction network - their values is primarily how they deal with fraud, governance, currency conversions, etc.

Who is "they" in that sentence?

the elders of the internet

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

#350

Post by jpmoral »

fragmede wrote: post #276
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are solutions to this problem that don’t involve crypto.

they all have their own problems, which leaves us in the same place. there's no practical way for the masses to give me 10 cents.

In many countries you can send 10 cents fee-free and real-time.
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