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Visa May Add Cryptocurrencies to Its Payments Network, Says CEO

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141–150 of 176 posts

Re: Visa May Add Cryptocurrencies to Its Payments Network, Says CEO

#141
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really the same thing. A chargeback is mediated by a trusted third party, and the merchant knows that if they are reputable and do what they're supposed to, they'll get (usually) paid. Future (possibly reversible) payments don't really give the merchant the same risk cap that a credit card authorization does.

That can be done with bitcoin too. Just send the third party the money to forward on or send back after 3 days. You can build more complex schemes where the third party can't just keep the money for themselves too.

Lots of things can be done. The fact that this is or is not technically possible with the protocol doesn't explain why precisely nobody is actually using it in this way.

Re: Visa May Add Cryptocurrencies to Its Payments Network, Says CEO

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think their rewards system is as valuable on you might think. When the cost of visa transactions are ultimately pushed to the consumer (~3%), they will eventually realize, those rewards are not worth the cost. Off course, this will probably take some time. But in my opinion, Visa's moat is thin and mostly reliant on the behavior of their users. For US, I expect Visa to still be dominant, but not so much in ot…

Visanet takes 0.1-0.2%, the rest goes to issuing banks to handle loyalty programs and loan origination and servicing. The value to merchants is a roughly 20% increase in average ticket size for card transactions, not having to handle risks associated with cash and crypto (theft and fraud respectively). For what it’s worth the bulk of the spread between processing fees and origination is returned to customers in North…

> I’m not sure off hand but I believe Australia has interchange caps too.

Australia had interchange caps since around 2006, with several subsequent changes forcing the rates even lower.

I was head of portfolio management for one of the big Aussie credit card companies at the time. Lower interchange fundamentally changed how loyalty products got funded. Annual fees for rewards programs had to be increased. The benefits were cut. High spenders were encouraged to move to products which still attracted higher interchange, etc, etc.

Re: Visa May Add Cryptocurrencies to Its Payments Network, Says CEO

#144
post #112

Have you used cryptocurrency for payments lately? Unless you want to pay $25 to wait 6 hours while your transaction is confirming, stick to venmo/zelle/paypal/etc... Unless, of course, you use places like Coinbase that pool transactions or bypass the network altogether, but then... what's the point of cryptocurrency?

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Re: Visa May Add Cryptocurrencies to Its Payments Network, Says CEO

#145
post #68

Cryptocurrency continues to gain more ground but I still have my reservations about it being the currency of the future. If by design, cryptocurrency has a finite volume of transferrable currency, do early adopters have an unfair advantage that could potentially make the currency unusable? I don’t see how it could possibly be fair when earlier mining yielded currency more quickly.

Isn't that true of everything? If you were an early adopter of America you could get free land that today could be worth hundreds of millions.

That's a valid analogy but also on a much longer time frame. Bitcoin increased in value orders of magnitude quicker than the value of land in the US. If somebody who bought a house 5 years ago was selling it for 100 times today, you bet your ass people would be mad.

Re: Visa May Add Cryptocurrencies to Its Payments Network, Says CEO

#146
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Miners will refuse to accept a transaction which conflicts with the one they saw much earlier. At the very least there's no guarantee of that. If you send a conflicting transaction with a higher fee, a miner should (rationally) discard the older one. And last I checked (Ethereum, a few years ago), that was indeed what they were doing.

With Bitcoin you have to enable the "replace by fee" flag on a transaction to allow that. Merchants could check transactions for if it is set. If miners did change their Bitcoin nodes to facilitate double spending even with RBF disabled, that would erode trust in Bitcoin and thereby de-valuate it, which is probably not in the interest of miners. They'd damage the thing they're heavily invested in.

There's probably a tragedy of the commons situation there though.

Re: Visa May Add Cryptocurrencies to Its Payments Network, Says CEO

#147
post #132

I wonder if this is one of these dot-com bubble-esque articles that we'll look back on and think, "What an interesting time."

People have been expressing that sentiment for nearly 10 years. At what point do you accept that you were shortsighted? 20 years?

Honestly, ten years ago was a better time for cryptocurrency as a currency. You could use it to pay for pizzas, there were online casinos, even some businesses selling actual hosting accepted it as a matter of course. Right now, it's this weird speculative asset that lots of people are interested in trading on, because it's a well-traded asset, but there seems to be zero interest in any of the fundamental principles of decentralization or divergence from fiat. Even longstanding businesses accepting it as a currency have stopped. It's closer to digital beanie babies than any sort of serious currency.

Re: Visa May Add Cryptocurrencies to Its Payments Network, Says CEO

#148
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't even make sense. For a start governments don't earn money. Secondly, a managed currency controlled by a central bank under the control of a democratic government is a good thing.

> For a start governments don't earn money. Build infrastructure = provide a service. Get paid taxes for usage of said infrastructure = earn money for properly providing a service. > Secondly, a managed currency controlled by a central bank under the control of a democratic government is a good thing. That is a tautology, you merely rephrased the claim without providing any argument.

> Get paid taxes for usage of said infrastructure = earn money for properly providing a service.

Taxes and provision of services are completely separated. Citizen did not get their money back when schools closed because of the pandemic.

Re: Visa May Add Cryptocurrencies to Its Payments Network, Says CEO

#149
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been expressing that sentiment for nearly 10 years. At what point do you accept that you were shortsighted? 20 years?

Honestly, ten years ago was a better time for cryptocurrency as a currency. You could use it to pay for pizzas, there were online casinos, even some businesses selling actual hosting accepted it as a matter of course. Right now, it's this weird speculative asset that lots of people are interested in trading on, because it's a well-traded asset, but there seems to be zero interest in any of the fundamental principles…

> It's closer to digital beanie babies than any sort of serious currency.

And then he flushed any possibility for a good faith argument away. What, are keeping your powder dry on the tulip mania line? I'm long past the evangelical phase on bitcoin, but back when I was doing that (when it was trading in the double digits) - I heard the exact same thing. Merchants would adopt and then quickly abandon, money transmitters would welcome and then ban... and banks would just ban. I was de-banked before it was cool. I mourn the opening of crypto trade desks at the likes of Goldman Sachs more than most, because my first exposure to bitcoin was on the cypherpunks mailing list, but that doesn't mean that bitcoin failed. The comparison to beanie babies is laughably moronic.

Re: Visa May Add Cryptocurrencies to Its Payments Network, Says CEO

#150
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason that limited supply need be an inherent mechanism to a crypto currency.

Yeah, I'm sure people would be happy to transact in a crypto with 1000% inflation \s

Historically people have been willing to use currencies with inflation like the US Dollar. The point is that any government could build a out a crypto version of their currency if they so wished and have the same inflation policies they use with paper money. The crypto part doesn't imply a specific monetary policy. Crypto just means you can use it peer to peer over the Internet without an intermediary.
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