5 ms·

X partners with Visa to enable money transfers on the platform

30 points by macleginn 2y ago

ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42854715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42854715
superkuh 2y ago
And this is the functionality that makes social media sites worth it for the vast majority of people. They are there following people who are there to make money. The vast majority of people involved in social media are primarily or secondarily there because of money. So this move makes sense. And that's why decentralized, federated, or whatever social networks will never gain a large scale (>1 million or so) users. The governments of the world will never allow non-corporations to provide the money transfers necessary for people to "make a living" on such sites. That's not a bad thing, but it does mean tha "alternative" social media really needs to stop chasing these kinds of users.
- woodruffw 2y ago
  Hm? I thought most people were on social media for, you know, social things: sharing photos, discussions, etc. Sending money is an important social activity, but I can't think of a single time I've wanted to use Twitter (when I used it) to send money -- the circles of activities weren't heavily overlapping. (This has nothing to do with politics or decentralization or anything else.)
  - MBCook 2y ago
    “Social” means people, and “media” means videos begging for money. I’m sure this will work out great.
- raincole 2y ago
  > And that's why decentralized, federated, or whatever social networks will never gain a large scale (>1 million or so) users. The governments of the world will never allow non-corporations to provide the money transfers necessary for people to "make a living" on such sites. Sure, if you ignore the simple fact that Twitter reached > 100M users when it had zero money transfer feature for the end users.
- kurito 2y ago
  I really don't get this. Why would I want to send money via a social media site, especially twitter in its current state?
  - nout 2y ago
    Because you can use actual value to incentivize what you want to see rather than "cheap" likes. At the same time if you provide posts that are valuable to others, then you receive value back. I don't like the exclusive solution that X is building where majority of people will be excluded from participating, but you asked about the "why".
- hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
  >And this is the functionality that makes social media sites worth it for the vast majority of people. The feature no major western social media site has had is the one that make it worth it for the majority of users? Seems like an extreme claim without any backing or logic behind it.
- greyface- 2y ago
  This is what the Nostr people have been saying, and it's also why I've avoided Nostr even as a fairly strong Bitcoin advocate. I don't go to social media to transfer money; I go to social media to freely exchange information with my social peers.
  - nout 2y ago
    This is what facebook used to be. You only see your social peers, you don't see any other "famous"/well known people that you don't know personally. This could be done on nostr quite easily, but it's just too tempting to start following the famous personas.
- tekno45 2y ago
  sounds like you have no friends to connect with if you're there for money.
- RiverCrochet 2y ago
  I think you're right with what you say about "alternative" social media. > And that's why decentralized, federated, or whatever social networks will never gain a large scale (>1 million or so) users This is fine. If we have 500 decentralized social networks and 2 centralized social networks, it's awesome. The decentralized networks will be harder for people to make money off of, but not impossible. That's also good. You can use the big soulless social networks for moneymaking, then return to the smaller ones for actual genuine social interaction. > The governments of the world will never allow non-corporations to provide the money transfers necessary for people to "make a living" on such sites. Before the Internet, we had money orders. You can still get them and cash them. In the 90's I used to order stuff via mail using money orders. It's riskier, but I'm not sure it's very much more riskier if you are dealing with someone you are following that has a group you are a member of. It is less convenient.
- flas9sd 2y ago
  centralized services can execute on "give every user a wallet", but federated services and protocols can also add an attribute to piggyback on the addressbook that is inherent to a following/follower relation. Subscriber tiers and encrypted content is harder, but the peer discovery is already there.
josefritzishere 2y ago
And here I was thinking the main point of social media was socialization.
- HKH2 2y ago
  Money talks.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 2y ago
  On Mastodon, it is.
- paxys 2y ago
  Is splitting bills/sending money to your friends not socialization?
hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
This has been Musks goal for a long time. But while trying to accomplish it he's burned the goodwill and much of the public perception of Twitter/X as a good company. I certainly have a highly negative view of Twitter/X and wouldn't trust the platform with any financial information or using it for financial transactions no matter who its backed by, but that's reflected in my not having a Twitter/X account to begin with so its a moot point.
- MBCook 2y ago
  I get him, but why Visa? As a company I’d be terrified to be tied to his brand in any way. I also suspect the primary use of this may end up being scams, which seems like a really bad market to get into. Now not only can you fake having cancer or whatever, you can ask for donations in-app! Or let people help you in your fight against $EVIL_THING by donating to your cause (no matter how real or not) without leaving the site. Or you can just peddle your new sponsor $WONDERFUL_THING. If it’s not primarily used for scams, seems likely to turn the platform into a big begging space. Before you had to convince people to go to IndieGoGo or your site or whatever. I know this has always been his dream. I just don’t see a likelihood of it making anything better. And I’d say that for any social network. Maybe Meta hasn’t done it because they realized that would likely be the case?
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Also, "why Visa" from the X.com perspective. As far as I can tell, Musk's vision was WeChat for the Western world. The platform for everything. WeChat replaces Visa, it doesn't use Visa or a competitor. If X.com is using Visa then Visa is the platform, not X.com. Using Visa feels like an admission of defeat to me.
