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PIX is also better because it gives control back to the central bank (as it was with cash) and not private industry although they are providing the service. The
by sschueller 5mo ago
PIX is also better because it gives control back to the central bank (as it was with cash) and not private industry although they are providing the service. The central bank controls what payments are permitted by what laws exist, not some risk management system that has decided that your legal purchase is too risky or some foreign state has applied sanctions against you.
- philipallstar 5mo agoThat sounds a little authoritarian for many Western countries, I imagine.
- somewhatgoated 5mo agoI guess it comes down to who you would trust more - your own government which you have some control over via elections or some (potentially multinational) corporation which you have exactly zero control over?
- philipallstar 5mo agoIt's the other way around. You have choice with a company, and people can switch provider very quickly if they are bad. You have very, very coarse-grained control with the government every few years.
- vrganj 5mo agoI've moved countries five times in my life. I still haven't been able to fully get rid of my dependency on Big Tech or the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.
- NalNezumi 5mo agoIn the context of mastercard and visa being a duopoly and the recent debacle such as certain games being removed from steam because they threatened to not allow stream to use the card payment system, it's a pretty bad take. Not that central bank won't be able to do the same, but it would have to follow laws set by the government rather than law+whatever the card companies decide to.
- ambicapter 5mo agoAgree to disagree. Lock-in is a thing that companies design for.
- philipallstar 5mo agoAnd a government is pre-locked in.
- bildung 5mo agoOk, I choose to not use Visa/Mastercard in the US, and I want to subscribe to some saas. What do I do now? Or do you mean "choice" as in "you can always choose not the breathe or eat"?
- CobaltFire 5mo agoTo be pedantic American Express and Discover exist. But I agree with your meaning. We are beholden to some third party no matter how we move in the current situation.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoAmex is regularly rejected by businesses and cannot be your only credit card, so really you maybe have Discover. I also wouldn’t say either of those is particularly better than Visa/Mastercard. They all engage in the same practices more or less
- SoftTalker 5mo agoThe only places I've found that refuse AMEX are very small mom and pop operations. And of those, many don't accept cards of any type: cash only.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoFair enough, it's probably not as common as I think and is more of a reputation.
- Balooga 5mo agoCostco? [Edit] -- And I've frequented several independent coffee shops that are cashless.
- volkl48 5mo agoCostco doesn't even accept Mastercard (credit cards), so they're kind of a unique case here where they intentionally choose to only accept one particular type of credit cards.
- delfinom 5mo agoYou only have a potential choice until a company buys out all its competitors and surpresses the rest.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago> You have choice with a company, and people can switch provider very quickly if they are bad. There are exactly two companies in the global credit card market and they operate in lockstep, literally coming to agreements to shut down legal businesses together. Visa and MasterCard have absolutely no right to determine who is and isn't allowed to receive payment. Governments have that right, but that doesn't mean they should use it -- if they're abusing that right, people can vote them out. The effectiveness of people voting out harmful politicians is another matter, but that's kind of on the people being bad at voting, not the idea of government altogether, and at any rate you have no vote whatsoever in what MC/Visa do (unless you vote for government to regulate them!).
- deaux 5mo ago> You have choice with a company, This is wrong for a large share of the companies that most people deal with on a daily basis. And that share has been steadily increasing every single year.
- somewhatgoated 5mo agoLike others said that choice is not really given in this case. Also with the government option it wouldn’t mean that you can’t still use other methods - for example in brasil credit card or cash work just fine, PIX is just one (very convenient) option.
- throwaway2037 5mo agoDo corner stores (small informal convenience stores) in Brasil usually accept PIX? I assume they all cash-only. Also: What is PIX uptake/penetration like in the countryside? China is shocking how fast that countryside wet/farmer's markets started accepting AliPay. Literally, you can buy a kilo of pumpkin (namguo) using nothing but your mobile phone with AliPay, and the old lady running the stand (in a wet market) probably has a 6th grade education. (No hate on that!)
- snovv_crash 5mo agoIn Africa they've had this since ~2005 with the Mpesa system. It basically transfers cellphone credits as payment. In certain regions everyone with a dumb phone was hooked up and you could do anything from buy a coconut from a guy on the side of the road to pay your taxi driver to pay at the supermarket.
