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1bil+ people have surrendered their right to artistic expression to Google, and another 1bil+ to Apple, and another 1bil+ to Microsoft. Many more billions have
by anonymous908213 6mo ago
1bil+ people have surrendered their right to artistic expression to Google, and another 1bil+ to Apple, and another 1bil+ to Microsoft. Many more billions have surrendered it to Visa and Mastercard. The world will only continue to get worse for the foreseeable future as five corporations assert global control over what is allowed to be published. It is mournful knowing that humanity's peak is behind us.
- oceansky 6mo agoBrazil and India have created alternatives to Mastercard/Visa duopoly. EU is seeking to do the same.
- gambiting 6mo agoMany countries have alternatives already. In Poland Blik is ubiquitous and very very easy to use. And I love how it's implemented, Visa and MasterCard could learn from it. Tldr - you open the app on your phone and it gives you a 6 digit BLIK code, you give that code to the seller, then a notification comes up on the app saying "seller X is trying to debit your account by amount Y, agree?". It's brilliant because then the seller gets nothing identifiable about you. Even if someone overhears the code, it's only valid 60 second so it's useless. Unlike with regular cards there is no risk of losing one or using a fake terminal that scans your card instead. And any transaction has to be explicitly rather than implicitly approved. Love it.
- floam 6mo ago6 digits effectively the time salted … the other digits are your lat long lol.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- lxgr 6mo agoThis is indeed one of the biggest weaknesses of "pull-based" payment cards, and something most if not all natively phone-based methods do better. The best credit and debit cards can do is PIN verification or biometrics (for Apple/Google Pay), but even there you still trust the terminal to not show you a different amount than you'll be charged (assuming the screen is even pointing towards you; I've often been asked to tap without seeing what I'm even consenting to). Online, there's 3DS, but that's not required everywhere and for every transaction. There once was a vision to extend both positive cardholder approval and cardholder authentication for each card transaction, but it turns out the friction of that is higher on average than just letting everything but the most egregiously suspicious fraud go through by default and handle the rest via the disputes process. Out of curiosity: > you open the app on your phone and it gives you a 6 digit BLIK code, you give that code to the seller Is this the flow for online payments as well, or only for in-person payments?
- gambiting 6mo ago>>Is this the flow for online payments as well, or only for in-person payments? works for both
- lxgr 6mo agoInteresting, I wonder if there is some other initiation channel then? The chance of collisions with random 6-digit codes seems non-negligible.
- TeMPOraL 6mo agoI've been wondering this too. As I understand it, BLIK codes are generated on the back-end, so I imagine they have some clever anti-collision measures in place. What I know is: - The TTL of the code is variable; on some days I've noticed it to be as low as 60 seconds, on others around 3+ minutes. Not sure if it depends on the type of transaction or time of day. - After entering the code in charging widget/terminal, or giving it to a merchant, you still get a screen on which you need to explicitly confirm the transaction; it displays the amount and name of charging entity, so this would presumably reduce the impact of possible collision. - Sometimes the codes generate instantly, sometimes it takes a few seconds; I always assumed it's network connection lag and/or usual webshit performance issues, but it would also be consistent with an anti-collision measure - if you run out of 6-digit codes, wait a second or two, some will free up. - Not once I've heard any report or rumor about a collision.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6mo agoThat's the problem. Every country has an alternative or ten, but what people actually need is one system that works across borders. That's the only way it reaches enough critical mass to be useful internationally beyond the EU, which nowadays is a requirement for it to be able to replace Visa/Mastercard in a decade or so.
- thaumasiotes 6mo agoThere's never been a system like that. Given this reality, it seems like a stretch to say that people need one.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6mo agoVisa/Mastercard is the system right now. European banks issue these US debit cards often as the primary card for an account.
- iknowstuff 6mo agoYeah but approving every purchase from a merchant I trust, like Amazon, would be annoying. Gotta allow for one tap to purchase, like eg apple pay does
- snicky 6mo agoIIRC BLIK asks you if you want to skip the verification next time you buy from the same merchant.
- wincy 6mo agoI misread blik as “bilk” which is… probably the last word you’d want associated with your credit card or payment processor in English.
- kulahan 6mo agoThere used to be a beer designed to be mixed with milk called bilk. Last I heard, it was terrible. Maybe it's still around - I think it's Japanese, so it's unlikely I'd happen across it.
