Live data from Hacker News

Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

economist.com

651–660 of 789 posts

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

#651
post #206

I'm thinking, maybe controversially, centralized national payment service like this should be government-run based on my experience with Alipay which is a digital payment service in China. Due to it's commercial origin, Alipay is filled with unwanted ads and traps. Almost every time I made a payment with it, a pop up prompts me to enlist their Ant Financial LOAN service either now, or being prompted for the same ques…

> I'm thinking, maybe controversially, centralized national payment service like this should be government-run based on my experience with Alipay which is a digital payment service in China. After dealing with many private sector services, I think a lot of things should be government run. For instance: weather apps. Private sector ones are just a vector to track and sell your location data, and they rely on governmen…

Switzerland has this for weather - government data, projections up to a week in advance. Of course no ads, tons of info ie on PM2.5, pollen, avalanche risk in mountains etc.

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

#652
post #622
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are alternatives to both inefficient government-run monopolies and US tech giant monopolies. Even a small country like Denmark has multiple software and finance companies doing apps and software in the digital payments and banking field.

You would think, but is it in practice? In the Netherlands (and I believe many/most other countries), practically all non-cash payments are handled by either Visa or Mastercard. Technically a duopoly, but that's not a huge improvement either.

Interesting and important question.

I know MobilePay by Danske Bank is one of the most popular payment apps and can be linked directly to a Danish bank account (probably using the Danish "Dankort" payment infrastructure) without Visa/Mastercard involvement.

Most Danish POS and e-commerce solutions support MobilePay and surprisingly the biggest international POS/e-commerce providers also support MobilePay:

https://docs.adyen.com/payment-methods/mobilepay/

https://stripe.com/en-dk/payment-method/mobilepay

https://help.shopify.com/da/manual/payments/shopify-payments...

Our independence from US-based Visa/Mastercard payment infrastructure is enabled by our decades-old "Dankort" digital payment infrastructure that was initially based on magnetic strip cards. Even today most people opt for a so-called "Visa/Dankort" chip card that domestically use the Danish Dankort payment infrastructure but can internationally be used as a Visa.

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

#653
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You better hope that your interests closely align with those of millions of your compatriots. corporation NEVER has my interests in mind, so coordinating millions is easier >And that no one with political power has a personal vendetta against you. same argument can be used with corporations

Those points are true, but a private corporation can't take away my life, liberty, or property under the threat of violence.

> [the government can] take away my life, liberty, or property under the threat of violence.

I do not envy your life situation if this is something that you have to genuinely worry about.

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

#654

How do people pay for illicit drugs, prostitution, bribes, etc.?

There's still cash money for those things. If you ever heard about the "Operation Car Wash" bribery scandal (largest corruption case in world history), the businessmen and politicians were exchanging suitcases full of cash at a car wash.

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

#655
post #633
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world needs to implement Pix. I truly believe that is a system which can replace SWIFT with just a intermediary, with a virtual currency that exchange rate between the 2 countries in the operation, this way the world can have a freedom outside dollar and really fast transactions.

Here in Sweden we have Swish which seems to be very similar (just send money to anyone with a phone number/QR Code), but Swish is a private company, not government. Relatedly, most company payments here, including water/electricity/etc bills, are paid using a system called Bankgiro, which is also a private company (and you can pay Bankgiro bills using Swish, of course). And even the de facto national electronic ident…

The national e-ID scheme should obviously be government run.

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

#656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much do you trust your government with your money? If you’re not able to trust the government to not steal your money then I suspect you have bigger problems and should look to claim asylum elsewhere.

So every Canadian?

I have never had any reason to believe my government is stealing my money, or even has any interest in stealing my money. It's not some centralized criminal organization like it is becoming in the United States or maybe in other third-world countries. I do pay my share of taxes (for which I receive excellent value), and some of that goes to consumer protection including banking and financial institution regulations.

Who I don't trust completely with my money is banks and financial institutions. That's why I have a government who regulates them. And hey, it has worked where elsewhere it has failed (see 2008 global financial crisis).

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

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have bizarre logic here. For example, in a topic discussed about GPUs, someone would say that it's not possible to run databases on GPUs, so GPUs don't have any chance of succeeding. > How much do you trust your government with your money? Do you trust crypto companies? Mt. Gox, FTX, Bybit… Do you know that crypto companies must follow government rules, regulations, and laws? Russians were banned from using many…

I would say your post has the logical flaws, not confronting any of the core criticism and instead misdirecting to other topics. Creating efficient payment rails for its own currency is one of the most obvious roles for government imo. If the government provisions the currency, why would they not also provision the infrastructure (like the printing of the paper money). That said, you’ve not offered a good rebuttal to…

>Digital payments does present a uniquely frictionless route for tyrannical governments to assert power should they ever decide to weaponize it…unlike paper money which is harder to control.

