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I’m all for Europe doing their own thing. I’m an American and even I hate seeing the US use it’s position for bully politics. No citizen of any other country should ever thing that an American company or govt will treat them with dignity or respect. Look at how we treat each other.
Why do Visa and MasterCard exist? The middleman that jacks up the price while offering the end user nothing? Thanks capitalism.
There was a time back in the day it was useful.
Before smartphones, credit cards were the cashless option.
Now that we all have a more than capable payment terminal in our pocket, Visa and mastercard are obsolete
Sorta. Whomever does payment on your behalf has to be willing to extend credit for an immediate transaction while the very slow process of exchanging money happens at a delay. This is especially so if the transactions are international. I truly wonder how the phone with just an ordinary bank account does this. Is it Google/Apple who extend credit? If so, is that better?
Most other countries don’t have to rely on the antiquated network the US uses for resolving those bank to bank transactions. In South korea, Street vendors have what looks like a phone number posted on signage around their Wares or snacks and people just make effectively debit pushes from their bank to the merchant’s bank in real time with zero margins.
I kind of expect this is how the rest of the world operates and it’s only the us then sits on using its own infrastructure which it made one time, in the 1960s, and has refused to move off of since. This created a lot of the market need for a bunch of private companies to make their own little piggybacking solutions like venmo, zelle, square cash, and all the others.
Too be fair, a lot of major businesses in the US now just exist as financialization institutions extending debt to their large-scale clientele, under the guise of being manufacturing or data services. Like GM. Or Oracle.
I’d suppose the banks work with each other.
uh…NFC payments work through V/M.
They offer credit to losers to spend more than they should. But the credit rates are what used to be usury when the mob did it.
great news
we need more alternatives to Visa and Mastercard.if Turkey was able to do it with Troy, why not Europe with Wero? Hope it all goes well
Interesting
Efforts are underway to expand the international e-commerce presence of TROY, which is already widely used and 100% accepted at all retail locations and e-commerce platforms across Turkey.
source Translated with translate.kagi.com
Turkish person here: Troy is not yet that popular, but it is slowly getting there. Give it another 5 years. The best example is probably Brazil’s Pix.
Pix is amazing but it is like an instant bank transfer. One cannot buy on credit through Pix.
That’s not exactly true. You can pay through an existing credit card via Pix (it doesn’t have to be Visa or MasterCard), or pay in instalments via pre-approved credit with the bank.
Probably a good thing. Buying on credit is a very bad way to spiral into crushing debt.
Not the same thing. Every european country already has domestic Troy.
Nice. We have JCB in Japan but I think it piggybacks off VISA/Mastercard for overseas transactions. It’d be cool if it partnered up with a European counterpart for purchases made in the EU.
We have JCB as well but only for digging holes and moving earth.
I suppose I could do that too with my JCB, but it would take ages to get anything done since the card isn’t very big or durable!
Great news. In India we have UPI which already made Mastercard and Visa come to their knees.
Just if it worked with international payments.
Currently, International GPay required a credit/debit card and I am unaware of a proper UPI solution for it.
Also, we lack proper FOSS UPI for Linux despite efforts, due to it being dependent on cellular networks.deleted by creator
For Android, we are pretty close.
For Linux, well, as long as I can get a cellular device that works with Linux [1] I am willing to take up development on the Linux branch of the same project. I have actually been considering this for a while and this is the only blocker I see.
could be either a mobile device (smartphone/tablet) or an USB/PCIe WWAN accessory having a Linux compatible cellular chip that also works viably on mobile devices, so I can do the testing. ↩︎
Costco broke up with VISA so, it’s possible. Re-establish the Templars again as the new money lenders from old.
What Would Jesus Do? Probably burn down banks and most churches.
When was that? I still can’t use my credit cards there unless they are visa
The Costco in Canada I go to only accepts Master Card.
In america they have a partnership with visa and don’t take other cards unless they are debit. Mexico Costco also takes discover and other cards
Discover wants a $25k retainer from me to take them as an option. Its just not realistic for smaller businesses when they have such a small footprint.
They accept cash.
Great if you don’t mind a wallet overflowing with loose change.
Crazy that we don’t have a public sector payment processor, though. You’d think we could have a Generic Card tied to a public bank that handles electronic payments efficiently. But it’s been over 40 years since we began consumer grade electronic transactions and its still entirely within the scope of the private sector.
Don’t you guys have EFTPOS?
