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Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

economist.com

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Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#201

Post by tossl568 »

odrekf wrote: post #184
tossl568 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to take a group of scammer's twisted, false interpretation of a v0.0.1 Bitcoin whitepaper as the absolute final Gospel truth and something which you put faith in regarding your money then you're going to have a really bad time. > it's actually being used as cash in the real world (unlike BTC) Simply not true, on both counts. Sorry.

So your only arguments are denials and ad hominems. Got it.

Still waiting on that evidence that Bitcoin hasn't had 100% uptime since the fork and that one node took down the entire Lightning network. Come up with some evidence that BCH is being used anywhere while you're at it.

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#202

Post by aidenn0 »

kelnos wrote: post #138
aidenn0 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If checking accounts get debit-only RTNs for cheap/free, this could potentially catch on. $0.06 per transaction with $25/month subscription fee is incredibly cheap, plus no chargebacks! Biggest issue I see is that the larger banks might not offer this to their customers so as to not cannibalize their credit card businesses and/or in-house payment system.

> $25/month subscription fee is incredibly cheap Cheap?! That's $300/yr, and is more expensive than most credit card annual fees (for cards that even have annual fees). And with FedNow you don't get any credit card benefits. I mean, I pay $550/yr for one of my credit cards, but I get like $2k of value out of it per year in benefits. Why would I want to pay $300/yr for something that lets me do something I can already…

The way I read it is that $25 per month is only for RTNs that can receive credits. If you just want to pay for things (like a credit card) then you don't need to pay any subscription fee.

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#203

Post by mchusma »

philip1209 wrote: post #49

Fraud protection of credit cards is the root of modern e-commerce. In some ways, Visa and Mastercard are the privatized court systems of the internet. If I end up on a random, self-hosted ecommerce site and decide to make a purchase - what guarantee do I have that the item will show up or be as-described? If I bought something through a bank transfer, reversing that purchase would be incredibly difficult. And, suing…

I am an online merchant. The visa Mastercard fees are enormously high, so not. We are not "happy to pay it". The 3% is not to cover any consumer protection, that cost is born by the merchants. When a dispute is made by a customer, the merchant is assessed a fee, and almost always loses the dispute. The fees are so high that credit card companies give extremely high rewards back, which is in effect a regressive tax.

In addition, visa Mastercard can cut off any business from doing commerce, and often do for political reasons.

A much better system is one with: - extreme low fees (like 0.1%) - consumers can dispute anything within x days and merchants have to issue a refund. No administration. - any merchant with a bank account can use it (or similarly broadly available)

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#204

Post by mcv »

julienb_sea wrote: post #136
cycomanic wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As your post illustrates credit cards are really a solution developped for the deficiencies in the US banking system which have been exported to the rest of the world due to the dominance of the US market. 20 years when I was still living in Germany, hardly anyone had a credit card, while everyone was using automatic payments and electronic wiretransfers. I was very surprised when later (about 13 years ago) a US frie…

The benefit of credit cards is no one can literally drain your bank account via fraudulent access to a payment card directly tied to your bank (i.e. debit card in US nomenclature). This is a clear benefit regardless of location. Courts are slow and not scalable, and you don't want to be in a scenario where your bank has been drained right before you need to make important payments.

No one can drain ky bank account through my payment card either. For one, they lack the authorisation to do so, and for another, there's a limit (which I can change) to how much can be transferred per day.

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#205

Post by carstenhag »

therealmarv wrote: post #91

European Union solved big part of the problem many years ago in 2015 with a new law. They capped the fees of Visa and Mastercard at max. 0.3% of the transaction volume on private consumer cards. It has many upsides (especially increased acceptance). The only downside: There are no real or good cashback programs (like getting 1-2% back) in Europe because of this.

Interchange yes, but that's only a small part of the price. Companies still have to pay 1-3%.

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#206

Post by marcodiego »

reaperducer wrote: post #25
10g1k wrote: post #6

1.4 billion people in China use WeChat to pay for everything. They don't even bother with credit cards.

Fortunately, phones never get lost. Or broken. Or stolen. Or discharge. Or malfunction. Or lock people out for no good reason. I can put a $100 bill through the washing machine and it's still perfectly usable. When I can do that with a phone, maybe I'll switch. I ran a credit card through the washer and dryer last month, and even though it got bent, and the stripe doesn't work anymore, the chip does. And the numbers…

> E-wallets are putting your finances into a single point of failure. Tech people should know better.

