321–330 of 333 posts
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Yea, I think you have this one backward? it's lack of regulation that allows Mastercard and Visa to say "if you do try to use some other payment process you can't use us". Since MC and Visa own all of it, no business can take that hit to their customer base Some other countries don't have this issue for various reasons.
Is it a US thing? In many countries there are definitely different payment systems accepted by merchants, just not card based and/or directly linked to a bank account.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
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The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index is a measure of the concentration of a market based on the market-share of the firms participating in it. Very much like the Simpson's index that tells you the probability of two organisms in a place being of the same type when randomly drawn. It's just \sum_i^n h_{i}^2 sum of squares of market-share. Enjoyed that. Thanks for the discovery.
HHI and Simpsons are neat new finds. There's also this other variant of the Simpson's Index: https://www.thesimpsonsindex.com/
If the US had functioning antitrust laws it would be looking at their margins and be considering whether to break up some of the existing players, not considering when allow even more mergers.
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> The future is direct payments without middlemen. direct payment can be good, but thats only part of the service. First, this is not a "card vendors are good" they are a large buisness entity, with their own motivations. Visa/mastercard are outsized and should have proper competition. THe point of card vendors in the modern era is to provide credit and protection for both consumers and buisnesses. Credit is provided…
> But, in the US your level of direct payment options are frankly shite. This is completely untrue. > In india, direct transfer is free and mostly instant, same in the UK/EU. Zelle is an instant payment-by-email network created by the US banks and is accepted basically everywhere. And there are still other options like FedNow.
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1.5% - 3.25% + 20p https://stripe.com/gb/pricing
"1% to Stripe and 2% to card companies" is the grandparent estimating how the Stripe fees that you're quoting are divided up. Stripe isn't keeping all of that "1.5% - 3.25% + 20p", they're paying the network some portion. Additionally, instead of using the blended pricing model you quote, they do offer IC+ pricing to (at least some) businesses. I don't know the criteria. On IC+, you're explicitly paying "whatever the…
Not great tbh. The more time goes on, I'm starting to come around to paypal's original vision of decentralized internet-native money as being the future. The more the international system breaks down and countries abuse their power via the banking system (especially the US, and from both parties), my opinion of cryptocurrencies transitions from "annoying scam infrastructure for hucksters" to "actually...you might hav…