This is true, and there's already a proposed law to ban paper money in Brazil.

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

#658

I've been living in Brazil for the last 20 years. Pix revolutionised the way we transact in Brazil. I've used Pix to pay for things that cost only cents, and I have a friend who bought her house using Pix. The system just works for any transfer amount. And it's so easy to use. Its speed is truly baffling, and so is its reliability. Never have I failed to make a Pix payment because of downtime. I never cease to be ama…

> 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…

> How much do you trust your government with your money?

I cannot fathom the reasoning that would lead you to believe this question is a big gotcha.

The value of any currency comes from the trust in the economy and military of the governments that stand behind it. The USD's value is backed by the economy and military of the United States. The Euro's value is backed by the economy and military of the Eurozone countries. If you live in the US and the economy collapses to the point the USD loses its value, the value of the USD will be your least concern - same if the US were invaded by a hostile military force and unable to defend itself.

Your currency is literally backed by your country. Your country issues the currency and your country sets the rules for how much additional currency banks can conjure into existence. Whether you use that currency in cash, bank transactions or payment systems doesn't affect that point. Cash is the only one of the three that's meaningfully different in that it allows the physical transfer of money without a "paper trail" because you can exchange it for goods and services directly (which doesn't apply to e.g. handing over keys to crypto wallets as part of a transaction because you can't move the balance off the wallet without leaving a digital trail).

There is no inherent value in cryptocurrencies just as there is no inherent value in state-backed currencies. The value of cryptocurrencies primarily hinges on their use as a speculative investment - even stocks or futures have a more concrete value basis (representing ownership of parts of a company and future ownership of trade goods respectively). This means its value is not tied to the performance or power of any one state but it also makes the value much more volatile and unreliable and much easier to manipulate.

Cryptocurrencies also stil rely on trust: for most cryptocurrencies you have to trust the people who issued it (and in some cases the underlying code), given how many have suffered from "rug pulls" and pump-and-dump schemes before. For currencies like BTC you also have to trust that no single actor can be able to perform a 51% attack. For currencies like ETH, you have to trust the smart contracts that might be involved (and have been exploited/abused before). Most people also rely on third party services to actually trade crypto currencies, so they need to trust those as well and there have been plenty of scams involving them even where they didn't turn out to be unreliable outright.

All currency is vulnerable to manipulation by agents with control over disproportionate amounts of it - billionaires, megacorps, banks, states using it as a reserve currency, etc. But non-cypto currencies suppress some of that control with their own and they have a symbiotic relationship with their currencies (i.e. if the USD does badly, that affects the US economy, which affects the US government budget, which affects its ability to maintain its institutitions including the military).

So the question then is not how much do you trust your government but do you trust your government more than the wealthiest other actors (domestic and foreign) that would exercise influence over the currency in its absence. Given that the state is not only the only thing enforcing the idea of property rights but also able to take everything away (including your physical freedom and life) from anyone who lives in its sphere of direct influence, even if you distrust your government more it's a moot point unless you also have the ability to flee it at a moment's notice if necessary - and I'd wager that's not the case for the overwhelming majority of people.

You say we may end up with systems like Pix for each country/union - sure but there's no reason there can't be interoperability between them the way there is with SWIFT transactions. At the moment Brazil seems to offer Pix International and Pix Roaming to open the system up to tourists and Brazilians travelling abroad but there's no reason similar systems can't develop a standard for direct compatibility without having to require support by each foreign bank or POS system.

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

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much do you trust your government with your money? Eh, the money was printed by government and any value it has is based on how much people trust their government. Using government payment processor is small potato compared to those...

More than that, any value it has is based on the fact you have to pay taxes in it, by threat of violence.

To be fair, that threat of violence is also the only thing enforcing your claims of property ownership. In its absence you'd have to rely on your community's consent.

I guess that alternative scenario sounds more dystopian the more wealth you have - but with enough wealth you can also imagine having a private security force providing that threat of violence to keep the community in check.

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

#660
I've worked with banking tech for almost 20 years in Brazil. The Pix system is great, but before that we already had TED which was slower but very reliable (the main downside is that it that it closes outside commercial hours for post processing). There are a lot of a lot of other things like Boleto (which are use for billing) and more recently the "Open Finance" system which allows different institutions to share customer data and even perform operations using connect accounts. It allows a customer to, for instance, check all of their balance in a single place. It allow institutions to learn more about you which can facilitate credit.

The reason? Why is a third world, poor country like Brazil so advanced on finance? While there's no single reason myself and most of the execs I've worked with tend to believe in two:

- Fraud, which is rampant in Brazil, incentivizes banks to invest a lot into modernizing their systems

- Complex financial rules, imposed by our government, required a lot of investment in systems as well

These all come from the 80s, so by now we have modern, fully digital systems in all our financial institutions, so things like pix and open finance can be easily implemented.

Post reply on HN