    - bobthepanda 2y ago
      I imagine it has to do with the difficulty of financial compliance. Musk was part of PayPal which has gotten into trouble before for being not quite a bank and attempting to do bank-like things.
ttoinou 2y ago
It’s a mystery to me why Meta / Facebook failed to integrate native payments into their products. They had 10 years and carte blanche to do it, but nothing happened. And what happened to Libra ?
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  I wonder if they'd be eyed by regulators for doing so, but yes, it does seem odd they didn't at least integrate Paypal or similar.
- ComputerGuru 2y ago
  Libra was shuttered due to feds saying “we have no legal reason to stop you but we still wish you to stop” and Zuckerberg (after some things we are not privy to) agreeing. There was a submission on this from an insider sometime in the past year. (IMHO: no loss to the world whatsoever.)
- paxys 2y ago
  They do exactly this all over the world. Look at WhatsApp Pay.
  - simonsarris 2y ago
    Yeah that they do it globally but not in the US (other than a kind of meagre payment transfer on FB that used to exist) makes me wonder if they were bullied, federally, into not doing so.
    - paxys 2y ago
      A simpler explanation is that US doesn't have the banking infrastructure to support these kinds of micropayments. ACH transfers take 3-5 days and require you to link a checking account. Debit & credit card transactions have high fees. Chargebacks/fraud are a constant problem. So no payment processor wants to take on this complexity and liability.
- Molitor5901 2y ago
BearOso 2y ago
It's because Musk got his feelings hurt. When PayPal formed, he and his money transfer idea were thrown out because he wanted to make a service doing exactly this and name it "X". Many of us predicted this happening.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  Didn't he say he wanted to do this? I'm not sure how much predicting was necessary.
  - pram 2y ago
    Yes, he also said people sending payments on Twitter would become 50% of the world financial system (lol)
  - MBCook 2y ago
    He’s been trying to make an everything-including-payments thing called X for decades. He did say he’d do this with Twitter, but as GP points out it wasn’t a new idea for him then. This is a “keep doing the same thing until it works to prove I was right and those others who forced me out were idiots with no vision” kind of a thing.
zelias 2y ago
Here's a hypothetical: 1) you put a bunch of money "in" this 2) you say something on twitter Elon dislikes 3) you get banned 4) you lose access to your money??? Seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  Sounds like PayPal.
  - throwaway290 2y ago
    If everyone who says something bad about paypal would be banned from paypal it would have no users left! Take issue with their policies as much as you want but it's telling that almost no one even knows who PayPal's CEO is. That's how it's supposed to be
beardyw 2y ago
Maybe it's an American thing, but I really can't see the point of this. Or PayPal.
- lm28469 2y ago
  Especially now that instant and free bank transfer are mandatory in the EU
  - dawnerd 2y ago
    Makes no sense in the Us either though with basically everyone having access to Zelle.
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      I have both a US and an Australian bank account. Zelle sucks compared to what's considered table stakes overseas.
  - xioxox 2y ago
    Free bank transfers are not mandatory in the EU. The bank just has to charge the same for a national transfer as an EU transfer: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/financial-products-and-services/payments-transfers-cheques/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/financial-pr...
    - beardyw 2y ago
      I think the free here related to payments within the country. I now understand and it sounds like X payments wouldn't be relevant to me.
- darknavi 2y ago
  Venmo, Facebook Messenger payments, PayPal, CashApp, Zelle, now X. These are all symptoms of a complete failure of our (US at least) banking system to provide a secure, nice to use system that is universal. The closest we get is Zelle and it's a complete joke with vague mechanics that are sometimes-email-sometimes-phonenumber. My personal bank's integration to Zelle is clunky and takes about 10x as much effort vs Messenger pay or Venmo.
simonsarris 2y ago
I was expecting Jack Dorsey to do this with Twitter and SQ/Cash App (since he was the founder and CEO of both of them) ages ago, but it never happened. One of the most baffling losses of steam and vision in my life to watch him do so little for so long.
- stephenhuey 2y ago
  I swore off Square long ago because I made a handle using the names of me and my wife to let people contribute to a honeymoon fund when we got married and then after a couple friends contributed, Cash banned my handle and support wrote me back only one time and then was forever afterward silent and never restored my account, and I thought, "Great, another Silicon Valley app where the goal is to provide as little support as possible, only it's not about photos or email, it's about money, so that seems like the worst fit for Silicon Valley where they don't like to lift a finger to help you with anything!" Ever since I've seen zero reason to use them over a sea of viable alternatives. My stodgy old bank lets me use Zelle, and my stodgy old bank answers the phone when I call. I can also drive a few minutes to talk to them face to face if there is a real problem with my MONEY.
  - BigGreenJorts 2y ago
    As a Canadian who has worked in the US for a bit, something I always find strange is the American aversion to Zelle. E-transfers are the equivalent here, and everyone uses it and as it's rolled out over the years, I've definitely seen the literal delight from people learning they don't have to download a new app, make a new account, anything else. But every American insisted I make a venmo account, when both of our bank accounts supported Zelle.
    - PyWoody 2y ago
      As an American, I've never understood it either. I've watched family and friends spend hours setting up Venmo to send each other $20 when both of them already have Zelle built into their banking apps. It makes no sense to me.
imtringued 2y ago
This makes no sense. Elon Muk hase nough money that he doesn't need to partner weith Visa at all. Especially in the EU all he has to do is acquire a license for an E-Money Institute. This is nothing but a glorified patreon or twitch subscription.
throwaway48476 2y ago
Partnering with visa is not an alternative. This does nothing for the issues of debanking and financial censorship.

