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I hate to point out that we have completely free payment options (way too free for most) that could prevent all of this based on b***** technology. But then ag

• timeon 1y ago
  Or how about actually elected alternative: government regulating these payment providers not to do this? (At least in countries where elections have total cap for donors per party.)
  • tavavex 1y ago
    Both Visa and Mastercard are American companies. What do you think the likelihood is that the US in its current situation regulates them? As for other countries, I'm not even sure they have the leverage when faced with an 'essential' duopoly that everyone already relies on.
    • thewebguyd 1y ago
      > I'm not even sure they have the leverage when faced with an 'essential' duopoly that everyone already relies on. The fact they are so essential should give the nations all the leverage - "Your service has become too important to the function of our nation, so we are nationalizing your company and making it a public service." Time to stop being afraid of doing that - if a private company is THAT important to the continuing functioning of your society, then that company has lost their right to be a private for profit business and needs to be nationalized, at least partially to keep them in check and make sure they are following the laws of the nations they operate in. We, as societies, should have never allowed any corporation to become more powerful than their governments.
• newswasboring 1y ago
  why are you censoring bitcoin?
  • falcor84 1y ago
    Oh, I thought it was a different b-word
    • WithinReason 1y ago
      it was
      • newswasboring 1y ago
        what is this skullduggery lol. just say it.
        • WithinReason 1y ago
          it was BLOCKCHAIN
          • baobabKoodaa 1y ago
            great. now i need a shower.
• 0dayz 1y ago
  Using blockchain would come with other risks. Such as different middlemen having their own agenda.
  • fidelramos 1y ago
    A decentralized blockchain has no middlemen, the trust is put in the network to be honest.
    • 0dayz 1y ago
      The same can be said to a degree about cash. Since we don't actually need visa or mastercard, but they make it damn convenient to buy stuff. Similarly blockchain got their equivalent of this.
      • fidelramos 1y ago
        Right, that's why the whitepaper is titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". The idea is to bring many of cash payments features to the digital world, which are not possible with payment systems with intermediaries: uncensorability (nobody can keep you from transferring cash); non-reversability (no chargebacks, escrow systems are optional); low fees (contentious because BTC decided not to scale on-chain, but that was Satoshi Nakamoto's idea.
• makeitdouble 1y ago
  > completely free payment options I thought you were going for direct bank to bank operations. I think these are currently the most practical and promising way to get out of the credit card duopoly's influence. It is more onerous on KYC check, but that sounds like a smaller price than a paid service just not existing at all.
  • ethbr1 1y ago
    The issue with bank to bank is that consumers don’t have an intermediary willing to fight (read: chargeback) on their behalf, no? I imagine few banks are staffed and teched to replicate payment processors’ anti-fraud systems.
    • dartharva 1y ago
      The solution to that is requiring your PIN, 2FA and ML-powered suspicious transaction alerts for each transaction. It's actually not as cumbersome as it sounds and takes less than five seconds at its best; UPI in India has perfected it.
      • resonious 1y ago
        Another reason for chargebacks is fraudulent merchants. If somebody sells me a fake item, I highly doubt they are going to willingly refund me when I complain to them about it.
        • makeitdouble 1y ago
          That should either be handled by a court or customer protection action agency, or by your private insurance (basically like how it works with cash transactions) Baking it into the payment processing warps the whole situation.
    • imtringued 1y ago
      This is an industry where chargebacks don't make sense. You either buy and pay or you don't and if you're on the fence, then don't. The only necessary intermediary is a trustworthy online shop/platform with a reasonable refund policy.
• rcxdude 1y ago
  crypto has well and truly poisoned its own well here, with the sheer number of scams and fraud on the various platforms. It's also hella expensive as a way to take payments, since you usually have 2x exchange fees as well as the network transaction fees on a payment.
  • superkuh 1y ago
    Crypto didn't do that. Investment bros did. Pretty much everything created after 2015 is a scam and hardly related to cryptocurrency at all. Just traditional investment/scam types moving in and adopting the name/language for popularity. But you're right about the outcome from this. Most people don't know the difference, were only exposed to the post-2015 scams, and just assume all cryptocurrency is a scam.
    • BoiledCabbage 1y ago
      > Crypto didn't do that. Investment bros did. So why didn't crypto block or ban them from doing these scams using their technology? Unless you're saying crypto created the problem at this scale and can do nothing to stop the problem it created...?
