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

Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

europeanbusinessmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 1001 posts

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#531

Post by linkregister »

digiown wrote: post #516
linkregister wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being de-Googled is a hardship, though there are replacements for virtually all its services. I acknowledge you are well informed on this topic. It is not unreasonable for governments to pursue avenues for laundering money. I recognize that you likely don't believe governments should prosecute money laundering, but that view is not aligned with the majority of citizens in your country.

Ah money laundering, the government's 2nd favorite excuse to bypass due process, remove freedom, and impose arbitrary punishments, after "emergency" and before "think of the children". The government can prosecute money laundering and all the other crimes, but it's not an excuse to impose extrajudicial punishment. Until they stop, having some cash and crypto is your only means of defense.

I understand your threat model is centered around the risk of a government persecuting you. This will naturally conflict with incentives of people whose threat model centers around a lower severity but higher frequency event of systematic violence performed by criminal enterprises, with a necessary condition being ease of moving money. Both representative and totalitarian governments seek to aid investigation of criminal activity by following the movement of money.

I'm unsure about your reference to extrajudicial punishment, is it referring to de-banking associated with AML and KYC regimes in the US? If so, I agree that unjust things are unjust. I believe we should seek to fix those injustices directly through lobbying lawmakers, rather than rejecting an entire system that has significant security benefits.

I am sympathetic to people who have a fatalistic attitude when it comes to political reforms. Having other financial instruments as a backup is a good practice.

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#532

Post by [deleted] »

SomeUserName432 wrote: post #256
niceguy1827 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment seems to miss the point. It is totally possible to enable the first two of your bullet points without Visa or Mastercard, for example banks could just give lines of credit directly to consumers. Indeed, the myriad of loan products is run without Visa and Mastercard.

Yet if the airline goes under, or I never receive the product I bought online, using Visa/Mastercard I'm not left holding the bag. If I take a random loan with the bank and use those funds to do the same purchases using debit, then I'm the one taking the loss.

[deleted]

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#533

Post by tuetuopay »

Pooge wrote: post #367
Coeur wrote: post #165

Not sure Wero will succeed, but European country-specific mobile payment systems like Swish (Sweden), Vipps (rest of Scandinavia), Bizum (Spain), iDeal (Netherlands), Bluecode (Germany and Austria), Twint (Switzerland), BLIK (Poland) etc. are also working on interconnectivity under the EMPSA association. Combined they already have 110+ million users. Wero is like a monolith, while EMPSA is more like mobile phone roam…

We wouldn't even need these services if instant payments were the norm. I guess we have to thank the Visa and MasterCard lobbies for this to happen at least 10 years too late.

Yeah that's pretty much the only reason people use Wero: transferring money faster than a snail between people. This was filled by the likes of Lydia before, but their shenanigans trying to become a bank pushed people to Wero (which is indeed a rename of something else I don't remember, but I used for less than a year).

The real deal is the card payment networks that your plastic thing can use at a merchant's point of sale. All the rest is moot as we already have SEPA for e.g. online payments (it does have its issue for sure, but it's something).

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#534

Post by tremon »

hermanzegerman wrote: post #471
tlogan wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always wondered what kind of shenanigans Mastercard or Visa did to convince so many banks to use their networks for debit cards. When did banks actually make that switch? It must be relatively recent, because I remember not that long ago my credit union ATM card was not part of Mastercard. Now I have a new one and it suddenly has a Mastercard logo.

They discontinued their debit networks Maestro and V-Pay, so they can get 0.1% more commission

And the result of that decision is that Europe is now moving away from both companies, so they will get 0% commission. Real genius move there.

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#535

Post by wolvoleo »

Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #101
eastbayjake wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little shocked that of all the comments so far, no one has mentioned the financial risk borne by this whole value chain. OP is operating as if it's just a debit system moving money from one account to another but: - For many consumers there isn't sufficient money in the account to settle all the one-time and ongoing transactions they are liable for -- credit cards are giving you a revolving loan, there's risk i…

There are many countries where debit cards are the norm and credit cards are extremely rare. In France, people are so afraid of consumer credit that cards are renamed ‘deferred debit cards’ rather than credit cards, otherwise people do not want them.

Here it's more normal to save up for something and then buy it. Rather than buying on credit and then paying it off.

It makes much more sense too.

The financial system is built to stimulate that. For example if you'd buy a house you need to pay about 30% in cash and you can't loan that money somewhere else. This way you get people that know how to deal with money. And also the bank doesn't run a big risk if there's a market slump.