30 points by macleginn 2y ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42854715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42854715

And this is the functionality that makes social media sites worth it for the vast majority of people. They are there following people who are there to make money. The vast majority of people involved in social media are primarily or secondarily there because of money. So this move makes sense. And that's why decentralized, federated, or whatever social networks will never gain a large scale (>1 million or so) users. The governments of the world will never allow non-corporations to provide the money transfers necessary for people to "make a living" on such sites. That's not a bad thing, but it does mean tha "alternative" social media really needs to stop chasing these kinds of users.

woodruffw 2y ago
Hm? I thought most people were on social media for, you know, social things: sharing photos, discussions, etc. Sending money is an important social activity, but I can't think of a single time I've wanted to use Twitter (when I used it) to send money -- the circles of activities weren't heavily overlapping. (This has nothing to do with politics or decentralization or anything else.)
- MBCook 2y ago
  “Social” means people, and “media” means videos begging for money. I’m sure this will work out great.
raincole 2y ago
> And that's why decentralized, federated, or whatever social networks will never gain a large scale (>1 million or so) users. The governments of the world will never allow non-corporations to provide the money transfers necessary for people to "make a living" on such sites. Sure, if you ignore the simple fact that Twitter reached > 100M users when it had zero money transfer feature for the end users.
kurito 2y ago
I really don't get this. Why would I want to send money via a social media site, especially twitter in its current state?
- nout 2y ago
  Because you can use actual value to incentivize what you want to see rather than "cheap" likes. At the same time if you provide posts that are valuable to others, then you receive value back. I don't like the exclusive solution that X is building where majority of people will be excluded from participating, but you asked about the "why".
hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
>And this is the functionality that makes social media sites worth it for the vast majority of people. The feature no major western social media site has had is the one that make it worth it for the majority of users? Seems like an extreme claim without any backing or logic behind it.
greyface- 2y ago
This is what the Nostr people have been saying, and it's also why I've avoided Nostr even as a fairly strong Bitcoin advocate. I don't go to social media to transfer money; I go to social media to freely exchange information with my social peers.
- nout 2y ago
  This is what facebook used to be. You only see your social peers, you don't see any other "famous"/well known people that you don't know personally. This could be done on nostr quite easily, but it's just too tempting to start following the famous personas.
tekno45 2y ago
sounds like you have no friends to connect with if you're there for money.
RiverCrochet 2y ago
I think you're right with what you say about "alternative" social media. > And that's why decentralized, federated, or whatever social networks will never gain a large scale (>1 million or so) users This is fine. If we have 500 decentralized social networks and 2 centralized social networks, it's awesome. The decentralized networks will be harder for people to make money off of, but not impossible. That's also good. You can use the big soulless social networks for moneymaking, then return to the smaller ones for actual genuine social interaction. > The governments of the world will never allow non-corporations to provide the money transfers necessary for people to "make a living" on such sites. Before the Internet, we had money orders. You can still get them and cash them. In the 90's I used to order stuff via mail using money orders. It's riskier, but I'm not sure it's very much more riskier if you are dealing with someone you are following that has a group you are a member of. It is less convenient.
flas9sd 2y ago
centralized services can execute on "give every user a wallet", but federated services and protocols can also add an attribute to piggyback on the addressbook that is inherent to a following/follower relation. Subscriber tiers and encrypted content is harder, but the peer discovery is already there.

