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Card payments are expensive for multiple reasons, the biggest one is that it involves multiple trusted peers that will refund your money if anything goes wrong.
by hocuspocus 5y ago
Card payments are expensive for multiple reasons, the biggest one is that it involves multiple trusted peers that will refund your money if anything goes wrong.
And to be fair, EU regulations have very successfully brought these fees to about half of the typical market-driven price we see in other parts of the world. I'm not saying they cannot be decreased even further, and the EPI was created specifically for that, but you cannot deny the situation in Europe isn't too bad.
Providing one-way, immutable money transfers is inherently cheap. Even SEPA transfers, which are reversible in some cases, are incredibly cheap. As you listed yourself, if you need to handle fraud with low transaction costs, that instantly discards permissionless blockchains; you're essentially going back to a centralized, federated network of trusted peers.
- thomasikzelf 5y agoI Agree that the situation in Europe is not too bad. Still I can see a situation where some cryptocurrency pushes transaction prices down for regular payments (maybe without handling fraud, because it is a smaller problem with smaller transactions?). But none of the cryptocurrencies are there yet, and maybe it will never happen.
- hocuspocus 5y agoIf you need marginally free payments, the mobile payment systems that exist in several countries are already doing a pretty good job. We could imagine some EU regulation push to mandate inter-operability [1] and no/low cost to small businesses. I don't think big businesses can just disregard the cost of fraud and other payment incidents. On the other hand, subsidizing small businesses makes sense: for good or bad, there's an increasingly anti-cash movement in some European countries. [1] https://empsa.org https://empsa.org