      • wallst07 1y ago
        >So why didn't crypto block or ban I think you have a misunderstanding of the technology.
      • fidelramos 1y ago
        > So why didn't crypto block or ban them from doing these scams using their technology? Bitcoin code is open-source. How do you prevent someone from using open-source?
      • southernplaces7 1y ago
        >So why didn't crypto block or ban them from doing these scams using their technology? And here we have a neat example of how this site, called "hacker news" of all things, can sometimes take on a absurdly idiotic hive-mind approach to some technology X where brainless hostility combines with laughable ignorance to reject something without knowing the first thing about it, even when the thing is emphatically a practical solution to a widely discussed problem.
• coffeebeqn 1y ago
  If you want a somewhat simple experience you still need to go through the exchanges which could also be coerced into censorship. I guess you can move the coins through multiple wallets but how many people want to jump through those hoops
• bryanlarsen 1y ago
  UPI in India, Pix in Brazil, Interac in Canada, various iBAN schemes in Europe, WeChat and AliPay in China. Everywhere but the US has good options that aren't the credit card duopoly or the scam / crime filled bitcoin.
  • tavavex 1y ago
    These examples aren't quite apples-to-apples. Yes, I can e-transfer money to other people in Canada I know or even pay small businesses for their services. But that only applies to one country. When I buy something on Steam or Itch, I must send money abroad, and the same is true for countless other things. And what options do you have for that besides the Visa/MC duopoly or crypto? I'm not a crypto user, but I see it as the only realistic future way of moving money to buy anything that the holy payment processors deem icky, barring the near-zero chance of them being regulated in the US or a popular competitor suddenly appearing.
    • dartharva 1y ago
      Aren't they already collecting through local entities in the first place and then converting them to dollars? Also, Steam does support local card companies like RuPay in India.
    • bryanlarsen 1y ago
      Steam collects GST so they've already figured that out. But your basic thesis is correct, it's not apples-to-apples. Debit vs credit is a significant difference. Another major issue is that while the regulations for any one of the alternatives on my list aren't particularly onerous, I imagine the superset of all the regulations/contracts might well be.
      • tavavex 1y ago
        I'm not sure how exactly Steam pays local taxes, be it a Canadian third party that siphons the extra money for them or if they just send each region the tax money, but either way the money is flowing abroad at some point. Then there's individual transactions. If you need to internationally send someone money and the payment processors say no for any reason, you're largely SOL. I guess you can mail cash directly, while that still exists. But my point that you can basically only go either through Visa/MC or through crypto stands, even though I don't particularly love either.
• flatline 1y ago
  Crypto moves the problem from payment providers like Visa to central exchanges like Coinbase. Until you have a completely decentralized ecosystem built around crypto, you run into trouble when offramping to fiat. If I recall, backpage accepted bitcoin when Visa dropped them, but it was way too much hassle to be useful. If you could pay rent and utilities and buy food using some sufficiently decentralized token, crypto may become a viable alternative.
  • Lerc 1y ago
    The principle should be that it shifts the problem to payment providers who can be switched out for other payment providers seamlessly. The providers are motivated to behave ethically because you have the option of going elsewhere. Paying with crypto is still not very usable but you can still do it directly which limits the degree of extortion that can be applied. I think it will get better as it ceases to be 'interesting' and people develop tools that just work rather than try to revolutionize your life.
  • fidelramos 1y ago
    > If you could pay rent and utilities and buy food using some sufficiently decentralized token, crypto may become a viable alternative. You can do all that today, although it requires some learning and setup, but at least in the US it's totally doable. I know of Joel Valenzuela who is an evangelist about paying everything with decentralized cryptocurrencies: https://descentr.net/ https://descentr.net/ The interesting thing about cryptocurrencies is using them directly, i.e. when users have their own wallets under their full control. Then it's magical when you make a transaction to somebody and think that nobody is censoring, filtering, moderating or rejecting it in any way. Oh and no PII either. Edit: typo.
  • Ferret7446 1y ago
    There is no monopoly on exchanges, and by nature of the technology it is impossible to monopolize exchanges.
• roguecoder 1y ago
  They aren't free as in beer, which is part of the problem. (The other major part being that the people who build them are in love with deflation, which makes them extremely hard to use as a currency.)
  • wmf 1y ago
    Deflation has been fixed by stablecoins but a lot of other problems remain.