josefritzishere 2y ago

And here I was thinking the main point of social media was socialization.

HKH2 2y ago
Money talks.
rcMgD2BwE72F 2y ago
On Mastodon, it is.
paxys 2y ago
Is splitting bills/sending money to your friends not socialization?

hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago

This has been Musks goal for a long time. But while trying to accomplish it he's burned the goodwill and much of the public perception of Twitter/X as a good company. I certainly have a highly negative view of Twitter/X and wouldn't trust the platform with any financial information or using it for financial transactions no matter who its backed by, but that's reflected in my not having a Twitter/X account to begin with so its a moot point.

MBCook 2y ago
I get him, but why Visa? As a company I’d be terrified to be tied to his brand in any way. I also suspect the primary use of this may end up being scams, which seems like a really bad market to get into. Now not only can you fake having cancer or whatever, you can ask for donations in-app! Or let people help you in your fight against $EVIL_THING by donating to your cause (no matter how real or not) without leaving the site. Or you can just peddle your new sponsor $WONDERFUL_THING. If it’s not primarily used for scams, seems likely to turn the platform into a big begging space. Before you had to convince people to go to IndieGoGo or your site or whatever. I know this has always been his dream. I just don’t see a likelihood of it making anything better. And I’d say that for any social network. Maybe Meta hasn’t done it because they realized that would likely be the case?
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Also, "why Visa" from the X.com perspective. As far as I can tell, Musk's vision was WeChat for the Western world. The platform for everything. WeChat replaces Visa, it doesn't use Visa or a competitor. If X.com is using Visa then Visa is the platform, not X.com. Using Visa feels like an admission of defeat to me.
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    I imagine it has to do with the difficulty of financial compliance. Musk was part of PayPal which has gotten into trouble before for being not quite a bank and attempting to do bank-like things.

ttoinou 2y ago

It’s a mystery to me why Meta / Facebook failed to integrate native payments into their products. They had 10 years and carte blanche to do it, but nothing happened. And what happened to Libra ?

robertlagrant 2y ago
I wonder if they'd be eyed by regulators for doing so, but yes, it does seem odd they didn't at least integrate Paypal or similar.
ComputerGuru 2y ago
Libra was shuttered due to feds saying “we have no legal reason to stop you but we still wish you to stop” and Zuckerberg (after some things we are not privy to) agreeing. There was a submission on this from an insider sometime in the past year. (IMHO: no loss to the world whatsoever.)
paxys 2y ago
They do exactly this all over the world. Look at WhatsApp Pay.
- simonsarris 2y ago
  Yeah that they do it globally but not in the US (other than a kind of meagre payment transfer on FB that used to exist) makes me wonder if they were bullied, federally, into not doing so.
  - paxys 2y ago
    A simpler explanation is that US doesn't have the banking infrastructure to support these kinds of micropayments. ACH transfers take 3-5 days and require you to link a checking account. Debit & credit card transactions have high fees. Chargebacks/fraud are a constant problem. So no payment processor wants to take on this complexity and liability.
Molitor5901 2y ago

