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Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

economist.com

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Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#411

Post by const_cast »

DeathArrow wrote: post #95
pjc50 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And quite a lot of Western ones like Vipps. And see this long list: https://truelayer.com/reports/alternative-payments/european-... > require ID, zero privacy, usually government sanctioned Unfortunately systems that don't have those requirements are going to be money laundering channels. I wish it wasn't such a big concern but it's unavoidable.

This is not a good argument. We can't forbid everything just because it can be used by criminals. By the same thinking we should forbid cash, too. We have two ways: Give up all freedoms, forbid anything and transform the society into a mass surveillance society where everyone spies everyone, where is no anonimity and no privacy. Or require law enforcement to do a better jobs without people giving up their freedoms.

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Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#412

Post by ImJamal »

forty wrote: post #27
oulipo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestig, but this is also worrying to know that the government now knows exactly what you bought, where, when, and for how much. They can also (if there's a rogue government) create fake transactions to implicate you in things you haven't done

Is it much more worrying than having Visa being able to do that? Especially when you see how the US is going downhill, I think it'd rather take the risk of having to deal with hypothetical local fascist state.

You could always just use cash then Visa wouldn't know.

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#413

Post by jessekv »

derelicta wrote: post #290
cubefox wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. See https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutscher_Wetterdienst

Oh well! Good to know! Next time I'll use DWD instead of using those weird apps. Thanks!

Windy.com gives you ECMWF. ECMWF has a much stronger model.

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#414

Post by Vilian »

lvass wrote: post #197

We have a saying in Brazil that absolutely no part of our government works, except for our IRS. Pix is such a huge win for them. Brazil has a huge informal/illegal economy that employs more people than those who are lawfully employed (40M vs 39M). We have an effective tax plus legal compliance rate of around 60%, that really stifles down anyone attempting to open a legit business in an already harsh environment. Pix…

>no part of our government works

after learning a bit about other countries, i would argue that we are better than most, we just compare ourselves with first world european countries, but even when comparing with USA we are fine in a lot of fronts

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#415

Post by const_cast »

xenospn wrote: post #178
accurrent wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance, my experience with qr systems has been a mixed bag. The country I live in has a fairly good qr code payment system. But there was one day when the largest bank went down and that was chaos (cash very much has a role to play). We also supposedly have linkage with India's UPI. Unfortunately, it was impossible for me to actually use that linkage thanks to the way upi…

QR codes are problematic. First of all, you can’t really verify it with your naked eye. It can take you to a fake site that looks just like the original. Using phone numbers is vastly superior.

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Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#416

Post by const_cast »

ImJamal wrote: post #412
forty wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it much more worrying than having Visa being able to do that? Especially when you see how the US is going downhill, I think it'd rather take the risk of having to deal with hypothetical local fascist state.

You could always just use cash then Visa wouldn't know.

[dead]

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#417

Post by const_cast »

somedude895 wrote: post #228
chneu wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly why NOAA in the US is under attack. Conservatives see $$$ potential if they privatize it.

I'm sure the NOAA is under attack because someone in the administration really wants to launch a new weather app.

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Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#418

Post by WinstonSmith84 »

reaperducer wrote: post #392
WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance. Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil - it's not even used in other Mercosur countries, what's the chance of having that adopted in other countries... And, that's problem #1. How much do you trust your government with your money? A system like Pix don't stand a chance to get a worldwide adoption - maybe people are naive but governments won't unify to adopt a common system cont…

try to use Pix outside of Brazil Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so small that it's a rounding error. Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant And somehow less relevant than cash. I can take cash from any country in the world to my local bank, and deposit it into my account. I can get a dozen different foreign currencies at my l…

> I can take cash from any country in the world to my local bank, and deposit it into my account.

If you are at a institution bank, probably but that's a non-existent use case - I never had Argentinian Pesos, Turkish Lira or Bulgarian Lev I suddenly needed to deposit into my bank account !..

> Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so small that it's a rounding error.

I'm not sure whether you travel much, but I always travel as a digital nomad. I pay small transactions with local cash or mostly bank cards as everybody does. But big amounts? That's where crypto comes into play. I've paid in crypto transactions worth a few thousands dollars because that's the only way to do it without incurring huge transaction fees and / or long processing time.

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#419

Post by whimsicalism »

archagon wrote: post #409
whimsicalism wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have friends who have had to deal with the NHS and absolutely ridiculous (like year+) wait times for specialists. frankly i find the american healthcare system quite good if you have good job-tied insurance. most of the problems arise because we don’t have any sort of triage for high need issues and thus get overutilization and high cost.

From personal experience, the quality of your insurance has little to do with wait times. I had best-in-biz FAANG insurance and I still had to wait months for dermatology and ENT appointments, for example.

The quality of your insurance definitely impacts wait times. HMOs are often faster and if you have medicaid you're going to look at much longer wait times for the specialists that accept it.

Months for specialists sounds bad (during covid the waits in the Bay Area got pretty bad), but for context on the NHS, they are currently targeting having more than 65% of patients served within ~5 months and they don't even make that target. Even the extremely capacity constrained Bay Area isn't close to that level of dysfunction.

Re: Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

#420

Post by sephalon »

I wish more of these government-baked payment systems would just use GNU Taler [1] instead of implementing their own walled gardens.

GNU Taler ensures that the paying customer is anonymous while the merchant is identified and taxable. This is great for privacy, but not very attractive for commercial companies as your revenue has to be fully based on fees instead of making extra money by selling your customers data. The Swiss National Bank showed interest in adopting it some years ago, but I haven't heard much anymore since…

[1] https://www.taler.net

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