Hello fellow Aussie/Kiwi. No, they don’t. Or they kinda do but call it something else and it still usually runs through a middleman rather than a direct bank-to-bank transfer - E.g Visa’s Visa Debit or MasterCard’s Maestro. EFTPOS still doesn’t work online unless using a middleman either, like PayPal or Square.
yeah I know eftpos doesn’t work online but they were discussing in person transactions at costco.
not having eftpos? Eeeeewwwww. Fucking backwards barbarians.
Interac isn’t too bad right? I agree with you that sort of service should be public, but I heard (years ago) that Interac is non-profit.
Edit: I should have just checked before posting: “Interac and Acxsys were combined into a single for-profit organization, Interac Corporation, on 1 February 2018”
Still, talking to vendors, it sounds like the fees are quite low, and I try to pay debit when it’s a small business.
Interac is non-profit.
OpenAI started out as non-profit. Quite a few health insurance companies (Blue Cross Blue Shield, for instance) are organized as non-profits.
shrug
Still, talking to vendors, it sounds like the fees are quite low, and I try to pay debit when it’s a small business.
Sure. All good when it works for you. But this isn’t some kind of wholesale replacement for Visa that doesn’t run the obvious risk of becoming Visa 2.0 (or whatever X.0 iteration of credit card companies we’re currently on).
One of the things I heard Musk say was that it shouldn’t be possible for a non-profit to just be converted into for-profit. Have to agree with him on that.
Nobody ever put change in a wallet.
Hi there I am Nobody.
You want trump in control of our commercial transactions?
He’s appointing the next Fed chair as we speak. We’re a bit past feeling squeamish about what Trump controls.
So then you do understand how having our transactions controlled by the government is a bad thing?
Brazil has a payment system (called Pix, IIRC) that seems to work well, and has survived some… questionable leadership.
I don’t know much about it (maybe a Brazilian can say more about it), but it seems to serve the businesses very well there.
I think the Digital Euro is going to be a better idea long term - taking off the hidden tax of payment processor fees is going to make businesses and people richer.
Don’t you think it has some privacy concerns? And how does it affect small businesses relying on cash? I’m asking genuinely, these are intuitive and not well thought out concerns.
I read that there also are lots of concerns regarding privacy of data. It apparently collects lots of your data and interactions and shares it with third parties for publicity and so. And they’re not transparent at all on this point.
What’s the point of having a European app if it behaves worst than GAFAM?
Anyway, I don’t know how much is rumour, how much is true. Does anybody have more information?
I can’t imagine that they could be worst than the existing VISA and MasterCard duopoly.
If it’s onshore then it would be possible to regulate. If it’s overseas then I imagine it would be harder to regulate without kicking visa and MC out of the EU and then we would need to start over anyway.
Europe’s $24 Trillion
Great, now nobody knows how much that is (other than a lot).
100K is a lot. 24T is unfathomable. :)
It’s transactions at the scale of a continent rather than a household or a business. Hardly unfathomable. Just bigger.
Yeah, but long scale unfathomable, or short scale unfathomable?
Idk count to a trillion and check.
I could make a tally stick worth 24 trillion dollars EZ. Seems pretty fathomable to me.
Isn’t crypto supposed to be a worthless grift tho? \s
Open article, control+f for “crypto”. 0 results.
I wonder how many trillions of dollars the Trump dumpster fire will end up costing American business.
You’d think our corporate overlords would remove him.
I wonder how many trillions of dollars the Trump dumpster fire will end up costing American business.
USAian business does great under fascism. Just look at the MIC. Both “parties” just voted on a massive handout for genocide, etc.
Business will be fine! The right/rich people will be bailed out. Etc.
Only the mega corporations are doing fine. Small businesses are going bust left and right.
Once people lose their jobs and can’t afford to spend, what do you think will happen?
I mean, the proletarinization of the petit bourgeois isn’t exactly something nobody predicted . . .
Let’s say the pre-Trump economy is worth $100 trillion, and a particular billionaire’s share is $2 billion. Let’s say Trump catastrophically decreases the economy’s value to $50 trillion, while increasing corruption such that that Trump is getting more power, and the billionaire’s share is $10 billion.
This is followed by a collapsing market that creates a dip in share prices or private valuation, the assets of which can be bought for pennies on the dollar, eventually leading to that billionaire having $30 billion in a total economy worth $20 trillion.
Win/win for Trump and the billionaire, at the cost of everyone else.
That’s basically what’s happening, and will continue to happen.
I’m not an economist, so here’s my ass talking, but I don’t think your example scales out. I think you’re making the mistake of equating the stock market to the economy. It isn’t.
Not everyone wins in a failing economy. If one billionaire makes out, three more lose money.
