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Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

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

#681

Post by SomeUserName432 »

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.

The PIX QR codes are URLs without the preceding https://

Scanning a PIX QR code with your camera will just result in text, not a payable URL. You have to scan it in your online banking app for it to be processed as something.

Your banking app will load the details about the payment and you'll see the recipient details before performing the payment.

Even with regular barcode payments, these barcodes are registered with the bank before it's a valid barcode. A lookup is done, if it exists the recipient details are displayed, often the amount, and verifications that it has not expired. (Do not receive after date X)

Brazil has a pretty decent banking system, though the worst online-banking experience I've ever had. (Slowly improving)

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

#682

Post by tim333 »

WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #363
SwiftyBug wrote: post #8

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…

Cryptocurrencies seem to have settled into a different use case. No good for paying for coffee, but good for gambling.

Like if you want to bet on "Elon out of Trump administration before July?" you kind of have to go to polymarket or similar. (current price 41c)

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

#683

Post by bayindirh »

yetihehe wrote: post #18
SwiftyBug wrote: post #8

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…

> I receive a push notification from my Brazilian bank before Wise finishes running the animation of confirmation of withdrawal. It's like magic. After I had to add a special animation for one email system so that user was sure that "the core functionality of encrypting" was indeed working (it took milliseconds in reality), your experience doesn't surprise me that much. But, in my "IoT" system we have a mix of device…

Finance can be fast if wanted, and I don't think there' s a deliberate delay in Wise's animation.

In my country, we have a similar system, and before my bank sends me a push notification about the outgoing transfer, the push notification for incoming transfer pops up for most of the time. The delay between push notifications rarely goes above 2 seconds.

Ours has an upper limit to prevent abuse of the system, but you can't beat instant, actually.

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

#684

Post by 627467 »

WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #363
SwiftyBug wrote: post #8

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…

Actually, you can find "pix accepted here" in shops/exchanges in neighboring countries. It's probably more wide spread near the border. Similar to east Asia, were alipat/wechat is widely accepted in areas flooded with Chinese tourists

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

#685

Post by jjice »

xinayder wrote: post #112
rebanevapustus wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Brazilian government is a *very* corrupt authoritarian oligarchy. I would take any US company over that any day.

Yet we, a developing "third-world" country, have a better functioning payment system than the US, where it takes days, or even weeks, for a wire transfer to land, and you pay a huge amount of fees for that. Cases in point: - To transfer money to a broker, I need to pay around $5 in transfer fees via ACH or wire - I want to change the custody of my stock market assets from one broker to another, and it will cost me $7…

Isn’t this what FedNow is for in the US? Genuinely curious since I feel like transfers still take days. My assumption is that it’s not fully adopted yet, but my understanding is that the US is in the process of adopting this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow

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

#686

Post by idiotsecant »

vasco wrote: post #581
idiotsecant wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't particularly address the point. Say the government decides that they don't like the political party you're supporting, or maybe you've been doing something they consider morally unclean like gambling or consuming pg-13 media. Let's say the government decides that your payments can no longer use the payment infrastructure. Now imagine it's effectively the only practical payment method. It's a permissioned…

How do you propose to get money into and out of crypto in this world where your government doesn't want you to pay for anything? Or we just assume everyone starts as a crypto millionaire in this example?

The same way we get value into fiat currency. By exchanging it for goods and services?

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

#687

Post by idiotsecant »

lompad wrote: post #612
idiotsecant wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't particularly address the point. Say the government decides that they don't like the political party you're supporting, or maybe you've been doing something they consider morally unclean like gambling or consuming pg-13 media. Let's say the government decides that your payments can no longer use the payment infrastructure. Now imagine it's effectively the only practical payment method. It's a permissioned…

>If you own it, you can spend it, regardless of what anyone thinks. Which is also its primary drawback. Transactions are non-reversable, which inherently makes it unsafe for wide-scale use. Consumer protection is so important, clawing back payments is an incredibly important part of that. Wrong copy-paste and all my money could just be gone forever? Yeah no, that's never going to fly in countries where consumer prote…

Transactions are non-reversible in the same way cash is. Are you equally worried about me paying rent in cash? Buying a hamburger with cash? It's not a big deal, and mostly a UX issue as argent and others have shown.

I like the idea of my money being my money and not just mine as long as my government isn't annoyed with me. I don't much care if other people are afraid of it. That's a great thing about crypto. You are free not to participate, unlike the corpo-fiat systems.

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

#688

Post by immibis »

DANmode wrote: post #619
ilirium wrote: post #590

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…

They said cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance, the conversation is supposed to be about cryptocurrency technology, but you're talking about the gross financial companies that operate in cryptocurrency as if they ARE cryptocurrency. Not just one feature of its existence. Common conflation.

Now that I've recognized this pattern I see it everywhere: someone invents part of a solution, probably including some cool technology, then hails that as the solution and insists everyone else is wrong for not getting it.

The classic one is some FOSS people inventing a protocol where servers can talk to clients, and declaring a problem solved, when in actual fact, most people don't have a server. Mastodon is this, but so is XMPP.

HTTP took off because there were servers you could fetch things from with HTTP, not because it theoretically allowed you to fetch things from servers.

Paper euros aren't cool because I can "have money". They're cool because I can go to the grocery store and trade them for something to eat. My bank card isn't cool because I can "have money". It's cool because I can go and swipe it and not have to count paper euros. If you want cryptocurrency to be cool, you're going to have to get it integrated into grocery stores, which is, of course, impossible because it can only process 7 transactions per second. You also need a way to convert my paychecks into cryptocurrency, but this is basically solved with crypto exchanges now.

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

#689

Post by riffraff »

tim333 wrote: post #678
riffraff wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? You don't like the pea-soup on vomit color scheme? I've been a loyal user of wise for more than a decade, since I used them to pay for my cross-currency wedding, and I can accept the name change since they wanted to show they were more than just money transfer (but just make it "bankwise", ffs), but the new brand style was a disaster. Notice they dialed it down over time,it's now more neutral than at launch,…

I've been with them a while also and haven't noticed a huge change apart for switching the colour from blue to green? Site from 4 years ago "The cheap, fast way to send money abroad" https://web.archive.org/web/20210305145221/https://wise.com/ vs now "Send money globally for less" wise.com

They also switched to the peculiar slanted round font ("wise sans"), and padded every page with whitespace so it has a much lower information density. The actual experience past login never had much so yeah it's not as much a change as the public branding.

But mostly, it's the light-green-on-dark-green text which I dislike, and I _think_ they dialed down its usage compared to e.g. the brand announcement[0] and how the blog looks[1] compared to the main site. Then again, de gustibus.

[0] https://wise.com/community/en/brand-new-look [1] https://wise.com/gb/blog/welcoming-libby-to-the-board

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

#690

Post by kyrra »

fdgjgbdfhgb wrote: post #88
earnesti wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the technicals? Is it a phone app? Does it work through QR codes or NFC? Is there a Pix "card"?

You use your bank's phone app. You can scan a QR code or you can send money to someone if you know their "id string", like a phone number, an email or a random string of numbers - you choose the "id string" format you want, and you can have different "ids" linked to different bank accounts. There are no physical cards.

Google Wallet also supports Pix via Open Finance. You don't need your bank app after going through account linking.

(Googler, opinions are my own.)

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