531–540 of 547 posts
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Uhh my bank’s $30 to wire fee would beg to differ. Literally any fee less than that for a same-day transfer is worth it.
That’s what the banks pay to use zelle. The $30 wire fee is what a bank charges you to make money and dependent on the bank. Underlying systems near free to use like ach for domestic wires.
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> Paying by card is common, paying using a Credit Card not necessarily. Care to expand on that?
Here are the statistics for Denmark. "International Credit Card" are a small fraction of the total -- under 5%. The vast majority of transactions by number and value are by debit card. (The national/international distinction is between Dankort, the Danish card payment system only used on most debit cards here, and the foreign companies like Visa and MasterCard.) https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/penge-og-kapitalm…
(For international readers, in Denmark, unlike Germany, the national debit card can be combined with a credit card on one card and then the terminal just chooses automatically)
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You're forgetting the percentages are on top of a ~$0.30 flat fee (though obviously this varies). So if you buy a $2 Coke, it's not a $0.054 fee (2.7%), it's $0.354 (or a whopping 17.7%). Maybe my dentist evades a few taxes, I dunno. But people buy cheap things at the bodega, so it probably is closer to the actual fees.
If the merchant doesn't offer the same cash discount for debit cards, then it's tax evasion. Debit card fees are a few cents, and the only reason to offer a big discount for cash, but not debit cards, is to not have the transaction on paper and hence evade taxes.
This isn't the full picture. Debit card transactions might only be a few cents. But you still have to pay a fixed cost for the machine and related bits. For some businesses, that cost might be too high to justify.
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The article (particularly the linked tweet) somewhat addresses your point: Amex and Discover may offer a superficial degree of competition for consumers , but banks have to obey Mastercard and Visa's rules even when it comes to offering bank accounts to merchants, otherwise they (and therefore all their other account holders) can't participate in the 80% of card transactions that are on the Mastercard and Visa networ…
I have seen many stories of legal and legitimate businesses for things like weed (legal in the stores location) and legal porn sites getting their merchant accounts shut down because the payment processors just don't want them to deal with it leaving cash as the only option.
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If the merchant doesn't offer the same cash discount for debit cards, then it's tax evasion. Debit card fees are a few cents, and the only reason to offer a big discount for cash, but not debit cards, is to not have the transaction on paper and hence evade taxes.
I don't think that "tax evasion" is a fair assessment. This isn't the full picture. Debit card transactions might only be a few cents. But you still have to pay a fixed cost for the machine and related bits. For some businesses, that cost might be too high to justify.
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> very impersonal, only-the-numbers-and-ROI matters. What would be a more personal approach when figuring out whether or not to loan the money to someone?
Deciding to lend to someone because you know them (they are "part of the community"), or they are a friend, or they are family. Of course it can be seen as more "humane" but it can also be seen as nepotism and/or a system excluding newcommers/strangers.
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are you retarded? you can literally can pay with cash, or you know, a DEBIT card.
We've warned you before about personal attacks, so I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't get it -- Amex and Discover are still providing healthy competition, so the "duopoly" the author complains about seems to be largely irrelevant. Competition between cards is thriving and consumers benefit -- witness the miniscule transaction fee the credit card companies keep after paying your rewards back of 2% to 5%, when you pay your bill on time. The article's main point is that such large companies are a…
The article (particularly the linked tweet) somewhat addresses your point: Amex and Discover may offer a superficial degree of competition for consumers , but banks have to obey Mastercard and Visa's rules even when it comes to offering bank accounts to merchants, otherwise they (and therefore all their other account holders) can't participate in the 80% of card transactions that are on the Mastercard and Visa networ…
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> mainstream-ization of the crypto currencies And modern Tendermint[1]/Cosmos SDK-based chains or Solana are basically distributed databases, using consensus models similar to Raft, except with byzantine fault tolerance and Proof of Stake for leader selection. No mining, no forks, finality within seconds, large throughput. Pretty boring, actually, with little hype surrounding it - it just works, like a regular databa…
Does raft work when people are trying to attack it? My understanding of it in its normal application is fuzzy enough.
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>In the US, interchange fees are extremely inflated to allow banks to recuperate the rewards they give out to distinguish their card offerings from one another. The 2% cashback has to come from somewhere. And that's a bad thing, because it's essentially the poor subsidizing the rich. People who aren't able to get credit cards (or the "good" cash back credit cards) tend to be worse off financially than people who do.
I think that's an oversimplification, because credit transactions tend to be 20%+ higher ticket sizes than cash purchases. In a way, the credit card surcharge baked in is something of a volume purchasing incentive. Further, the networks do explicitly permit cash discounts on card transactions, and always have. Merchants tend not to offer them, though.