Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 377 posts

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

#201

Post by fragmede »

roughly wrote: post #121
oldprogrammer2 wrote: post #9

Stripe, Block, and PayPal each solved a massive pain point. PayPal provided a way to pay people and vendors without giving away your credit card number. Square made it easy to accept payment in person on a phone, without an extensive upfront underwriting experience and without expensive fixed monthly fees. Stripe did the same as Square, but for accepting online payments. Fraud and Risk come in many forms, and these p…

Stripe had a live dashboard over Black Friday that showed the dollar value of all transactions across their network, including those blocked for fraud. The fraud rate was nearly 12% of the total dollar amount of transactions.

Which, we've got to ask about the false positive and the false negative rate. it's annoying when it's really me and I try to charge something and it gets declined, but also the fraud detection can't be 100% effective, so the real rate is probably higher.

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

#202

Post by FabHK »

leobg wrote: post #164

Just imagine how different the Internet would look like today if receiving payments would’ve been as easy as receiving email from the beginning. That it is not trivial for a single person on the Internet to receive payments without a third-party involved, in my mind, leads directly to an Internet that is based on ads and on monopolies: You can’t make a living posting stuff online on your own private website. Because…

> if receiving payments would’ve been as easy as receiving email from the beginning.

In Germany, every business (and some individuals) has published their account number for ages (on the letterhead, website, etc.), typically right next to their address and email address (or fax number, for that matter).

And with that account number, you can just transfer money to the recipient. It really is as easy as email.

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

#203

Post by konschubert »

warkdarrior wrote: post #158
konschubert wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) can also be solved with limits and increasing levels of authentication.

Sure, tell me the limit that has no fraud detection, so I know how many card numbers I need to steal.

Why do you think a card number would be enough to issue a payment?

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

#204

Post by FabHK »

reboot81 wrote: post #152

I wonder what EU will come up with in the future, some kind of digital cash? Private transactions that must work instantly with all banks doing business in the EU? Several countries here have their own solution, but none of them are compatible with each other. (Please correct me)

Money (like stocks and bonds and ETFs and ...) is already digital.

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

#205

Post by FabHK »

Aachen wrote: post #61
paxys wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a currency that fluctuates in value +/- 20% every week is exactly what people want in a payments system. Plus the exchange fees for Bitcoin is way higher than what regular payments processors charge.

I hate Bitcoin as much as the next person but it's not really fair to criticise a technology that's potentially cool on the grounds that it doesn't have enough adoption. If it had the stability of entire countries behind it, it wouldn't fluctuate this much and even if it did, if everything's in that currency then you don't notice it in daily life either. The problem I have with it, is that the technology is inefficie…

> If it had the stability of entire countries behind it, it wouldn't fluctuate this much and even if it did, if everything's in that currency then you don't notice it in daily life either.

Common misconception. You basically need currencies tied to countries (more precisely, OCAs or optimal currency areas, characterised by either 1. homogeneity with respect to external shocks (not the case e.g. within Europe), 2. complete factor mobility (not the case e.g. within Europe), or 3. transfer payments (that is, fiscal support)).

In other words: If there were one currency (only), even with the stability of entire countries behind it, it would still fluctuate too much to be very useful. Or, to put it different again: You need FX. One currency is not enough.

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

#206

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

fragmede wrote: post #184
leobg wrote: post #164

Just imagine how different the Internet would look like today if receiving payments would’ve been as easy as receiving email from the beginning. That it is not trivial for a single person on the Internet to receive payments without a third-party involved, in my mind, leads directly to an Internet that is based on ads and on monopolies: You can’t make a living posting stuff online on your own private website. Because…

it's not just not trivial, it's quite cumbersome. but micropayments exist. assume I made some content and users wanted to give me 10 cents for it. if they didn't want to pay the 30 cent visa tax, they'd have to: create a Coinbase account, fund it, buy some crypto, install a wallet, move the crypto to the wallet, and connect the wallet to my website, before finally sending 10 cents my way. even if we handwave that the…

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

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

#207

Post by lmz »

zinekeller wrote: post #117
Nextgrid wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you explain the example I gave where the taxi app only has to SCA me once and not upon every transaction? This is in the EU. What I suspect is that the "mandatory" bit is by law (and the law has flexibility, which covers this taxi app scenario) but there is no technical solution to make it mandatory, thus a non-compliant merchant can still drain your account until your chargeback claim goes through.

You're right that it's not fully enforced technically. It's complicated, and I don't think that's really solvable by technology (being that this scenario is roughly equivalent to direct debiting). Banks can validate if a particular merchant has already been used by a customer and blocking them from debiting your account, but since that SCA has exceptions for recurring debiting, this is not really enforcable once the…

Of course it's enforceable technically. Any exemption is up to the issuer.

https://www.checkout.com/blog/exemptions-to-sca

> If you attempt an exemption and the bank returns a decline code indicating that the payment failed due to missing authentication, you’ll have to reattempt the payment with your customer but this time utilizing SCA.

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

#208

Post by l3x4ur1n »

immibis wrote: post #162
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…

I often make medium-to-large purchases using SEPA bank transfer. The merchant gives me a bank account number, a random or serialized reference code, and a week to make payment. I go to my bank, and send the money to the bank account, inputting the same reference code. Once it arrives (usually within the day or the next morning) the thing is paid. This works for most online purchases that are not urgent and support th…

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.

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

#209

Post by lmz »

konschubert wrote: post #194
crazygringo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EDIT: I see the general problem of origination fraud. But that can be mitigated by imposing limits and requiring extra levels of authentication for bigger payments. Which are exactly the kinds of things credit cards do, but it can't be perfect so they still suffer losses, so they still have to charge a percentage. (Of course a lot of the percentage can go to rewards programs, so we're talking about the percentage o…

In the US you can take money from a credit card by just using the that’s plainly written on it. That’s not what I would call making an effort at origination fraud prevention.

Hell, you can take money from a bank account by just using what's written on a cheque...

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

#210

Post by jahabrewer »

leobg wrote: post #164

Just imagine how different the Internet would look like today if receiving payments would’ve been as easy as receiving email from the beginning. That it is not trivial for a single person on the Internet to receive payments without a third-party involved, in my mind, leads directly to an Internet that is based on ads and on monopolies: You can’t make a living posting stuff online on your own private website. Because…

> You can’t make a living posting stuff online on your own private website.

There are many counterexamples to this.

Post reply on HN