Actually, multiple single points of failure.

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#207

Post by tossl568 »

cowtools wrote: post #168
tossl568 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has better scalability if you don't care about decentralisation whatsoever and that it's possible that everyone can store a copy of everyone's else's coffee transactions in perpetuity. It's not possible without huge, expensive to run servers, which is why nobody runs a BCH node. Uptime? By what metric? Bitcoin, the real one, has 100% uptime since the fork. The entire LN did not "go down the other day due to one ba…

>It has better scalability if you don't care about decentralisation whatsoever That is not true by any meaningful use of the word "decentralization". The LN system is markedly worse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbD0kiTddEs >If you're a sockpuppet then nobody is buying it sorry, your coin is dead. If you are concerned about sock-puppet shills, don't be: I have never owned BCH, BTC or any other bitcoin variant and…

> Good cryptocurrencies (like cryptonote, zerocoin, etc.)

Ah, you've got shitcoins to hawk.

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#208

Post by makeitdouble »

philip1209 wrote: post #114
makeitdouble wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To note, all of these work on PayPal, with a bank account. PayPal are a dick on fraudulent merchant account detection and it’s well know assets can be frozen on a whim, but at this point it’s the one of the few other options.

Lower fees matter most for low-margin businesses. If your business has 5% margins, then taking your payment processing fees from 3% to 1% is transformative for your profits. The reality is that most low-margin B2C businesses are brick and mortar service-based businesses, such as restaurants. And, therein lies the problem for Paypal and for crypto payments: The low-margin businesses that care about CC fees are not ear…

Yes. There is a huge divide between online and offline.

For online your choice is to poney up the fee or not get paid at all. You’ll also probably target a wider audience and region restricted payment networks become less viable.

Offline credit cards processing currently has super low fees, but it’s also a field where there is already way more competition than VISA/Mastercard, in particular there will be national card networks, and prepaid NFC that rise up as an alternative.

> Restaurants can't conceivably introduce a non-traditional payment network as their exclusive provider.

In my experience they do. They always have cash as the fallback, so they can pick and choose more freely than other businesses (think of all the restaurants that won’t accept anything other than cash)

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#209

Post by searchableguy »

nixass wrote: post #121
cycomanic wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As your post illustrates credit cards are really a solution developped for the deficiencies in the US banking system which have been exported to the rest of the world due to the dominance of the US market. 20 years when I was still living in Germany, hardly anyone had a credit card, while everyone was using automatic payments and electronic wiretransfers. I was very surprised when later (about 13 years ago) a US frie…

Why would I use credit card at all? Sure it does help when traveling but not much use for it otherwise

Predictability in cash flow and free rewards in India. Most places do not charge extra for credit cards and nor do you pay annual credit card fee in most cases.

It's an interest free loan for upto 45 days. Many banks will provide 3.5 - 6% interest without risk. If you spend a lot monthly, it's a free nice dinner every month without doing anything. If you can use the capital, it can be worth more.

They provide free lounge access and food at airport + concierge service for discounted bookings at hotels.

Chargeback protection is necessary in India.

Re: Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

#210

Post by xenadu02 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #58
sytelus wrote: post #23

I still haven't understood why credit cards companies need to go through this complex multi-hop "settlement" pipeline that takes almost a day for transactions to get "processed". Is it because some banks still depend on mainframes doing batch processing?

> Is it because some banks still depend on mainframes doing batch processing? Pretty much all banks use mainframes to do batch processing. "SFTP runs the world". I got heavy into fintech a couple years ago, and at first I thought "This is all insane." I was coming from a SaaS world where it's easy to think about transactional guarantees with API calls. I finally "got it" when I realized that pretty much all of our fi…

Indeed; check settlement used to be small planes flying the checks to the nearest Federal Reserve every night where all the checks from all member banks would be reconciled and money transferred from the bank where the check was drawn to the bank where it was deposited. Then the checks themselves, having been stamped, would be flown to the originating bank and kept on file. A "bad" check would get stamped and returned to the depositing bank.

The bank where you deposited a check would in fact be lending you the amount of the check until the settlement was complete - hence the daily deposit limits and such to limit the bank's exposure.

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