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When I moved to the Netherlands, I was at first irritated that my credit cards weren't accepted anywhere. But as the debit (maestro) card transactions are often

When I moved to the Netherlands, I was at first irritated that my credit cards weren't accepted anywhere. But as the debit (maestro) card transactions are often free [1], paying 3%+ to a card service does seem exorbitant. For online payments, the Dutch use the IDEAL system, which is even easier than online credit cards. This also prevents vendor lock-in, like Amazon. And, the banking apps make it super easy to send money to friends. Looking back, I have to imagine that this 3%+ tax on all American transactions must put a weight on the system. [1] https://www.ing.nl/media/ING-rates_for_business_transaction_services_uk_tcm162-135848.pdf https://www.ing.nl/media/ING-rates_for_business_transaction_...

xadhominemx 5y ago
> Looking back, I have to imagine that this 3%+ tax on all American transactions must put a weight on the system. 90% of the credit card take gets paid back out in the form of rewards, so it’s not really a tax
- Invictus0 5y ago
  It's a tax on the people paying with debit, who finance the credit card fees by paying higher prices with no rewards paid back. Credit cards are regressive.
  - xadhominemx 5y ago
    Debit interchange is regulated, and much lower than credit.
cm2187 5y ago
Everything is not so much more expensive in the US, not the least because this is dwarfed by the difference in VAT. Not that I am in any way in favour of the current duopoly in credit card payments.
- axelthegerman 5y ago
  It's not about more or less expensive or higher/lower VAT. It's about whether or not we should pay a 3+% cut to the payment processor when there are clearly other options. Nothing in this world is free, question is who pays for it and how much. Of course US credit card transaction fees also fund cashback and other reward systems
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    UK credit card transactions also used to fund cashback and rewards, but when EU rules from a few years ago limited the fees all that ended. Society no longer funds rich/middle-income people's air miles, which is an improvement.
    - smaryjerry 5y ago
      No one else is funding other peoples money in any significant way. The problem with cash back and miles programs is consumers don’t realize the business they just bought something from is paying the fees which then amounts to the cash back. Essentially forcing the consumer to pay a higher price but it’s their own money coming back to them later. In the mean time the banks hold more cash in their pocket and earn interest until you redeem your rewards and benefit even more when people don’t use their rewards and points, some people never redeem them, similar to gift cards. Then the banks want to seem like the good guys giving your own money from the fees of stuff you bought back to you. It’s all a big unnecessary loop when the price of goods could have just been lower in the first place.
the-dude 5y ago
Just to add : iDeal is a flat fee, starting at about € 0,29 AFAIK. Depends on your contract. edit : according to the document, ING charges € 0,25.
kolinko 5y ago
Yeah, in Poland it’s similar. Since ~2001 we’ve had wire transfers that take up to a few hours to arrive (or instant) and cost 0-0.25$ to send, regardless of the amount. It made PayPal or Venmo kind of pointless over here.
- Reason077 5y ago
  People use PayPal, Venmo, Revolut, etc mostly for convenience. You just need a phone number or email to send a payment, compared to a bank/wire transfer where you first need to obtain the account number you’re sending to. All of these services (including PayPal) charge no fees for personal payments. Just to merchants for commercial transactions, which often come with buyer protection, free credit/payment plans for the buyer, etc.
  - stephen_g 5y ago
    Yeah, the banking regulator and the banking industry alliance added that as a feature with the New Payments Platform in Australia. You register a ‘PayID’ with your bank (can be a phone number, email address, company number etc.) and then you just share that with people to do free real-time transfers (between basically any Australian banks).
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    My bank app, ING, lets me send a payment request link as a text, via whatsapp, etc. Which is a nice way of not needing account numbers to send money.
    - mariushn 5y ago
      But does it offer an API to do this? No. So it's useless for merchants who'd like to offer it as an alternative payment method. I believe this would work, but I'm not an influencer: https://medium.com/@mariusandreiana/open-letter-to-banks-please-make-bank-transfers-easier-d0200f803c68 https://medium.com/@mariusandreiana/open-letter-to-banks-ple...
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
twoslide 5y ago
It's a bit of a stretch to equate Paypal with "all American transactions." There are of course Visa/Mastercard (variable but about 2%), debit cards, Venmo, and older bank transfer technologies (ACH).
- harry8 5y ago
  A service that costs a fraction of a cent to perform but charges tax on total revenue plus a big old fee has a big barrier to entry or it has zero customers tomrrow. "all american transactions" - who cares what proportion it is? It's the most vulgar display of market power imaginable. "We will tax this large chunk of the economy." And I'm not even seeing anyone saying they won't get away with it. It's really quite astounding!