- ArekDymalski 6mo agoBLIK rocks. In addition to being a payment system for goods and services it can be used for instant private money transfers between individuals.
- dtech 6mo agoMany European countries have had viable online alternatives since forever, and a lot of them are being consolidated into Werk, which will also enable physical payments
- cubefox 6mo agoI think you mean Wero
- mastermage 6mo agoalso it seems like the digital euro is getting forward.
- MikeTheGreat 6mo agoI'm pretty sure that I know what the answer is (sadly), but I'll try anyways: Any chance folks in the US can use these, in the US? This is a genuine question, although I don't have my hopes up. It would be nice to have some actual competition / choices
- NewJazz 6mo agoHope you like carrying cash.
- lmm 6mo agoIt costs you nothing but a few hours (heck, you may even make money on the points) to get a Discover card, which you can use on Japanese game sites that don't apply the Visa/Mastercard censorship (they have a partnership with JCB). It's a small move, but most people can't even be bothered to do that much for competition.
- weberer 6mo agoI think he's referring to the SEPA network, which isn't really an alternative to credit cards. I've only seen it used to pay for rent and bills. Theoretically there's SEPA Instant payments, but I've never seen any merchants that use it.
- 0x3f 6mo agoThe EU 'seeks' to do a lot of things but is notoriously ineffective.
- philipallstar 6mo agoWirecard was pretty good. Assuming you're Jan Marsalek.
- lxgr 6mo agoThe EU already managed to make card payments significantly cheaper and more secure within a few years than they'll probably ever be in the US (still no PINs and no 3DS, and interchange will probably never get regulated because everybody freelances as a severely underpaid lobbyist thanks to frequent flyer miles), to say nothing of regulating a free and instant bank payment scheme into existence while FedNow is still rolling out. Say what you will about EU inefficiency and regulations, but in my view, at least their financial ones have been largely on point.
- anonym29 6mo agoBitcoin exists. Completely permissionless, anyone on earth can use it. Easier to accept as a merchant than any third party integration. Doesn't require you to trust any government at all.
- lxgr 6mo agoUnfortunately it's also pretty clunky for tax reasons in many places and inherently deflationary (and as such problematic from an economic point of view). Sure, great if you don't trust your government or whoever issues your local currency, but if you can, there are better alternatives. Trust is an asset, not just a liability.
- anonym29 6mo agoWell-placed trust is a small asset, but misplaced trust is a massive liability.
- lxgr 6mo agoIt might not always be warranted, but where it was, increased trust in society, institutions, and systems has been the enabler for economic growth and human development in the past centuries. Talk it down at your own (or more accurately, at all our) peril.
- anonym29 6mo agoEconomic growth and human development over the last several centuries has been the result of a complex web of interleaved prerequisites, that said, trust wasn't one them. People trusted institutions for thousands of years prior to the scientific revolution. Europe had plenty of trust in religious institutions between the collapse of the Roman empire and the scientific revolution, and you know what it got them? Superstition, witch hunts, barbarism in the name of proselytizing, failed pandemic responses, and a near complete stall in technological and scientific breakthroughs for a millennium. What the scientific revolution brought us was the decision to not trust, but to reason, to measure, to hypothesize, to verify. Facts matter. Humans are stupid and it is human nature to place trust exactly where trust is least warranted.
- wat10000 6mo agoChina has cleverly replaced the Mastercard/Visa duopoly with an AliPay/WeChat Pay duopoly.
- thaumasiotes 6mo agoThey'd like to. Vending machines will no longer sell to you unless you can pay that way. For more significant things, you can still use cash. I'd go down to my landlord's bank every three months to pay the rent.
- kulahan 6mo agoWas that like, enforced? Or did your landlord potentially just prefer cash? I know very little about how land-ownership works in China, except that nobody really ever owns their land.
- thaumasiotes 6mo agoMy landlord preferred to be paid through Alipay. I had to pay in cash because Alipay wouldn't let me make payments that large. (Because my Alipay account was backed by a foreign credit card as opposed to a Chinese bank account, I assume. If you're curious, the rent was about US$700 / month, so the payment would have been about US$2100.) I don't see that landownership is really relevant. Mostly it's done on the basis of notional 70-year leases from the government. Since the government dates to 1949, the first round of those recently expired. There was a lot of curiosity beforehand as to what would happen, but it doesn't seem to have made enough of a splash that anyone commented about it (where I could see) afterwards. So I don't know how it turned out. I understand that rural peasants may sometimes own their land outright. In this case, I was renting one apartment in a building with 5-6 floors and I think 4 apartments per floor.