- throwaway2037 5mo agoWow, this is a great reply! "In Africa" -> Can you share a few countries? Google tells me that East Africa is the biggest users: Kenya, Tanzania, etc. (No hate on the use of "In Africa here"... as Google tells me it is used in at least 10 different African countries.)
- snovv_crash 5mo agoAnywhere that MTN (telecom provider) operates. East and southern Africa mostly.
- dormento 5mo ago
- surgical_fire 5mo ago> You have choice with a company, and people can switch provider very quickly Oh yeah? Please enlihhten me, how exactly can I switch providers from the Visa/Mastercard duopoly?
- vanjoe 5mo agoDuopoly is bad. We should work to fix that. A monopoly is worse.
- array_key_first 5mo agoTheres a natural tension here, because in order for this to be true you need a diverse market with many competitors. But that is bad usually, because it's extremely inefficient, so it gets optimized out. The monopolies we see are indeed an optimization - the natural climax of a developing market. Consider payments: you do not want to carry around 100 different cards and trinkets just to pay for things in your daily life, right? And for merchants, they do not want to make deals with 100 different companies to accept payments, right? So what's the end result? We see the monopolies in the US economy because our economy is very efficient. It could be even more efficient - consider, for example, how much time and money could be saved if only one phone OS existed. But then of course that's bad for you, the consumer, because then these huge corporations rule your life and can essentially do whatever they want.
- sschueller 5mo agoI trust my government (Switzerland) way more to do the thing that is right for the people and the law then some private company that has the primary goal of making money. It doesn't mean that governments don't make mistakes but the primary goal is to serve its people. That is what government is for in a functioning democracy. A functioning government is of the people for the people.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> I trust my government (Switzerland) I do, too. I’m not sure I trust Brussels.
- surgical_fire 5mo agoI certainly trust the EU a lot more than I trust US corporations.
- Lionga 5mo agoConsidering the head of EZB is a convicted criminal with, lets call it interesting, letters to the convicted criminal Sarkozy I am not sure what is plague and what cholera.
- dvfjsdhgfv 5mo agoTaken into account than of two convicted criminals, Sarkozy went to prison and will probably be sent there again, whereas Trump is running a big country, I'm pretty sure which is which.
- wsng 5mo agoLagarde is not a convicted criminal. She was convicted for negligence, but this is not a criminal conviction.
- throwaway2037 5mo ago[flagged]
- moralestapia 5mo agoBrazil is on the West, fyi.
- dragontamer 5mo agoThe new alignment isnt East vs West... But North vs Global South, which Brazil sees itself a part of the South.
- moralestapia 5mo ago??? Wrong thread? The comment I see reads like this: "That sounds a little authoritarian for many Western countries, I imagine."
- Nerwesta 5mo agoYeah the concept of "Western" is a relic of the Cold war, just like Western Europe / Eastern Europe ( past some countries being genuinely there ) It's still taught like that to younger people, but definitely shouldn't.
- dvfjsdhgfv 5mo ago> The new alignment isnt East vs West... But North vs Global South, which Brazil sees itself a part of the South. Where's Russia and Australia then?
- dragontamer 5mo agoAnd Cuba was in the West during the Cold war. We knew what East vs West meant, it's more a figurative phrase than anything. Today's alignment is shaping up to be North and South. Not quite 'versus' like the Cold war was.
- surgical_fire 5mo agoWest is just the US nowadays.
- amelius 5mo ago> That sounds a little authoritarian for many Western countries, I imagine. If you ever had your account blocked by Apple or Google, you know exactly why a government is the better option. At least you have the rule of law on your side. Big companies are the authoritarian situation, not the government.
- PowerElectronix 5mo agoIt deems to me that the rule of law is easier to apply to third parties than to the government that is in charge of administering it
- mothballed 5mo agoThis reminds me of how all the drug dealers use USPS because it actually requires a warrant to open the package. If the government has to enforce banking KYC/AML itself they won't be able to hide behind all the third party fuck-fuck games and they'll get sued into oblivion. I'm sure they'll play the normal federal court and sovereign fuck-fuck games but it would be glorious trying to watch them try to enforce the BSA and Patriot act bullshit while not being able to hide behind the auspice it's just a private bank collecting the data.
