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You've lumped together companies that do very different things. I would just google "payment card network" and you can spend days going down rabbit holes to und

by prng2021 2y ago

You've lumped together companies that do very different things. I would just google "payment card network" and you can spend days going down rabbit holes to understand how complex the system is. And yes it is all totally necessary: https://www.spreedly.com/blog/card-processing-network https://www.spreedly.com/blog/card-processing-network "Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and AmEx also form the PCI Security Standards Council (SSC) alongside Japan’s JCB International. The PCI SSC acts as an authority in the payments industry, regulating and enforcing the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) to protect cardholder information. The rules set by this consortium are not guidelines, but the ground-rules participants must abide by in order to participate in card-payments."

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> And yes it is all totally necessary Highlighting because it's important. We recently got a totally free and open payments system, probably hundreds of them in fact, and they're a disaster. All the inequity and risk that any money system inherently possesses, with zero protections for anyone involved and zero recourse if you're robbed blind, unless of course you're wealthy in which case the people actually in charge who insist they aren't in charge will write a whole bunch more code to give you you're money back even though that's not how this works for anyone else. And that's not even getting into the fact that every seven transactions used as much electricity as Visa uses per minute to handle hundreds of thousands.
- alwa 2y ago
  By which I understand you to mean the cryptocurrency efforts, right? Man. That whole turn-of-the-2020s, peak-COVID period seems like such a collective fever dream in retrospect.
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    Oh yeah. And I mean, I'd agree if there weren't still a substantial community of people swearing up and down that it was the future, despite all evidence to the contrary.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

> And yes it is all totally necessary Highlighting because it's important. We recently got a totally free and open payments system, probably hundreds of them in fact, and they're a disaster. All the inequity and risk that any money system inherently possesses, with zero protections for anyone involved and zero recourse if you're robbed blind, unless of course you're wealthy in which case the people actually in charge who insist they aren't in charge will write a whole bunch more code to give you you're money back even though that's not how this works for anyone else. And that's not even getting into the fact that every seven transactions used as much electricity as Visa uses per minute to handle hundreds of thousands.

alwa 2y ago
By which I understand you to mean the cryptocurrency efforts, right? Man. That whole turn-of-the-2020s, peak-COVID period seems like such a collective fever dream in retrospect.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  Oh yeah. And I mean, I'd agree if there weren't still a substantial community of people swearing up and down that it was the future, despite all evidence to the contrary.