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Seth Eisen
American Payment Processors really need more competition. They can not be trusted to act in a free market sense and not drift into a chaindog for political ideas.
Payment processing is one of those things that really should have been treated as a public utility from the start. The same way we treat water, electricity, and phone lines. But even getting the internet treated as a utility has been a losing battle thus far.
Only problem with a public utility like that now would be Trump and his Insane Cunt Posey would weaponize it for the religious right.
As if they’re not weaponizing private entities anyway
Would it be possible to build a FOSS alternative to all this?
Does Bitcoin count?
Yes, it does. Pretty wild that people will proudly fly their luddite flag even in threads like these lol.
With how volatile cryptocurrency has been in general in the last decade or so, I wouldn’t bet on it.
Crypto is ultimately a different form of money, as compared with fiat.
What I think people in this discussion are seeking is an electronic, FOSS , secure network that can facilitate economic transactions of fiat currency.
Of course the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive
Fiat currency is the problem
It really isn’t, in this case. The issue is not the currency being used for the transactions, but rather two companies having a duopoly on processing those transactions that allow them to dictate terms to other people on how they can legally use their money. If there were two similar points of failure in processing cryptocurrency transactions, they would be just as vulnerable to having whoever occupied those two spots throwing their weight around. Sure, I suppose in that situation, companies could take payments to a new wallet easier than they could open new business accounts, and bypass the restrictions temporarily, but it still wouldn’t be a viable solution in the long term.
Does DAI count?
What’s DAI?
They’re trying with GNU Taler, but it’s pretty much a pipe dream at this point.
I feel like it should be super easy now for smaller competitors to pop up by just offering digital credit services using tap on mobile phones. No need to manufacture and ship out plastic cards, just a digital version people keep on the phone, until they get large enough to be able to provide physical cards.
The issues here are trust, security, adoption and so forth. It’s not easy to start a competition here I’d say.
Well at least with phone tap there’s like a limit of $200, so maybe some company can corner a niche market where they only cover small daily purchases. No $10,000 credit balances or $2000 purchases and points and whatnot, just like $1000 balance limits and max $200 on purchases through tap.
You wouldn’t need quite as much capital that way, and I bet that would eat a good chunk of business from visa and MasterCard.
It’s a catch 22. You need a phenomenal amount of capital to stand up a payment network with all those criteria, but anyone with that amount of capital can’t actually be trusted not to abuse their position in exactly the same way the existing banking networks have.
Have you tried Discover or American Express?
I live miles and/or kilometers away from the three business that accept either of those
It feels to me like payment processing has a similar function to physical currency. Like all of those security features on the bills are used to ensure the transaction is trusted.
Point being, I’ve long thought that payment processors are essentially doing a job that should be done by the government.
There are strange gaps where physical services have digital analogues but are completely ignored by the government.
I don’t understand why the treasury doesn’t process payments or why the post office doesn’t issue email addresses, for another example.
Anyways, back to the point, physical currency specifically says that it is valid for all debts. If they applied the same logic to payment processing, then this would never happen.
Probably because government and the people in charge of government are largely tech illiterate and being literate or seeking policy advice from literate people isn’t expected.
It is fucking wild that we don’t have INTERAC credit cards here in Canada
Postal banking is a thing in some places.
I’m not sure I want the government running those services. Like a basic one, sure, but for handling credit cards and general banking services? Nah, I don’t want the Trump administration having direct access to my purchases.
I don’t see any reason to trust the credit industry more than the government, though.
The main reason is that the credit industry isn’t in the business of running an intelligence service or part of law enforcement. That said, what they are connected to is almost the same as an intelligence service, that being the advertising industry, and there’s literally nothing stopping them from selling or even being forced to give their data to law enforcement. The only reason it doesn’t happen more I’d say is just the optics of it.
Ultimately what’s needed is a digital payment system that’s at least somewhat anonymous, but that’s an incredibly hard nut to crack. Bitcoin tried it, but largely failed to do so (and immediately got corrupted by speculators that wanted to use it as a forex instead of currency). A couple of the other crypto currencies that have come out since then have claimed to be better but I’m still incredibly skeptical that there’s any real anonymity there.