  - twoslide 5y ago
    Would you propose a national price cap on transaction charges? It would be hard to justify intervening in this way, given that there is plenty of competition and rates are not very different. Any transaction (even cash) has associated costs.
    - throwaway473825 5y ago
      I'm yet to find a European that complains about the EU's caps on interchange fees for debit and credit cards. Is a regulation like this unfathomable for most Americans?
      - krageon 5y ago
        Folks in the US are so used to corporations stepping on them a balanced discussion about this (where both parties agree that you being exploited is not okay, but maybe disagree on the solution) is no longer possible.
        unglaublich 5y ago
        It's bizarre how in the US, companies unionize against consumers, instead of the other way around.
AniseAbyss 5y ago
Dutch banks, unlike their American sisters, are not archaic. iDeal was a direct response to e-commerce and a preemptive strike against Visacard. The Dutch banks all work together to prevent a US fintech takeover which they saw coming.
scrollaway 5y ago
I like iDEAL. My bank is dutch (bunq) although i live in Belgium, i got to use it a few times. I don't know if it's really easier than cards though given all the tools that are available for cards now, from auto fill to contactless. To be honest, google pay / apple pay are just so damn convenient. Being able to just hold my phone and have payment happen in a second is fantastic. And here in Europe let's not forget visa and mc fees are capped at something like .7%.
- unglaublich 5y ago
  Android supports contactless debit card payments too, depending on your bank.
Reason077 5y ago
Merchant fees for both debit and credit cards are significantly lower in all EU countries (and UK), compared to the US, thanks to the interchange fee regulation (IFR) that caps interchange fees at 0.2% for debit card and 0.3% for credit cards. This translates into much lower merchant fees. Even a tiny startup with zero transaction volume can easily get less than 2% on their physical card transactions (using something like iZettle or SumUp). Big retailers will be paying well under 1%. Also, merchants are banned from adding surcharges for debit and credit card transactions in the EU & UK.
- c12 5y ago
  Due to Brexit merchant fees in the UK are no longer capped. Visa for example, plan to increase the interchange fee on digital payments made between European customers and British businesses from 0.3% to 1.5%. Other providers will surely follow. Still lower fees than in the states but probably not for long.
  - Reason077 5y ago
    > "Due to Brexit merchant fees in the UK are no longer capped." No, they are absolutely still capped in the UK. The IFR regulation has been mirrored in the UK so the same caps still apply to UK cards and UK banks. The exception you are referring to is when a UK card is used for an online ("card not present") transaction at an EU merchant. In this case it is now considered an inter-regional transaction and a higher cap applies: 1.15% for debit and 1.5% for credit cards. (but note, even here there is still a cap!)
- stephen_g 5y ago
  Interesting. In Australia you can charge a surcharge, but only what the interchange fee cost you. So airlines especially used to charge large fees, like $12 or something, and now can only charge a few dollars.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Before this law in the UK it was mostly small businesses (e.g. local independent grocery stores) charging 50p per transaction. I think the law was probably to encourage uptake of contactless payments which are targeted at these small transactions. It's still legal here to have a minimum transaction value for paying with card, which some businesses use. But since the pandemic it's become more common to find businesses that don't accept cash than the other way around.
arnvald 5y ago
I like that, too. The only thing that bothers me is that Maestro cards can't be used for online payments, so if I buy something from other countries (where shops don't support iDeal) I still need to use credit card, and support for credit cards in NL is pretty bad. Btw these high transaction fees are the reason why loyalty programs are so good in US while so bad in EU. EU caps credit card fees at around 1.5%, while in US it's much higher, so basically banks give people part of the fee in form of loyalty points
- yarcob 5y ago
  In Austria banks switched from Maestro to Mastercard Debit to make online payments easier.
- krageon 5y ago
  > 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).
  - arnvald 5y ago
    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.
    - krageon 5y ago
      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).
      - hakfoo 5y ago
        It seems to be somewhat compatible. 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.
Scoundreller 5y ago
Even better, many PayPal payments are from PayPal funds, Checking acct debits or EU/AU/NZ cardholders with capped charges, so PayPal pays 0% or under 1% to visa/MC for those transactions, but charges the same 3%+ to vendors. Plus additional charges for cross-border payments (even if there’s no forex) and terrible rates for forex which they probably self-settle anyway.
- danlugo92 5y ago
  They can afford to do this because "it just works"(r)(tm).
tinus_hn 5y ago