I just want to inject here my experience in Britain during the 2008 Crash and its aftermath:
In Britain, the Finance Industry was 17% of GDP, so when the Crash happened the country was disproportionally hit.
After the crash the autorities chose to protect Asset Owners above all:
- Interest rates were lowered to 0%, thus protecting lenders (i.e. those with the money to lend or ownership of Banks which in the modern system can de facto create money: if you don’t believe me, read the paper “Money Creation In The Modern Economy” from the Bank Of England) from debt defaults, also indirectly protecting Asset Owners by avoiding asset firesales from collateral confiscated after a default thus avoiding the associate asset price falls, most notably for Land and Housing (in the UK the Housing bubble never really stopped being inflated and Land Ownership is the core of Old Wealth)
- Banks were unconditionally saved by the state taking a share in them. That Public share was then put under management of a group made up of bankers “so that the government doesn’t interfere in the market”. De facto pressure for changing from the very practices that had cause the Crash was removed and most of the people having the blame for the failures of the Crash kept their positions of privilege.
- All this was paid by most people through Austerity. Public services were cut, Social Security (aka "Benefits) were reduced, salaries stagnated. The poorer one was the worst they got hit.
By 2015 the incomes of the top wealthier 10% of the population were growing in real terms 23% per year whilst the bottom 90% were seeing their incomes fall 1% per year in real terms.
This was roughly how things went for about a decade after the Crash. UK inequality is nowadays huge, social mobility near non-existent, average incomes when measured in a currency other than the pound - which went down following Brexit - have stagneted, overall economic growth is anemic and concentrated in highest wealth layers since that “growth” told by official GDP numbers is mostly asset prices going up.
This is the process by which the billionaires make sure they win: everybody gets hit more or less in a Crash, but in during the subsequent period when the state is supposedly trying to fix it, you get also sorts of “extreme measures required by extreme times” that, “curiously”, help the billionaires the most, so some years later everybody but the wealthiest slices of society are worst of whilst the wealthiest are much richer even than before the Crash.
I expect the plans of the billionaires who are cozying up with Trump is exactly to end up richer via this process.
This is spot on, and pretty much how it went down everywhere, not just the UK. Just to clarify: it’s workers, not capital, who create wealth. The staggering rise in inequality, pricing people out of cities and the housing market is having a significant negative effect on productivity which is why Europe is falling behind.
This means lost time where we have not been producing anywhere near our potential, and by consequence also not honing our skills to produce anything in the future. We can’t just win this time back by political change now, it’s lost forever, and young people who should have been at the forefront of developing the economy and making families will never win this back.
We need to be way more angry than we are, and every day that we don’t fix this we’re letting it get worse.
I’m pretty sure this is exact same thing that happened in USA.
Yeah, I believe so based on what I saw from affar, but I’m more intimatelly familiar with Britain - especially the more subtle elements of politics and policy - since I lived there from before the Crash until Brexit.
If one billionaire makes out, three more lose money.
That’s just what you say. And who cares about billionaires losing money anyway?
The billionaires will be buying up what the millionaires sell off to stay afloat.
Not everyone wins in a failing economy. If one billionaire makes out, three more lose money.
No, yeah, that’s true. But the billionaires are also competing with each other in a (perceived) zero-sum game and they believe the ones who are cozying closest to Trump will be the best ones positioned to make money - either in a corrupt or a failing economy. But every recession has been a golden opportunity for billionaires.
Heck, in post-collapse Russia, this is how oligarchs first appeared - the “shock therapy” of the 1990s transition to a market economy dropped the value of resources to nothing, and the rich at the time bought them and became the ultra-rich. Some didn’t make it. ( Like a super-bacteria forming from the ones not killed by antibiotics, the ones that survived were even more resistant to control.)
Good example, especially given that it looks like a Russian oligarchy is where we’ve been headed since 2016
Good example, especially given that it looks like a Russian oligarchy is where we’ve been
headed since 2016since 1776Nah, since the 80s at the earliest. The wealthiest were taxed up to 90% and corporations didn’t get the tax loopholes they have now until Reagan took office.
That’s where you’re wrong my friend, for while we had a progressive period in the 20th century, the united states were built by and for rich white land owners, so they could continue to benefit off that which they owned.
This is followed by a collapsing market that creates a dip in share prices or private valuation
I am not a billionaire, just an average joe lucky to be able to borrow a few thousand from my Roth 401k in order to buy oil stocks in March 2020 at 90% off.
I earned between 15x and 20x what I invested and paid off my student loans when the market recovered.
It’s not just for the billionaires, but you’re right, all of this is intentional and the wealthiest will profit the most.
