I'm glad the Mastercard-Visa duopoly is finally getting some attention, these companies shouldn't be allowed to exercise the financial control they do. Payment infrastructure is not a free market - you can't just choose to pay via some other processor if they turn you down, they ARE the processors. Therefore, they should be under intense scrutiny when they refuse.
I think the mint should maintain a payment processor, and the post office should maintain an official email address for everyone.
these are basic things we need to exist in society, we should not be at the whims of private organizations.
Is a payment processor operated by the Federal Reserve good enough? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow
Well, it probably would be, except guess who killed it in favor of a crypto scheme? https://www.jitumaster.com/2025/06/us-president-signs-execut...
I agree about the PO though. Social media shouldn't be a for-profit enterprise either.
Is there another source that says what exactly happened in that executive order? I can't find one signed on june 6th that had anything to do with payments.
[0] was from March, and demanded treasury modernization (like paperless and stuff), but didn't really say anything about crypto or FedNow. And FedNow's website mentions nothing about the program being slowed down (just announcements about new things happening in Q3 and a bunch of new signed on banks).
0: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/03/28/2025-05...
I can find nothing about FedNow being replaced or even changed recently. Your source is the only one about this, and it's some no-name crypto junk site nobody's ever heard of.
I think the federal reserve is too close to the status quo to be effective for this. It is owned by the federally chartered banks, the same ones that all have longstanding relationships with the current payment processors.
A government organization like the mint should be in charge of the layer 1 of money transfer. Let the current providers adapt and sell their other services on top of it. It could be crypto, copy the existing systems, or be something new all together. It doesn't even have to be free, they could add in a small transfer tax or whatever. The point is that any person or business should be able to send money to any other, for any reason. At the very least within the country.
The banks have longstanding relationships with payment processors but they aren’t stupid. The duopoly has fat margins that the banks want a cut of, hence earlier initiatives like Zelle.
Ugh, they killed FedNow too? That hadn’t hit my radar. Why a waste.
FedNow has not been diminished through policy, still full speed ahead.
I don't think so?
Here's the EO, I don't see where it kills FedNow, it seems like it just mandates electronic payments and disallows paper checks: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/mode...
Heh, while I like the idea of using immediate electronic dispursement over the mail.
I do find the ending of the EO pretty amusing. You're telling the agencies exactly what to do, how is that not impairing their authority?
> Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
> (i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
That's boilerplate that's been attached on most of all EO's for decades now.
The point of EOs is that they aren't laws and cannot change laws, but they can provide [mandatory] guidance to entities, under the Executive, on how to implement laws. So imagine there's a law that says some agency can ban whatever widgets they want. An EO requiring that they not ban widgets made in Timbuktu would not contravene that law, but provide guidance on how the law will be implemented. By contrast if the law said that the agency must ban any harmful widgets, an EO would not be able to prevent them from banning harmful widgets, even if they happen to be made in Timbuktu.
Thankfully modern EO's are (contrary to intuition) pretty much weak sauce because of this balancing act. See, for contrast the dictatorial mandate that is executive order 6102. [1]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
But how does mandatory guidance not impair the authority of an agency?
The agency is no longer allowed to do something against the guidance! Or the Order must not be ordering some action?
Government agencies in the executive branch don't have independent authority. They work for the president, and an EO isn't much different than the email you get from your boss directing you to do work a certain way.
An email from my boss telling me to implement something using rust transpiled to wasm certainly impairs my authority to determine the best approach.
My argument is not the EO has the legality to make a claim; it's that the top half of the EO is at odds with the disclaimer at the end. If you mandate somebody to do something then you're impairing their authority to have chosen not to do something.
Like by definition the EO impairs agencies that were using their authority to issue paper checks to continue doing so. It may be advantageous to stop issuing checks but to claim mandating that they don't doesn't impair their authority is just false.
You're conflating authority, the authorization to do something, with autonomy - the ability to use that authority at your own personal discretion. The law grants a regulatory agency the authority to do something that they would not otherwise be able to do, like nationally ban widgets. But the law does not also inherently grant them to the autonomy to do so entirely at their own discretion. For agencies under the Executive branch, the President is free to direct them to utilize their authority at his discretion.
