111–120 of 253 posts
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Fourth option: You use tap-to-pay and pay the balance in full every month for the convenience at zero cost.
Do American debit cards not have tap?
Means one payment from my savings account a month to cover all daily expenses.
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Solana mainnet was shown to have capability to handle 100k transactions per second [1]. Granted, it was a synthetic benchmark of noops, but it shows the capability is there. For reference, Visa claim 83k TPS [2] for their system. It also has the advantage of being vastly cheaper than tradfi payment networks at ca. $0.0005 per transaction [3] irrespective of transaction amount. [1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/202…
Until it is in prod, it is a proof of concept. Blockchains solve for low trust; if you have trust, you don't need the efficiency loss of a decentralized ledger or blockchain. Central banks provide trust. As mentioned in one of my other comments, Pix in Brazil costs ~$10M/year. They process ~6-8 billion monthly transactions and roughly $6.7 trillion in payment volume a year [1]. That's roughly ~$0.0015/transaction bas…
Most recent indicator of peak Pix transaction volumes I could find [1] was 227M/day (=2700 TPS). You can see yourself that Solana does 130-140M/day consistently. Pix fees you quote are still triple Solana's.
Not to mention there is the entire decentralization aspect, which means the government does not control your money as with other blockchains.
[1] https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/economia/noticia/2024-09...
[2] https://blockworks.com/analytics/solana/solana-onchain-activ...
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Payment processing costs are a scam. They're 10x as expensive as they need to be to fund rewards programs and fund the financial system. EU max credit card transaction fees are 0.3%, in the US they can be up to 4%. It just doesn't cost 4% of a transaction to handle the exchange of funds. Just wealth transfer to finance people and the upper class who take advantage of credit card perks.
The only good use case for a credit card is if you are buying something from someone you do not trust. I have a CC and it use it a few times a year. But using them to pay for groceries or ordering something from Amazon is just moronic. The way I see it: you are either rich and don't care or you are poor and need to spend money that is not in your account (no judging I grew up poor and had to hide from debt collectors…
I wish Adyen was as good at marketing and hype as Stripe was. Stripe is really good at making themselves look like a way bigger deal than they are.
Surprisingly small contract. It's interesting to see that a full government contract for a payment provider is a fraction of a US mid-size company's cloud bill. I am constantly surprised by things like this. Here's another: there are more foreigners in Taiwan (total pop. 25 m) than in China (total pop. 1.4 b).
Interchange average in the UK was about 0.2% last time I looked (which was a few years ago), it't not much anyway. Also the government doesn't really do card transactions. I imagine this is for fairly rare things like renewing your passport, booking a driving test or buying a title copy. Oh and visa fees maybe? Small beer anyway, it's not like people are paying taxes via card.
I do. If I’m going to give the government a big pile of money, I may as well earn some points for my trouble.
Surprisingly small contract. It's interesting to see that a full government contract for a payment provider is a fraction of a US mid-size company's cloud bill. I am constantly surprised by things like this. Here's another: there are more foreigners in Taiwan (total pop. 25 m) than in China (total pop. 1.4 b).
Payment processing costs are a scam. They're 10x as expensive as they need to be to fund rewards programs and fund the financial system. EU max credit card transaction fees are 0.3%, in the US they can be up to 4%. It just doesn't cost 4% of a transaction to handle the exchange of funds. Just wealth transfer to finance people and the upper class who take advantage of credit card perks.
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> not intended to be an enumeration of all 54 instant payment systems currently active. Even then, not mentioning those who pretty much started / invented instant transfers still seems odd :) but no need to apologize haha, maybe I was a bit too abrasive. I get why you prioritized to mention those though. The Chinese and Indians have leapfrogged us. No more fussy legacy (digital) cards, just scan a QR and go. Even ill…
Can you imagine how cumbersome conversations would become if people felt obligated to qualify ad-hoc statements with what amounts to a historical ledger? Every new entry would open up an opinion around “if you included that, why didn’t you include this?” In such cases we’ll always up at Kevin Bacon.
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Payment processing costs are a scam. They're 10x as expensive as they need to be to fund rewards programs and fund the financial system. EU max credit card transaction fees are 0.3%, in the US they can be up to 4%. It just doesn't cost 4% of a transaction to handle the exchange of funds. Just wealth transfer to finance people and the upper class who take advantage of credit card perks.
The only good use case for a credit card is if you are buying something from someone you do not trust. I have a CC and it use it a few times a year. But using them to pay for groceries or ordering something from Amazon is just moronic. The way I see it: you are either rich and don't care or you are poor and need to spend money that is not in your account (no judging I grew up poor and had to hide from debt collectors…
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You are also being subsidised by debit card users.
How many people are actually buying things on a Debit card? I imagine not a lot
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Brazil's central bank operates their instant payment network Pix [1] [2] [3] for ~$10M/year [4]. Its not that these are small contracts, but that large, inefficient, unnecessary contracts have become the norm (I argue). Similar example from India's UPI payment system [5]. The US has FedNow to move instant payments for pennies, but banking and payment system participants in the US ecosystem are avoiding it to continue…
don't centralized payment systems like this reduce the overall resilience of the ecosystem and prevent future innovation? You hint on those lines with the possible future transformation of deposits into credit. Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly? (Zelle comes to mind). It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries where the free market likely could not h…