I think the state should provide an alternative, or states jointly. Everyone needs to pay under capitalism.
Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
271–280 of 377 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can’t make a living posting stuff online on your own private website. There are many counterexamples to this.
I'm not trying to be stupid but can you name some?
https://www.themarginalian.org/ has a Bitcoin address for donations on the page, and has received significant donations through that.
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US, there is also a "pay a person" scheme, where you only need to know someone's phone number or email to send them money.
Are you referring to Zelle? I think the issue for users that keeps them on services like Venmo is primarily the UX. The Zelle experience varies depending on the customer’s bank. It’s a service run by and between the banks, who are generally not as user experience-focused as tech companies. One example of this is that there is no feedback when sending money to a phone number that is not on the platform. The funds just…
No, not zelle. Pay a Person service is popular with credit unions and some banks. Receiver gets a message and inputs his bank account information into a form. Sender never sees that information. After the link has been established, subsequent transfers are just one click.
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#274In Poland there is a bank-to-bank payment system called BLIK. It works incredibly well and avoids the payment processing providers entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik
Basically it works like this: when you go to pay online, open the bank app on your phone, pick “pay by Blik”, copy the temporary 6 digit code, and paste it on to the online store’s website. You then also have to confirm the transaction on your phone.
It takes 5 seconds and is significantly easier than paying with a credit/debit card. It’s a shame this isn’t a thing in the US.
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. These middlemen take our work and monetize it never cutting us in (Google, Facebook, X, etc…)
There's a reason Facebook is printing money and X is not making any (and essentially never has). It's actually not the user generated content that primarily matters for ad revenue. Time spent on the site is necessary but not sufficient
> essentially never has
Twitter generated $3.4 billion in revenue in 2023. That's a helluva money printing machine. About a fourth the size of Facebook's. I don't know how big yours is, but thats bigger than mine. The problem is that, even with such a big money printing machine, if it costs more to operate than it spits out, you don't make money. Twitters problem wasn't getting money, they were getting huge piles of it. It's that they spent more than was coming in. Paying people to make the service happen, especially people to deal with the people who want to give them money to run advertisements, on top of with everything else, was expensive.
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
they all have their own problems, which leaves us in the same place. there's no practical way for the masses to give me 10 cents.
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#277look up Red ocean vs blue ocean. Even if it was, there are better uses for a "decade with enough funding" unless you have some competitive advantage, like you're the CEO of Chase Bank or something. If you want to know how possible it is, consider that Bitcoin was released in 2009 and cryptocurrency's success at being used for payments - in the history of the world - it has been used for payments between people for so…
> look up Red ocean vs blue ocean. For those not wishing to visit another site to learn new vocabulary first: blue-ocean market = entering into a new markt, red = entering into an existing market Interestingly, I never heard this term before but now twice in one week someone referred to it (linking an article from 2012 iirc). At least the other one provided a link, albeit to a 5600-word documentary that I'm sure ever…
I think readers here are intelligent and able enough to select the text and then choose "search Google" (if they haven't installed an ask ChatGPT extension yet), and don't need to be that spoonfed. I even put the words right together to make it easy. But thank you for doing that, I'm sure that much exertion would have been collectively exhausting.
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#278Of course, how else could you have them dictate where you can spend your money and where not?
The Visa/MasterCard monopoly is pretty invisible, I feel. Few cases where they have enforced their power to forbid payments towards someone, but there are out there, at least in the past 5-6 years.
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#279It can be premature optimization to save the credit card fees before learning to make the other 97.1% of each dollar.
Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a word yes. You'll still get a lot of chargebacks by the way. With a lot of ecomm I've been involved with the fraud you are talking about is actually a small part of chargeback volume. Most is unhappy or demanding customers, or another type of low level fraud, claiming goods didn't arrive despite a photo of the person literally accepting them from the delivery company. This is absolutely rampant in b2c with smalle…
The alarming rise in the incident rate of inappropriate chargebacks ("my fries were cold") really pisses me off as a sane user of contemporary credit card infrastructure. That is, I think of chargebacks as an absolute last resort; essentially a bulwark/ombudsman to protect me from bad actors. It should be used incredibly conservatively, and it should have significant reprocussions if it is used inappropriately; sort…
> peace of mind
Pay with cash. No risk of recurring charges, charging more than what you hand over, etc.