I guess it’s for anybody who’s privileged enough to profit off exploitation and planetary destruction.
Yeah. Keep finger wagging. Worked wonders for you in electoral politics.
At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re working on it. He’s destroying their bottom lines.
That said, if you go after the king, you’d best not miss.
Their bottom lines aren’t very important to their goal of owning everything. Money is just a vehicle for power, but once they own everything and everyone they won’t need it.
The parasites are still making money. Rocking the boat would temporarily interrupt the party, they’ll continue to party until they’re forced to change.
The question is incomplete. They will cost trillions, but the presidency, the party fixing elections right now, will cost the country the dollar itself. They will max out borrowing, then print money to pay off the debt and de facto default. They will turn all of those dollars into very much less valuable things.
Presuming no one stops them.
They will max out borrowing, then print money to pay off the debt and de facto default.
I think you wanted to use past tense here.
Oh they will squeeze tens of trillions more out of the federal government before it fails. Every excuse they will borrow.
Chaos is a ladder
The corporate overlords area fucking idiots. They always have been.
Most of those overlords don‘t care about their business anymore. They want to get the bag now. It‘s how Oligarchies operate. They burn billions to make millions. Or in this case delete trillions to make billions. The goal is have proportionally much more money than us pathetic peasants.
The way Trump operates in particular is unsurprisingly dull. He flips the table and ruins the game for everyone. Then he waits and whoever says some flattering words to him and gives him a hefty bribe is excluded from his bullshit. Suddenly they see their competition crippled while they themselves can do business as usual. That‘s all there is to it. Trump was never the brightest bulb and probably thinks his obvious scheme is brilliant.
True risk is also anathema to them, probably hedging bets on how the midterms go before they make big moves
I think it’s simpler than that and just is down to the impact on the next quarter’s profits.
It’s kind of a weird game theory thing, because the industries affected aren’t consistently losing. A decision he makes on Wednesday can help the finance industry but hurt the tech industry, and then he can reverse it on Thursday and now the finance industry is tanking but the insurance industry is up. It’s tough to know who would work together to pull him out of office, because between any two given days, the people who have the money have different opinions on how he’s doing.
24 trillion. the culture war bs with the right is thier best chance of maintain power in the us, so no, they might have accept less to hold on to that power. Or they just stir up the right wing in other countries, alongside with russia.
They’ll make sure it hurts us, long before it ever touches them.
American big business? Not a dime. It’ll be a bailout on the American tax dollar I bet.
I don’t get it, sometimes you wonder if it’s true and he might be acting to help Russia
Sometimes?
Good. The Mastercard and Visa tax never made any sense. We deserve better.
Good. Make it hurt.
I want to see CEOs from the sky.
Yes, make it hurt EU. It sucks that my dumbass country made it come to this, but it needs to happen. Way too many people here pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist.
They would be tiny from way up there
I like the way you think, get them to terminal velocity.
The most important thing about terminal velocity is the immediate stop and its effects.
And the popcorn stand for spectators. Very important.
I dont
Theyre usually fat old men
Better splats. 🤷
reminds me when Brazil launched their Pix payment system nationwide, which is free for individuals, and the US launched an investigation into unfair trading
potential unfair advantaging of Brazilian payment services over US competitors was cited
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has accused US president Donald Trump of being “bothered by Pix” because it “will put an end to credit cards”
lol get rekt
Against what? Against consumers that don’t need to pay fees? Against the Brazilian government who is behind the pix?
Poor US companies with billionaires yatches bills to be paid.
Becoming independent from the US empire‘s dollar or oil is a serious crime that gets punished with dictatorship. It‘s no coincidence the US is launching a cascade of fascist think tanks and lobby groups against Europe right now.
Very well said. What a great ally! My way or the highway.
Hello, friends in civilized lands, especially those of you who work at financial institutions…
Some of us in the states are excited to watch you do some damage to the entrenched middlemen that have been skimming from all of us for so long. Please do consider letting us sign up for the new stuff. Our money is still worth something, for now!
We should solve our own problems. Haven’t we exported enough problems abroad already?
I agree 100% but also this is like when you watch your brother punch your dad to make him stop hitting your mom, and you know you’re going to get the shit kicked out of both of you later for it.
…unless one of your grabs the crowbar and goes for broke…
Hey blue states…
This is like that son that was sexualy abused by his dad for years, then killed and ate him.
This is like that son that was sexualy abused by his dad for years, then killed and ate him.
Seconded.
i would gladly make the switch if for no other reason than just playing a tiny part in screwing over Visa and MasterCard.
Why? Cause fuck em! That’s why!