It's the law that must not be ordering some action. Laws generally provide e.g. regulatory agencies with some degree of discretion on how to apply a given law, like ban a widget. But that discretion can be defined by executive order. By contrast, if a law says an agency must do something, then an EO cannot override that law and direct them not to do that thing.
You can be almost certain these EOs are composed in tandem with LLMs.
And its okay because the federal employees who need to know what these say will just ask their LLM what it says! /s
Every time we have this discussion someone brings up FedNow, and I will repeat the same question I always ask: when I visit the farmer's market this weekend, will anyone there be able to practically accept payment in FedNow? What would that even look like? (FYI the vendors take most cards, Apple/Google Pay, Venmo, paper cash, Square Cash, Apple Cash, etc.)
If the answer is "no for these reasons", then this probably shines a big light on why FedNow is not serving the same use case.
What is preventing any of those mentioned card vendors from integrating with FedNow either directly or via some abstractive layer through another entity? I don't understand why the answer would be 'no for these reasons'.
The retail payment companies I've seen all use the same structure: they provide a retail interface and then handle monetary transfers within their own proprietary network (effectively a centralized database). To interface with the financial system, they provide a mechanism to occasionally wire funds to/from a traditional bank account. If FedNow has any role in these systems, it's just to speed up the occasional funds-wiring process by a few hours. I have yet to see anyone actually directly using FedNow in any meaningful sense for retail payments.
Most likely, what it would look like is they would have a routing and account number posted. You'd go into your bank app and push a payment to those numbers, and they'd say yeah great; not confirm the transaction and everything would probably work out.
Is that satisfying? Not really. Is it possible? Yes.
There are over a thousand different companies affiliated with FedNow, so the answer is going to be "it won't look like FedNow, but you will use some wrapper for it"
I thought FedNow was for settlement between banks, not a consumer-facing service. That would be a "Central Bank Digital Currency": https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
There were some bills on the subject, Republicans opposed to a CBDC to demonstrate their libertarian credentials:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1919...
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1430...
HR-1919 passed the house, but it's not clear if "they" intend to bring it up for vote in the Senate.
People have submitted comments to the gov for using XRP as a mechanism, but AI tells me that FedNow is not killed or being replaced.
That article is XRP-pumping misinformation. Like almost 100% of content related to Ripple.
This is amazing.
I cannot think of anything worse than an official post office email I have to maintain. Do you not remember how many government sites would simply shut down after business hours because they couldn't figure out how to do on-call? Have you ever used US-treasury direct?
This site would be slow, the code base would be unmaintained, it'd get enormous amounts of spam you have to sort through to get some important tax document, and it would be down all the time. Think the line at the post office but for server up-times.
Similarly if the mint maintained a payment processor then they'd just create a legal monopoly (like the USPS did) and ban new processors. Not only would they be worse than VISA and MasterCard, but they'd make paypal and venmo illegal. Don't forget the USPS bans competitors from being cheaper than itself, and this is exactly what would happen if the Mint had its own payment processor.
Hard disagree on every point. Just because implementations aren't always perfect does not mean you should not have public services.
I know a librarian who spends an inordinate amount of time helping the elderly and tech illiterate members of the public with creating emails, because they're necessary. However, you can't create emails anywhere without a phone number these days - a post office option would fix that.
Email already gets enormous amounts of spam, and the only reason most don't see it is because private service providers like Google expend resources filtering them out. Why would a business not be able to charge for premium filter services on an email they don't host? Not to mention that private email services send you ads.
To be clear, I'm not saying we should shut down Gmail tomorrow, but having a free public email service option would allow many people to use internet infrastructure they don't have. It's an accessibility problem that should be addressed in the public's interest as well as shareholders.
But what happens when the Gov decides they don't want to fund it anymore? Or the gov decides something shouldn't be funded.. Say truckers on strike, or wiki-leaks? Well then boom we have the same game, just a different player.
that's already happening? are you going to be funding your own vaccine research?