The problem with iDeal is that there is 0 consumer protection. If you pay for an order using a credit card and it’s a scam, you do a chargeback. If you pay for an order using iDeal and it’s a scam, the money is gone the moment you pay. There is no way to get the money back.
- semi-extrinsic 5y ago
  I love how Americans are totally fine with paying a tax on every transaction they make in order to protect random people from occurrences of financial fraud, yet are vehemently opposed to exactly the same system for healthcare. I mean, rationally you would expect the opposite: people typically don't do $10k+ transactions using credit cards, so a worst case consequence of fraud you're not protected from is quite small. But for medical emergencies, the worst case cost is orders of magnitude larger, so a system that protects everyone (financially) is much more beneficial.
  - patentatt 5y ago
    Oh, you’re giving us Americans too much credit, credit card fraud happens all the time. It’s like a constant thing you have to watch out for, and I’d estimate happens once every couple of years for most people. Either straight up fraud and theft, or just a recurring charge that will not stop no matter what. So the system is super broken and relevant to individuals, which is why people accept all the fees maybe. It’s not a sign that Americans are ok with a communal approach to anything, we’re just as selfish as always with this one. Sometimes it does feel like a third world country.
    - Grimm665 5y ago
      This seems overblown, I've had credit cards for over ten years in the US, using them in person and online, and the only time I've ever had a fraudulent transaction was an hour after my wallet was stolen, which like yeah, kind of expected. I'm not sure what you mean by "happens once every couple of years for most people."
speleding 5y ago
One fee that Dutch banks have, and PayPal does not, is negative interest on your balance over €100K. So as a small business owner I park excess cash there, which makes up a little bit for the high fees when customers choose PayPal.
herbst 5y ago
Switzerland has a system called Twint. It exists as prepaid account or attached to one of the most popular Swiss bank accounts. Transactions are free (for end users) and instant, you can even chat with emojis under the transaction. You can start accepting Twint without any hurdles. Or use a merchant gateway and pay like 0.3% or so.
- danlugo92 5y ago
  There's Zelle in the US.
xur17 5y ago
> Looking back, I have to imagine that this 3%+ tax on all American transactions must put a weight on the system. I 100% agree. It's pretty absurd that all merchants have to pay a 3% fee on the vast majority of their transactions with no real alternative. And I realize crypto gets a bad rap around here, but I really do think stablecoins offer an interesting way around this. It's an open standard that anyone can build on top of and integrate with which means we could have a healthy market with many payment processors, and wallet providers. Even if we ended up with the likes of coinbase, kraken, etc custodying the majority of user funds, the fact that users would have options, and any startup could integrate would help a ton with maintaining a competitive arena and driving prices down. (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)
- helen___keller 5y ago
  > (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 lightning network, or a shitcoin network of choice that's never experienced heavy usage) (c) are exciting but hypothetical future ideas, such as sharding on Ethereum
  - xur17 5y ago
    A lot of scaling solutions for Ethereum focus on being fully EVM compatible, and as such are forced to store every transaction on a widely distributed, permanent datastore, which in my mind is never going to be "cheap". Since we just need to move money around, payment channels [0] allow us to move the funds by just committing an entry and exit transaction to the widely distributed, permanent datastore, and once we "enter" this network, transactions can be very very cheap. In terms of implementations, Bitcoin's lightning network is probably the biggest active version today, but this only allows you to move Bitcoin around, and hence is a non-starter for a widespread consumer adoption. Which brings us to payment channels on Ethereum. It doesn't feel like there has been as much focus on the payments use case yet, and none of the solutions have as much adoption as Bitcoin's lightning network, but there are a few options I know of. Raiden network has been around for a while, visa is supposedly creating a "universal payments channel" [1], there's xdai [2] (not payment channels, and I'm not super familiar with this solution), and there's connext [3]. There's a long list here [4]. Basically it boils down to - payment channels are the solution, and it'll probably be a mix of self custodied wallets and custodial providers, all integrating with an open standard. [0] https://hackernoon.com/how-we-built-the-largest-payment-channel-network-on-ethereum-ky11r2h7c https://hackernoon.com/how-we-built-the-largest-payment-chan... [1] https://decrypt.co/82233/visa-universal-payment-channel-stablecoin-cbdc https://decrypt.co/82233/visa-universal-payment-channel-stab... [2] https://www.xdaichain.com/ https://www.xdaichain.com/ [3] https://connext.network/ https://connext.network/ [4] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/state-channels/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/state-channe...