- amelius 5mo agoNot if your government properly implements separation of powers, as is the case in most Western countries. Yes, I'm aware someone is trying to undermine it in the U.S. currently. That doesn't mean that companies are a safe haven suddenly.
- PowerElectronix 5mo agoSeparation of powers is easy to erode and we are seeing that happening in a lot of western countries. Companies are, of course, never going to be trustworthy, but they at least can go out of business if they go full dystopian.
- 5mo ago
- RobotToaster 5mo agoThe choice is between the ECB and visa/mastercard (who are de-facto controlled by the US government). It's a shit situation we're in, but the ECB seems like the lesser evil.
- voxleone 5mo ago[dead]
- VerifiedReports 5mo agoEspecially now in the (former) USA.
- jeroenhd 5mo agoWero is run by the banks themselves, which are in turn controlled/restricted by the central bank. I don't think there's a meaningful difference on that front. The European ECB isn't really in a position to directly offer services to people, and relying on every country's central banks to cooperate will take decades.
- wslh 5mo agoThe difference is clearly that banks have a different agenda from central banks. SWIFT is a cooperative of banks also but it seems that some central banks endeavours are better. BTW Argentina created an innovation back in the early 2000s as a product of a crisis. It was implemented in record time and transfers were immediate back then and improving. It's not run by the central banks though.
- econ 5mo agoBit like Moldova automating government because there simply was no money for armies of overpaid burocrates.
- underlipton 5mo agoThe central bank is governed by a direct mandate from the government (and, effectively, the entire population, when dealing with a democracy). Commercial and investment banks are beholden to their board and shareholders. There's a clear conflict of interest in trying to dump a service that should be available to everyone onto a business with narrower concerns.
- jeroenhd 5mo agoI have been using iDeal for many years now and have yet to see any of the downsides of it being a product of a commercial bank. Perhaps it's a difference in banking culture between different countries; I would certainly not put the same trust and faith in a Wero alternative set up by American banks, that's for sure. Banks are beholden to policy from the central bank and financial authorities. Payment fees are capped, payment processing terms aren't a free-for all, and the power of individual banks is kept in check. The people doe have a voice in all of this, just not in the direct implementation process.
- dadoum 5mo agoAnd that's the whole reason why Wero has been made I think. It's because the ECB wants to advance on their digital euro plans due to sovereignty concerns, and I think this push is to dismiss that argument.
- dataflow 5mo ago> The central bank controls what payments are permitted by what laws exist, not some risk management system that has decided that your legal purchase is too risky or some foreign state has applied sanctions against you. That sounds worse to be honest. You're essentially asking for the government to be not only aware of but also able to control all digital payments. That upends how money has worked over (literally) millenia, and is an incredible risk to take. Giving someone in government the ability to block someone's payments and trusting they won't abuse it might be fine as long as good people remain in power, but do you really want to bet the entire nation's ability to live life on that? Furthermore, wouldn't determining if a payment is legal require prying into details of the transaction that may violate your privacy? And if they make an incorrect determination based on stuff that really wasn't their business in the first place, they now have the force of government behind them, going far beyond merely declining the transaction. I would think what you should want to advocate for is a system that cannot block payments (at least domestically) just like with cash, and enforcement either happens prior to enrollment, or after the fact through some other traditional law enforcement mechanism (warrants, etc.).
- dgoldstein0 5mo agoNot intending to defend either system but private financial institutions basically end up deputized as enforcement arms of anti money laundering and sanctions in the US and probably other countries where the payments systems are privatized. That's a why every bank has a big compliance department - the laws say a lot about who and what they can serve and they have to be on top of it. Which yes means sometimes legit transactions that match rules meant to catch money laundering and other shady business get blocked or flagged. Sometimes out of avoidance of legal risk, rather than actual certainly anything illegal is happening. I don't know if the centralized government implementation would be any better in that regard, but at least you could complain to the government instead of having a bank hide behind a law they didn't write but have to enforce.
- michaelt 5mo agoYou're right that politicians can pressure private financial institutions into cutting off anyone they don't like. For example Operation Choke Point [1] which cut off legal-but-scandalous businesses' access to the financial system, and getting WikiLeaks debanked for publishing material that made the government look bad. But some might see that as a sign you need more separation between the state and payment networks, rather than less. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point