BearOso 2y ago

It's because Musk got his feelings hurt. When PayPal formed, he and his money transfer idea were thrown out because he wanted to make a service doing exactly this and name it "X". Many of us predicted this happening.

robertlagrant 2y ago
Didn't he say he wanted to do this? I'm not sure how much predicting was necessary.
- pram 2y ago
  Yes, he also said people sending payments on Twitter would become 50% of the world financial system (lol)
- MBCook 2y ago
  He’s been trying to make an everything-including-payments thing called X for decades. He did say he’d do this with Twitter, but as GP points out it wasn’t a new idea for him then. This is a “keep doing the same thing until it works to prove I was right and those others who forced me out were idiots with no vision” kind of a thing.

zelias 2y ago

Here's a hypothetical: 1) you put a bunch of money "in" this 2) you say something on twitter Elon dislikes 3) you get banned 4) you lose access to your money??? Seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Sounds like PayPal.
- throwaway290 2y ago
  If everyone who says something bad about paypal would be banned from paypal it would have no users left! Take issue with their policies as much as you want but it's telling that almost no one even knows who PayPal's CEO is. That's how it's supposed to be

beardyw 2y ago

Maybe it's an American thing, but I really can't see the point of this. Or PayPal.

lm28469 2y ago
Especially now that instant and free bank transfer are mandatory in the EU
- dawnerd 2y ago
  Makes no sense in the Us either though with basically everyone having access to Zelle.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    I have both a US and an Australian bank account. Zelle sucks compared to what's considered table stakes overseas.
- xioxox 2y ago
  Free bank transfers are not mandatory in the EU. The bank just has to charge the same for a national transfer as an EU transfer: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/financial-products-and-services/payments-transfers-cheques/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/financial-pr...
  - beardyw 2y ago
    I think the free here related to payments within the country. I now understand and it sounds like X payments wouldn't be relevant to me.
darknavi 2y ago
Venmo, Facebook Messenger payments, PayPal, CashApp, Zelle, now X. These are all symptoms of a complete failure of our (US at least) banking system to provide a secure, nice to use system that is universal. The closest we get is Zelle and it's a complete joke with vague mechanics that are sometimes-email-sometimes-phonenumber. My personal bank's integration to Zelle is clunky and takes about 10x as much effort vs Messenger pay or Venmo.

simonsarris 2y ago

I was expecting Jack Dorsey to do this with Twitter and SQ/Cash App (since he was the founder and CEO of both of them) ages ago, but it never happened. One of the most baffling losses of steam and vision in my life to watch him do so little for so long.

stephenhuey 2y ago
I swore off Square long ago because I made a handle using the names of me and my wife to let people contribute to a honeymoon fund when we got married and then after a couple friends contributed, Cash banned my handle and support wrote me back only one time and then was forever afterward silent and never restored my account, and I thought, "Great, another Silicon Valley app where the goal is to provide as little support as possible, only it's not about photos or email, it's about money, so that seems like the worst fit for Silicon Valley where they don't like to lift a finger to help you with anything!" Ever since I've seen zero reason to use them over a sea of viable alternatives. My stodgy old bank lets me use Zelle, and my stodgy old bank answers the phone when I call. I can also drive a few minutes to talk to them face to face if there is a real problem with my MONEY.
- BigGreenJorts 2y ago
  As a Canadian who has worked in the US for a bit, something I always find strange is the American aversion to Zelle. E-transfers are the equivalent here, and everyone uses it and as it's rolled out over the years, I've definitely seen the literal delight from people learning they don't have to download a new app, make a new account, anything else. But every American insisted I make a venmo account, when both of our bank accounts supported Zelle.
  - PyWoody 2y ago
    As an American, I've never understood it either. I've watched family and friends spend hours setting up Venmo to send each other $20 when both of them already have Zelle built into their banking apps. It makes no sense to me.

imtringued 2y ago

This makes no sense. Elon Muk hase nough money that he doesn't need to partner weith Visa at all. Especially in the EU all he has to do is acquire a license for an E-Money Institute. This is nothing but a glorified patreon or twitch subscription.

throwaway48476 2y ago

Partnering with visa is not an alternative. This does nothing for the issues of debanking and financial censorship.