xadhominemx 5y ago

> Looking back, I have to imagine that this 3%+ tax on all American transactions must put a weight on the system. 90% of the credit card take gets paid back out in the form of rewards, so it’s not really a tax

Invictus0 5y ago
It's a tax on the people paying with debit, who finance the credit card fees by paying higher prices with no rewards paid back. Credit cards are regressive.
- xadhominemx 5y ago
  Debit interchange is regulated, and much lower than credit.

cm2187 5y ago

Everything is not so much more expensive in the US, not the least because this is dwarfed by the difference in VAT. Not that I am in any way in favour of the current duopoly in credit card payments.

axelthegerman 5y ago
It's not about more or less expensive or higher/lower VAT. It's about whether or not we should pay a 3+% cut to the payment processor when there are clearly other options. Nothing in this world is free, question is who pays for it and how much. Of course US credit card transaction fees also fund cashback and other reward systems
- Symbiote 5y ago
  UK credit card transactions also used to fund cashback and rewards, but when EU rules from a few years ago limited the fees all that ended. Society no longer funds rich/middle-income people's air miles, which is an improvement.
  - smaryjerry 5y ago
    No one else is funding other peoples money in any significant way. The problem with cash back and miles programs is consumers don’t realize the business they just bought something from is paying the fees which then amounts to the cash back. Essentially forcing the consumer to pay a higher price but it’s their own money coming back to them later. In the mean time the banks hold more cash in their pocket and earn interest until you redeem your rewards and benefit even more when people don’t use their rewards and points, some people never redeem them, similar to gift cards. Then the banks want to seem like the good guys giving your own money from the fees of stuff you bought back to you. It’s all a big unnecessary loop when the price of goods could have just been lower in the first place.

the-dude 5y ago

Just to add : iDeal is a flat fee, starting at about € 0,29 AFAIK. Depends on your contract. edit : according to the document, ING charges € 0,25.

kolinko 5y ago

Yeah, in Poland it’s similar. Since ~2001 we’ve had wire transfers that take up to a few hours to arrive (or instant) and cost 0-0.25$ to send, regardless of the amount. It made PayPal or Venmo kind of pointless over here.

Reason077 5y ago
People use PayPal, Venmo, Revolut, etc mostly for convenience. You just need a phone number or email to send a payment, compared to a bank/wire transfer where you first need to obtain the account number you’re sending to. All of these services (including PayPal) charge no fees for personal payments. Just to merchants for commercial transactions, which often come with buyer protection, free credit/payment plans for the buyer, etc.
- stephen_g 5y ago
  Yeah, the banking regulator and the banking industry alliance added that as a feature with the New Payments Platform in Australia. You register a ‘PayID’ with your bank (can be a phone number, email address, company number etc.) and then you just share that with people to do free real-time transfers (between basically any Australian banks).
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  My bank app, ING, lets me send a payment request link as a text, via whatsapp, etc. Which is a nice way of not needing account numbers to send money.
  - mariushn 5y ago
    But does it offer an API to do this? No. So it's useless for merchants who'd like to offer it as an alternative payment method. I believe this would work, but I'm not an influencer: https://medium.com/@mariusandreiana/open-letter-to-banks-please-make-bank-transfers-easier-d0200f803c68 https://medium.com/@mariusandreiana/open-letter-to-banks-ple...
- jokethrowaway 5y ago

twoslide 5y ago

It's a bit of a stretch to equate Paypal with "all American transactions." There are of course Visa/Mastercard (variable but about 2%), debit cards, Venmo, and older bank transfer technologies (ACH).

harry8 5y ago
A service that costs a fraction of a cent to perform but charges tax on total revenue plus a big old fee has a big barrier to entry or it has zero customers tomrrow. "all american transactions" - who cares what proportion it is? It's the most vulgar display of market power imaginable. "We will tax this large chunk of the economy." And I'm not even seeing anyone saying they won't get away with it. It's really quite astounding!
- twoslide 5y ago
  Would you propose a national price cap on transaction charges? It would be hard to justify intervening in this way, given that there is plenty of competition and rates are not very different. Any transaction (even cash) has associated costs.
  - throwaway473825 5y ago
    I'm yet to find a European that complains about the EU's caps on interchange fees for debit and credit cards. Is a regulation like this unfathomable for most Americans?
    - krageon 5y ago
      Folks in the US are so used to corporations stepping on them a balanced discussion about this (where both parties agree that you being exploited is not okay, but maybe disagree on the solution) is no longer possible.
      - unglaublich 5y ago
        It's bizarre how in the US, companies unionize against consumers, instead of the other way around.

