Bank transfers as a payment method

It's a no-brainer. Card processing fees are just too high (2.9% + $0.3).

Account transfers bring more flexibility and convenience and costs almost nothing.

This is all great if the currency between the buying and business is the same (ie, USD to USD), but still does not fix transactions between entities of different currency types.

In my opinion, this is where cryptocurrency as a payment method for B2B, B2C will shine. No more dealing with foreign transaction fees and conversion fees. Plus the added benefit of not converting your money into an unstable currency (ie, Turkish Lira)

UPI can potentially be scaled to all countries. I think the biggest USP of UPI is the interoperability between payment apps(Google Pay, Paytm, PhonePe, etc), VPAs(alice@icici, bob@axis, dan@upi, 9848123456@paytm) and banks. One could have an account with bank A, create a VPA with bank B and use that VPA to pay a business through virtually any of the payment apps(GPay, Paytm, PhonePe, BHIM, etc). The main pain point UPI addresses is instant transfer, zero cost transfer irrespective of transaction size and removal of friction due to credential exchange. NPCI (the creators of UPI) are already in talks with the UAE and other neighbouring countries to build a cross nation interoperable payment stack. Since no player in the entire stack can charge a service fee, the way that payment apps have monetized UPI is by acquiring customers through payments and selling value added services like insurance, prepaid mobile recharges and mutual funds/ETFs. Interoperability allows for balancing and decentralisation of network load across multiple providers, making transactions less likely to fail. Also cross border exchange is another problem that is still unsolved. Maybe a UPI backed approach to real-time currency transfers is a pipe dream but in a ideal world every transaction, irrespective of point of origin, size or currency would be as seamless as an UPI transaction.

On a side note, I wonder if something like this could be built in the web3 space. A totally decentralised public blockchain implementation of the payment network using UPI-esque interoperability between payment providers and banks.

If it could work, it would have worked three decades ago. Bank transfers are just a pain in the ass. I still remember all the fees I paid just to transfer money to another bank/another country.

Cryptocurrency was considered a way to simplify the problem, but probably didn’t work in this aspect

Allowing site owners to declare zero-karma could nullify the market pressure. The site owner would be saying “let people post my stuff, but don’t give them any karma for it”:

    $ curl https://example.com/.well-known/hn.txt
    Nokarma: /

That could have a side effect of promoting commentary blogspam about the original post instead but dang et al are pretty quick to swap out those links for links to the original material, which would then pick up zero karma.