- add-sub-mul-div 6mo agoNot Microsoft. "Sideloading" is not even a term in Windows culture the way it is with Apple and Google because it's not a second-class citizen.
- girvo 6mo agoThat’s not for lack of trying, though: remember Windows RT?
- ACCount37 6mo agoMS has mostly abandoned that approach now. But during Windows 8 days? Yeah. There was a legitimate concern that MS will lock down Windows and try to funnel everything through Microsoft Store, establishing an Apple-style walled garden. The concern was serious enough that Valve took a defensive posture and started investing into Linux support. Which, at first, largely failed - but eventually resulted in Steam Deck.
- girvo 6mo agoFor sure, and I'm glad they backed off from it. I'm also glad they did it because of how it pushed Valve into making Steam OS so good. But Microsoft really did want to go down the same path, and I do not trust them not to try it again.
- wiseowise 6mo agoWinRT wasn’t locked down.
- lxgr 6mo agoHey, on the other hand, zero malware! It is zero, right? Please say it's zero... Just today I found a malicious version of Ledger on the macOS app store. It's been there for five weeks, and there are already some anecdotes out there of people losing their coins. I guess that's somehow the developer's fault for not "staking their claim" to their name, as Apple seems to only monitor for malicious duplicate submissions if the original is in the App Store to begin with...
- g-b-r 6mo agoSure, and zero ads and total privacy, as well
- ddtaylor 6mo agoAds would never be used for malware either, thankfully.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- cubefox 6mo agoAnd only 30% fees, just for being on the app store!
- peterspath 6mo ago15 for most
- NetMageSCW 6mo agoOnly if you charge for your app - and how much free labor and bandwidth do you give away? Apple gives away millions.
- Sayrus 6mo ago$99 per year for your developer account required to distribute applications. At AWS pricing, that's a bit over a TB of traffic. At any normal pricing, that's anywhere from 10TB to a few hundreds. At volume pricing, that's even more. How many apps are paying for traffic they don't use? Apple pockets millions.
- Ferret7446 6mo agoI wonder if this was coerced by Visa/MasterCard yet again, as they have done against many Japanese styled games in the past years. Despite some motions from the current administration, the payment processor monopoly seems keen on policing the public, which is one reason why crypto must still exist as a plan B payment method.
- user34283 6mo agoMaybe regulators can be bothered this decade to do something about these corporations abusing their power over mobile app distribution and payment processing. The EU's DMA has been a step in the right direction, even if it's yet been fairly toothless with Apple and Google flouting it.
- fuzzy_biscuit 6mo agoThey could be bothered if they weren't indirectly (or directly, I imagine) on the dole.
- Cider9986 6mo agoMonero, or honestly any cryptocurrency is a huge improvement on trad payment processors.
- DiffTheEnder 6mo agoThe walled garden approach stifles creativity and robs talented artists of the opportunity to express their work and get paid fairly. Hope the EU or another progressive regulatory body allows users to fully control what they can/can't download and from where on to the phones they purcahsed.
- theturtletalks 6mo agoSellers across every marketplace have to rise up and demand interoperability and then these rent seeking marketplace will fade.
- PurpleRamen 6mo agoSurrendered in what way? Do those billion of people exclusively only use android/iOS and only pay with Visa/Mastercard?
- fortyseven 6mo agoThese companies control content by exerting pressure on those they either control directly or indirectly, by denying them and their customers access to their services, if they in any way threaten the profitability of their business. And when this kind of power it's consolidated with a handful of companies, you leave people with nowhere to go for any kind of real success. So you're forced to compromise your vision in order to get any shelf space. Money money money money money money money money money. Money.
- PurpleRamen 6mo ago> you leave people with nowhere to go for any kind of real success. This game is available on Steam, Epic Games, itch.io, MacOS, Xbox, Switch, Playstation, iOS, and probably some more. Play Store is just one platform, a big one, sure, but it's not like there is a coordinated attack on banning this game from the internet.
- sambuccid 6mo agoI'm very hopeful for the "digital euro" that is planned in europe, and if it works and as they say brings digital, anonymous, online and offline transactions, that are not dependent on a private bank, I think it could be an amazing example that other countries could later follow