I'm not trying to take away from the thrust of your point. But pragmatically it seems like it could be in the scope of libraries to maintain some $4/mo prepaid SIMs to facilitate people signing up for new online accounts. Win-win for serving both the poor and people who care about privacy.
[dead]
None of what you say is inherent in a public service.
The DMV often gets singled out as an inefficient system that is emblematic of the failure of public option, but I assure you as someone who's had to deal with a privatized version, you're not getting better service and in fact the fees are much more expensive without recourse or oversight.
The answer to a bad system is a good system. Adding a middleman who is only interested in extracting as much money as possible is rarely the improvement the consultants would have you believe.
Washington state has privatized much of the DMV, and it's much better then what I've experienced in other states.
I was under the impression that government sites having "business hours" had as much or more to do with their backends dating from the mainframe era, with nightly batch jobs that take all cpu time or prohibit database writes.
Anyway, I agree that government provided services functioning as you described would be intolerable, but disagree that's somehow inevitable. Rather than expecting government services to be unaccountable monopolies of the "line at the DMV" archetype, what if we expected effective and valuable baseline services of the IRS FreeFile archetype? Or models like unemployment benefits and FDIC insurance, where the government quietly provides citizens an umbrella without limiting access to alternatives?
I strongly resonate with gp's sentiment that when services like email or payment processing become requirements for modern life, ensuring access to them becomes a government prerogative. We're in agreement that it must be a net improvement, not trading one monopoly for another.
My local city runs a water heater rental company. It provides water heaters more or less at cost to residents because we have exceptionally hard water here and they need to be replaced every ten years or so. It's a well run, valuable public program, and its cost is minimal.
The US Digital Service made a number of good web services for the US federal government while it lasted. They didn't close at night.
There are many times where governments do a bad job of things, and times where they do a good job. They're just institutions made of people, but they have no other default orientation. Describing faults in some non-existent service you're just imagining, as though they would obviously happen, is frankly a bizarre thing to do.
May I suggest: consider getting involved in the governance of your world. You could meet the many humans who are already doing so, working to improve it, and learning something. You can actually do that! It might surprise you how much good work is being done.
You might also then be able to help prevent others from implementing your worst dreams, instead of treating them as obvious or foregone conclusions.
Largely opinion here, but the glaring issue with many modern governments is that they don't do. They get some consultants to come in, make some requirements, then shop for a contractor. IMO, governments should do a lot more themselves, should own infrastructure/utilities outright & ongoingly.
Particularly hard in today's climate where so so many people are empowered to say no, or to come in and add their own pet complications/expenses to a project. The meta-governance of staying to mission, to relentlessly caring about value optimization (in the pursuit of public good) is fraught with failure modes. Yet still it feels vastly less dangerous and expensive than shopping the work out, than governments perpetually seeking to do things it itself doesn't know much about & can't do.
We've had decades of nihilism that sees this juncture of difficulty & says: maybe we shouldn't have a government. But some day, I hope, maybe, possibly, we'll redisocver the spirit of makers and doers, and the eternal jibing critically can give way to a some will & make happen.
It's telling that in order to interact in many ways with the IRS online, you have to verify your identity using a private company (ID.me). Identification of citizens and residents has to be on the short list for core competencies of any government, but we outsource even that.
> US-treasury direct
Ok but this one is good. And it works because it’s a tool they need to generate revenue
It's better now, but during the era of the on-screen keyboard it was atrocious.
Further invalidating the original objection that the site would be unmaintained.
I thought they still had the on-screen keyboard? They had it as of 6 months ago at least.
But still, atrocious site. I can't use the back button or it logs you out; logging in is like a 5 step chore, it's unintuitive and looks like it's from 2005. I can only assume it's unsafe and doing simple things like checking your balance take 20 minutes. There will never be an app and I'm sure they will continue to do no innovation on the customer service side.
> looks like it's from 2005
Fantastic. Really fast pages, simple forms, no Js. trendy is not what I want from my government service site.
> There will never be an app
Good. I want more websites and less apps on my phone. That also helps me trust the security more.
I hate this approach so much. Something doesn't work very well, so instead of putting pressure on making it work better, let us abandon it!
