241–249 of 249 posts
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Do they? Can I get an immediate refund for anything if I don’t like the item? I can with my Amex. No questions asked under $1000.
>I can with my Amex. No questions asked under $1000 So you don't try to return the item for a refund first?
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Are you aware that the US Federal Reserve is deploying instant payments infrastructure in 2023? I believe the cost will be free to consumers, and pennies per transaction to businesses. I'd expect online payments will integrate with banking providers to support initiating instant payments from deposit accounts, similar to Europe's IBAN instant payment system. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/08/31/fednow-the-feder…
I am aware of the Fed solution. I can tell you it’s DOA and by design.
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> Maestro cards can't be used for online payments They can, for example ~15 years ago I used a maestro card to pay for a subscription to Sony. All they needed was a card number and an address (the latter for tax reasons, that is mandatory).
That's interesting, are there different types of Maestro cards? I also had one years ago, but it didn't have CVV so I could not pay online. My current one does not even have a real card number, it has just my bank account number on it.
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Zero fees? In crypto, there's an inverse correlation between on-chain fees and price volatility. So either you incur high on-chain fees or accept a high exchange rate risk.
Bitcoin and Nano move very closely together, yet one charges hundreds of thousands in fees every day and the other none at all. I'm not sure where you got that idea from.
In comparison, you can move around $100 million USD worth of Bitcoin until you move its price by 0.5%.
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I once tried to buy a beer in a small corner shop. The beer was 2€. The minimum charge for card payments was 5€. I agreed to pay 5€. The shopkeeper refused to charge me 5€. I walked out without my beer, sad, and wishing I'd remembered to carry some cash that day.
Couldn't you buy three? I mean, if you're already price insensitive to pay 5 euro for one...
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> (and before someone yells "crypto fees", there are already solutions that can drive these well below $0.01 if we're just sending payments between 2 parties) Can you specify what you're referring to? As someone who frequently yells "crypto fees" my understanding is most low-fee options either (a) require transfers within a centralized ecosystem, (b) aren't likely to scale effectively as a system (e.g. bitcoin's ligh…
Payment/State channels exist today. Is there a difference between your (c) hypothetical future ideas and hypothetical future scaling problems? Lightning works today. Try Breez Wallet https://breez.technology/ or Strike https://strike.me/ and tell me what your experience is like.
Hypothetical future ideas require development. Hypothetical future scaling problems block current development.
For example, suppose that Amazon Marketplace wanted, as soon as possible, to have all customers pay through bitcoin including through lightning network). The question is, would the average fee per transaction average 1c or less?
I claim the answer is no. Lightning channels require broadcasts (though much less frequently than 1 per merchant transaction) on the main network. Let's suppose someone does 100 transactions with amazon per 1 broadcast to the bitcoin network, which seems generous to me. A google search[0] suggests that the current average transaction fee on bitcoin main network is about 2.5 dollars, which then averages to 2.5 cents per lightning transaction with Amazon. This is close to the desired goal of 1 cent per transaction, under the listed assumptions.
However, Amazon adopting bitcoin for all transactions would drive a ridiculous amount of traffic to the bitcoin network. If we go to recent history, march-april 2021 saw about $20 average transaction cost (or more - peak at $60). Going back to our same calculations, $20 per broadcast puts us at a fee of 20c per amazon transaction, far beyond our goal of 1c per transaction. Furthermore historical data has not yet seen Bitcoin as a primary transaction network for a large commerce site like Amazon, so it's reasonable to speculate we could see per-broadcast fees average above $100.
In simpler terms, while Lightning network greatly decreases the fee per real-world transaction, it's not enough to handle large scale adoption unless ratio of real-world transactions to bitcoin broadcasts increase in direct proportion to the fees on the bitcoin network. Realistically, if a large amount of US commerce occurred on the bitcoin network, the most optimistic access pattern would have users broadcast to true-up their channel liquidity roughly in line with receiving paychecks - maybe twice a month.
The simple fact is that if you take millions of humans and have them broadcast twice a month on the bitcoin network, the bitcoin network would not be able to handle it (bitcoin volume is roughly 10 million transactions per month[1]). Forget even hoping to scale to billions of humans.
[0] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem#/m...
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As far as donations go, Patreon and Ko-fi should have a lot lower fees.
Patreon is not necessarily an alternative because supporting someone is more of a subscription kind of transaction, and not a one-off thing.
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That's interesting, are there different types of Maestro cards? I also had one years ago, but it didn't have CVV so I could not pay online. My current one does not even have a real card number, it has just my bank account number on it.
It is not a creditcard-compatible system. I was merely hooking into the thought that this was not possible at all, it definitely is. Most companies just choose not to support it (or use payment gateways that prefer not to).
I work in the card-payments space, but in the US. We can handle Maestro cards, so long as all parties are aligned to accept them. You need a shopping cart that doesn't scream "This card number looks weird" before even letting the customer submit it, a gateway that identifies it correctly, and a processor that's built to handle it. Probably the merchant account needs to be configured to accept it too, but that's outside my scope.
If the processor mentions Maestro at all, it's usually a corner-case line item in the documentation-- "Send field 923 = AA for Mastercard, and AB for Maestro, but everything else the same."
It's an interesting evolutionary divergence. We had/have "debit only" networks in the US (i. e. Star, Cirrus, Plus). They still exist but they are largely irrelevant for purchases because virtually every checking account provides a Visa or Mastercard badged card. There are a few situations where merchants can try to reroute the transaction to a debit network for lower fees, but it's a narrow interest at best.
They actually went through a legal tussle here because some merchants felt imposed on when the card networks said "If you take Credit Visa/Mastercard, you also have to take Debit Visa/Mastercard" back when the fees for doing so were higher.
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About the charge backs if one is mainly shopping from local companies there is really strong consumer protection laws instead. Basically you can demand a refund and if they don't give it to you it is a really simple process of just sending a bill to that company for your money and initiate bankruptcy process if they fail to pay.
Yes, but in this context, everything depends on the interaction with the merchant. While most merchants are not pricks, they are businesspeople and won't unconditionally accommodate any claim even if it is reasonable. Based on my experience, the worst are not necessarily the small merchants unless they are just fraudsters but the semi-large online stores like Otto/Saturn/MediaMarkt which will do everything to make a…
The product when returned still has to be in a state that it can be sold.
This also means that lot of people pointing out Amazons very liberal return policy being a good reason to shop there makes no sense here. We got roughly the same return policy for all online shopping. And as others pointed out EU regulations give 14day return policy for all online shopping.