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#536

Post by lifestyleguru »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #450

Even if somehow EU is able to pull this off it would be a nightmare in terms of user experience. I live in Germany and this is how I would imagine it would work base on my experience in Germany. 1. You first need to install an app (because you want to use tap to pay) 2. Then you need to download another app to authenticate the first app 3. But to set up the 2nd app you need to wait for an actual physical mail which c…

Then every app has to be always the latest version working only with the recent smartphone operating systems, of course the authentication is invalidated on app upgrade. They'll make sure to turn in into some insolvable hellish paradox.

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#537

Post by xyzzy123 »

ignoramous wrote: post #470
xyzzy123 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you work on mobile apps you will notice that full attestation is too slow to put in the login path. [This might be better than it used to be, now in 2026]. I don't think a good security engineer would rely on atty as "front line" anti brute force control since bypasses are not that rare. But yeah you might incorporate it into the flow. Just like captchas, rate limiting, fingerprints etc and all the other controls…

> you work on mobile apps you will notice that full attestation is too slow to put in the login path Hm, Play Integrity isn't that slow on Android, from my experience. > don't think a good security engineer would rely on atty as "front line" anti brute force control since bypasses are not that rare I'm not privy to device-wide bypasses of Play Integrity that ship with Trusted Execution Environment (which is pretty mu…

> I'm not privy to device-wide bypasses of Play Integrity that ship with Trusted Execution Environment (which is pretty much all ARM based Androids), Secure Element, and/or Hardware Root of Trust, but I'd appreciate if you have some significant exploit writeups (on Pixels, preferably) for me to look at?

Hi, you don't have the break the control on the strongest device. You only have to break it on the weakest device that's not blacklisted.

The situation is getting better as you note, but in the past the problem was that a lot of customers have potatos and you get a lot of support calls when you lock them out.

> think Pacemaker / Insulin monitoring apps; government-issued IDs; financial instruments like credit cards; etc

I agree with you on the need for trustworthy computing. I mainly disagree on who should ultimately control the trust roots.

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#538

Post by wolvoleo »

graemep wrote: post #346
wolvoleo wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course but they can support an EU standard as well. It's not mutually exclusive. The big benefit is that all internal EU card transactions are no longer routed via US companies which is quite ridiculous.

Internal transactions all over the world are routed through US companies. I have paid using Visa or Mastercard at some point in Australia, Indonesia, India, Frnce, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Dubai..... its not exclusive, but there is a problem with network effects. From the point of view of a business why should they add support for a new payment system no one users, from the point of view of consumers why should they sig…

It's a problem for two reasons. First of all it means American companies get access to a lot of privileged information. Secondly, them pushing foreign morals eg sexual content or services being blocked.

If there were an EU card system id certainly sign up for it and demand from vendors that they support it. I don't want my data ending up in America especially these days.

The network effect will work out fine because we have reasons to want it.

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#539

Post by monksy »

axus wrote: post #456
wiradikusuma wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, maybe for countries with strong consumer protection, yes. I lost 3 credit cards INSIDE an airplane (hello AirAsia!). I only realized it when I turned on my phone while queuing at immigration and was bombarded with dozens of "Successful transaction" messages. That's ~30min from stepping off the airplane. When I checked my statements, I saw dozens of physical transactions (swipes/taps) with different merchants in…

I had missed the warning that this tech is now widespread. Must have not logged into Hacker News that day https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/nfc-gate-relay-attacks-2026/5...

But but my CC literally said "it's more secure" (I asked and complained about the contactless feature because it interfered with my transit card)

Re: Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

#540

Post by tuetuopay »

Curiositiy wrote: post #33
yardie wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife found out her new card was Discover debit card right before her trip to France. Her bank sent her a new card unrequested. In an abundance of caution she activated the new card which automatically cancelled her debit Mastercard. Then when she landed in CDG found the new card didn't work anywhere.

This is what these peeps advocating for an "EU-based payment system" don't get, as they typically don't travel worldwide. VISA + Master just work. Have a debit plus credit for one each. (And no, Google / Apple pay won't do it, everyone who calls themselves a "hacker" should know that you too often can't even pay for transport using a rooted phone).

The idea is for the US to not be able to shutdown CC transactions at points of sale in Europe on a whim. All cards in europe are dual-issued under Visa or Mastercard, and under a national card payment processor. In France, that's CB (Carte Bancaire). When you pay in europe, it uses the European network. Outside, it uses Visa/Mastercard.

So sorry, we do definitely get what this entails :)

Post reply on HN