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

europeanbusinessmagazine.com

721–730 of 1001 posts

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

#721
post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it seems as if government mandated privacy intrusion is OK Once you give people an outside boogieman(Putin, Trump, Covids, etc) or a self inflicted false flag crisis(surge in violent crime rates for example) to shake them up to their core and put the fear in them, you can then easily sell your intrusion of privacy in their lives and extension of the police state, as the necessary solution that protects them. When yo…

I agree 100%. Europe is just ahead of us for the time being, but our turn is soon approaching...

You may say that, but last I checked, we don’t get stopped and shot in the streets by masked goons on government payrolls.

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

#722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating Acceptance is super difficult. Hence why crypto hasn't taken off with merchants. Because who's going to pay for merchants to change their point-of-sale systems to accept a new payment method.

Crypto is also a shit payment method though. Expensive and difficult to run and with high transaction fees. And if you use a chain with low transaction fees, there's no consensus on which chain that is (otherwise transaction fees would be high) so you have to support all of them. Then you might as well outsource the whole thing.

I have done some work at crypto exchanges so I am a bit biased.

I would agree that BTC and many assets are a terrible payment method due to poor UX (block time, clunky wallets), speculation, and wild price swings. But crypto in general works well for payments I would say.

Transaction fees have improved significantly where it can be on the order of a few cents per transaction. So yes this is a little high for a $1 candy bar but this is fantastic for a $1,000 watch.

The number of chains and interoperability is a bit of a pain at the moment, but this problem can be resolved by delegating to a payment processor, or simply targetting ETH, the top stablecoins, and BTC which account for the vast majority of the market.

> Expensive and difficult to run

Again I am biased because of my experience, but I could set up a payment gateway for ETH in a few hours using free public nodes at virtually no cost. No business overhead. No agreements with payment processors or card companies. The biggest cost and overhead ends up being accounting, because crypto still has ill defined laws and regulation.

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

#723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is not the only difference in the banking system; 25-year fixed-rate mortgages are also a feature that is rarely found elsewhere.

The minimum 10% deposit is mainly there to cover taxes, which cannot really be recovered by the bank in the event of default.

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

#724
"Consumer habits are deeply entrenched".

I disagree. In Portugal, MB Way arrived, allowing people to use their phone to send money to each other, or pay in terminals, and it was widely adopted. People want ease of use and low fees, not to keep their credit cards.

With this being said, the Digital Euro has more potential.

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

#725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

35 years ago, a good chunk of the current EU was under a Soviet-imposed totalitarian rule. Spain was a dictatorship until 1975. And it's been just 80 years since WWII. It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again. Meanwhile, many people in the US are convinced that the government will be coming for them any minute now.

> It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again. It’s not that it cannot happen again. It’s that the EU is explicitly built against that and if it happens it will come from the national governments (see Hungary), not the EU.

How is the EU built against that and how does it matter?

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

#726
post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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>Didn't really stop them passing whatever rules they wanted during Covid, did it? >Or today with Russia and Ukraine situation. Sure is convenient that we keep having more and more crisis and boogiemen that governments can leverage to deflect accountability and bypass the wishes of the population, for our own good of course. >Why do you think Germans supported to tie themselves to Russia's gas and destroy their nuclea…

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

#727

Item one, that has been mentioned a lot of times in this discussion, is that a payment system that is independent of Visa/MC but is dependent on US based smartphones is about as useless. Item two is convenience. All these systems are "faster wire transfers". I don't really see the point of them when you can already do instant IBAN or even phone number based transfers. What they do not have is a line of credit backing…

I never understood the credit card thing Why would I want to spend money on loan by default? Why do the Americans do that all the time? What's the benefit?

The benefit is to the banks, making huge money this way!

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

#728
post #724

"Consumer habits are deeply entrenched". I disagree. In Portugal, MB Way arrived, allowing people to use their phone to send money to each other, or pay in terminals, and it was widely adopted. People want ease of use and low fees, not to keep their credit cards. With this being said, the Digital Euro has more potential.

Ease of use, and a bit of customer protection.

Living in the Netherlands iDeal is perfect for online shopping, but once the money is gone there is no way to get it back.

With Visa/Mastercard there is a level of protection available which leaves the door open to get your money back if you are being scammed.

I believe Wero is going to implement this as well, so time will tell but I think any move to break the duopoly of Visa/Mastercard is good for consumers.

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

#729
post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again. It’s not that it cannot happen again. It’s that the EU is explicitly built against that and if it happens it will come from the national governments (see Hungary), not the EU.

> it will come from the national governments (see Hungary), not the EU. what's the difference? The EU relies on national gov't to enforce rules. Until the EU becomes a sovereign entity with standalone enforcement mechanisms, it's no more able to ensure things can't happen than the UN.

>it's no more able to ensure things can't happen than the UN

It's not the same. EU will cut your funding if you don't follow their rules. UN is not finding any EU countries, but the opposite, we all pay to fund the UN.

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

#730
post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the odds they're using this on-shore tech grab to implement their own domestic version of China's social credit score system, to easily get data on their own citizens who commit "wrong-think", without having to through the effort to twist the arm of US entities every time they want to do that? What are the odds that once shut down "chat control" will come up under a new name?

> without having to through the effort to twist the arm of US entities every time they want to do that? Right now, it's more like US corpos are try to twist the arm of EU governments [1][2], pushing heavy propaganda to manipulate our elections [3], allying with the US government to do so. And the US government has been threatening EU govts with invasion [4], leveraging US corpos to harm lawful individuals doing their…

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