AniseAbyss 5y ago

Dutch banks, unlike their American sisters, are not archaic. iDeal was a direct response to e-commerce and a preemptive strike against Visacard. The Dutch banks all work together to prevent a US fintech takeover which they saw coming.

scrollaway 5y ago

I like iDEAL. My bank is dutch (bunq) although i live in Belgium, i got to use it a few times. I don't know if it's really easier than cards though given all the tools that are available for cards now, from auto fill to contactless. To be honest, google pay / apple pay are just so damn convenient. Being able to just hold my phone and have payment happen in a second is fantastic. And here in Europe let's not forget visa and mc fees are capped at something like .7%.

unglaublich 5y ago
Android supports contactless debit card payments too, depending on your bank.

Reason077 5y ago

Merchant fees for both debit and credit cards are significantly lower in all EU countries (and UK), compared to the US, thanks to the interchange fee regulation (IFR) that caps interchange fees at 0.2% for debit card and 0.3% for credit cards. This translates into much lower merchant fees. Even a tiny startup with zero transaction volume can easily get less than 2% on their physical card transactions (using something like iZettle or SumUp). Big retailers will be paying well under 1%. Also, merchants are banned from adding surcharges for debit and credit card transactions in the EU & UK.

c12 5y ago
Due to Brexit merchant fees in the UK are no longer capped. Visa for example, plan to increase the interchange fee on digital payments made between European customers and British businesses from 0.3% to 1.5%. Other providers will surely follow. Still lower fees than in the states but probably not for long.
- Reason077 5y ago
  > "Due to Brexit merchant fees in the UK are no longer capped." No, they are absolutely still capped in the UK. The IFR regulation has been mirrored in the UK so the same caps still apply to UK cards and UK banks. The exception you are referring to is when a UK card is used for an online ("card not present") transaction at an EU merchant. In this case it is now considered an inter-regional transaction and a higher cap applies: 1.15% for debit and 1.5% for credit cards. (but note, even here there is still a cap!)
stephen_g 5y ago
Interesting. In Australia you can charge a surcharge, but only what the interchange fee cost you. So airlines especially used to charge large fees, like $12 or something, and now can only charge a few dollars.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Before this law in the UK it was mostly small businesses (e.g. local independent grocery stores) charging 50p per transaction. I think the law was probably to encourage uptake of contactless payments which are targeted at these small transactions. It's still legal here to have a minimum transaction value for paying with card, which some businesses use. But since the pandemic it's become more common to find businesses that don't accept cash than the other way around.

arnvald 5y ago

I like that, too. The only thing that bothers me is that Maestro cards can't be used for online payments, so if I buy something from other countries (where shops don't support iDeal) I still need to use credit card, and support for credit cards in NL is pretty bad. Btw these high transaction fees are the reason why loyalty programs are so good in US while so bad in EU. EU caps credit card fees at around 1.5%, while in US it's much higher, so basically banks give people part of the fee in form of loyalty points

yarcob 5y ago
In Austria banks switched from Maestro to Mastercard Debit to make online payments easier.
krageon 5y ago
> 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).
- arnvald 5y ago
  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.
  - krageon 5y ago
    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).
    - hakfoo 5y ago
      It seems to be somewhat compatible. 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.

Scoundreller 5y ago

Even better, many PayPal payments are from PayPal funds, Checking acct debits or EU/AU/NZ cardholders with capped charges, so PayPal pays 0% or under 1% to visa/MC for those transactions, but charges the same 3%+ to vendors. Plus additional charges for cross-border payments (even if there’s no forex) and terrible rates for forex which they probably self-settle anyway.

danlugo92 5y ago
They can afford to do this because "it just works"(r)(tm).

tinus_hn 5y ago

The problem with iDeal is that there is 0 consumer protection. If you pay for an order using a credit card and it’s a scam, you do a chargeback. If you pay for an order using iDeal and it’s a scam, the money is gone the moment you pay. There is no way to get the money back.

semi-extrinsic 5y ago
I love how Americans are totally fine with paying a tax on every transaction they make in order to protect random people from occurrences of financial fraud, yet are vehemently opposed to exactly the same system for healthcare. I mean, rationally you would expect the opposite: people typically don't do $10k+ transactions using credit cards, so a worst case consequence of fraud you're not protected from is quite small. But for medical emergencies, the worst case cost is orders of magnitude larger, so a system that protects everyone (financially) is much more beneficial.
- patentatt 5y ago
  Oh, you’re giving us Americans too much credit, credit card fraud happens all the time. It’s like a constant thing you have to watch out for, and I’d estimate happens once every couple of years for most people. Either straight up fraud and theft, or just a recurring charge that will not stop no matter what. So the system is super broken and relevant to individuals, which is why people accept all the fees maybe. It’s not a sign that Americans are ok with a communal approach to anything, we’re just as selfish as always with this one. Sometimes it does feel like a third world country.
  - Grimm665 5y ago
    This seems overblown, I've had credit cards for over ten years in the US, using them in person and online, and the only time I've ever had a fraudulent transaction was an hour after my wallet was stolen, which like yeah, kind of expected. I'm not sure what you mean by "happens once every couple of years for most people."

speleding 5y ago

One fee that Dutch banks have, and PayPal does not, is negative interest on your balance over €100K. So as a small business owner I park excess cash there, which makes up a little bit for the high fees when customers choose PayPal.

herbst 5y ago

Switzerland has a system called Twint. It exists as prepaid account or attached to one of the most popular Swiss bank accounts. Transactions are free (for end users) and instant, you can even chat with emojis under the transaction. You can start accepting Twint without any hurdles. Or use a merchant gateway and pay like 0.3% or so.

danlugo92 5y ago
There's Zelle in the US.

xur17 5y ago

> Looking back, I have to imagine that this 3%+ tax on all American transactions must put a weight on the system. I 100% agree. It's pretty absurd that all merchants have to pay a 3% fee on the vast majority of their transactions with no real alternative. And I realize crypto gets a bad rap around here, but I really do think stablecoins offer an interesting way around this. It's an open standard that anyone can build on top of and integrate with which means we could have a healthy market with many payment processors, and wallet providers. Even if we ended up with the likes of coinbase, kraken, etc custodying the majority of user funds, the fact that users would have options, and any startup could integrate would help a ton with maintaining a competitive arena and driving prices down. (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)

helen___keller 5y ago
> (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 lightning network, or a shitcoin network of choice that's never experienced heavy usage) (c) are exciting but hypothetical future ideas, such as sharding on Ethereum
- xur17 5y ago
  A lot of scaling solutions for Ethereum focus on being fully EVM compatible, and as such are forced to store every transaction on a widely distributed, permanent datastore, which in my mind is never going to be "cheap". Since we just need to move money around, payment channels [0] allow us to move the funds by just committing an entry and exit transaction to the widely distributed, permanent datastore, and once we "enter" this network, transactions can be very very cheap. In terms of implementations, Bitcoin's lightning network is probably the biggest active version today, but this only allows you to move Bitcoin around, and hence is a non-starter for a widespread consumer adoption. Which brings us to payment channels on Ethereum. It doesn't feel like there has been as much focus on the payments use case yet, and none of the solutions have as much adoption as Bitcoin's lightning network, but there are a few options I know of. Raiden network has been around for a while, visa is supposedly creating a "universal payments channel" [1], there's xdai [2] (not payment channels, and I'm not super familiar with this solution), and there's connext [3]. There's a long list here [4]. Basically it boils down to - payment channels are the solution, and it'll probably be a mix of self custodied wallets and custodial providers, all integrating with an open standard. [0] https://hackernoon.com/how-we-built-the-largest-payment-channel-network-on-ethereum-ky11r2h7c https://hackernoon.com/how-we-built-the-largest-payment-chan... [1] https://decrypt.co/82233/visa-universal-payment-channel-stablecoin-cbdc https://decrypt.co/82233/visa-universal-payment-channel-stab... [2] https://www.xdaichain.com/ https://www.xdaichain.com/ [3] https://connext.network/ https://connext.network/ [4] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/state-channels/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/state-channe...