Don't get me wrong. There are cases when it makes sense, but only when it is certain that there is no way to make it better, or when making it better would be a waste of resources. And neither is case here.
In my country, we have, what is essentially, a centralized email for communication with authorities. Taxes, permits, trials, it all goes there. There is no spam, you can set it up so that reminders about unread go to your normal email. It's not perfect, but it saves me hours of time I would otherwise have to waste in line.
So try for something like this. Instead of just giving up.
> Don't forget the USPS bans competitors from being cheaper than itself
That’s a disingenuous take. USPS legally cannot be undercut on certain types of postal services but in exchange they must serve EVERY permanent address without price discrimination.
No private company has to do that, nor would any sane profit maximising company want to.
It's also a necessary protection because, for some ass-backward reason, we force the USPS to operate in the black instead of funding it with taxpayer money.
Wouldn't it be better to try to regulate the necessity of needing these services out of existence?
For the sake of reducing complexity in an already very complex world, I'd rather that it be illegal to require an email address to sign up for an account (or, alternatively, make it illegal to require an account for things like making a reservation at a restaurant) then being provided with an email by the USPS.
Doubly so given the interactions that I've had with digital services provided by my country's government and the bad (and in several cases extremely bad) experiences that I've had with them.
To be clear - I don't object to e.g. an address from the USPS complementing my existing email - I just don't want to be forced to use it for anything due to it being given some special properties that normal email providers aren't.
> Wouldn't it be better to try to regulate the necessity of needing these services out of existence?
No because these things are genuinely useful. As much as people lament that we are going cashless, it's very convenient to be able to just carry one card and it's genuinely useful to just give my email as an identifier when registering for stuff.
Regulating their necessity means forcing people to accept cash and then using this as a reason why MasterCard and Visa should be allowed exist. In practice if something is that ingrained into daily interaction, then it should have something like the common carrier rules, set the fee to a static percentage of the transaction and that's it. The current 50% profit margins rent-seeking approach is just inefficient.
I completely agree with a lot of what you said! I'm not against technology in general or think that things like email aren't useful.
I think my argument is harder to make for payment processors, but in the case of email, it is preferable to not need an email address to create an account (even if it's convenient to have the option), and have other identifiers that can be used, like OAuth using an existing account or phone number, for instance.
Or, like I said, even better if you don't even need to create an account to participate in a one-time transaction (instead of a service relationship) with an entity.
The USPS and state DMVs should also collaborate on the novel role of identity management. Right now if you lose your phone, half of your life disappears because Google won't even log you into the email address that contains every "lost my password" redirect without 2FA on a new device. This is a bad scene. We need boring old meatspace ways to establish, re-establish, and federate our identity as a real person. Something that demands that I wait in line, that I show them a utility bill or drivers' license, that I confirm with a retina scan or fingerprint printed out on a sheet of paper that nobody else has access to. Something that is only trackable in one direction, from which you can generate a new identity if one is compromised. This is so close to the functional role of the "Credit card number" that you may as well tack bank transfer verification on there.
The One Digital Identity Service To Rule Them All is always vulnerable to mass hacking. We need to connect it with something slower, something more private, and the interface to that slow identity needs to be something that already has a branch open in the middle of nowhere.
Post office offering emails is an interesting idea if you extend it further in the physical world. As in, using this identifier to deliver correspondence/parcels as well.
pros:
- privacy. Senders have zero idea where you actually are. mapping to physical addresses is performed by the post.
- no need to update addresses in a million accounts when you move, your email points to the new physical address automatically (no idea how that works in other countries, but here you can set automatic forwarding for at most 1.5 years after you move).
cons:
- goods being sent to gmail addresses
Just thinking out loud here, but if the government operated a bank they could apply some common sense to the whole system:
* Allow any legal transaction (so if another payment processor refuses you, you have a backup)
* Allow an account for any legal entity (so no more debanking)
* By setting rates for savings and mortgages, it would provide a soft range for other banks to move within
* The state would only have to guarantee its own bank. If other banks crash and burn it won't take down civilisation
How does that fix censorship concerns? The main issue is that political pressure campaigns has a lever over the entire payment processing sector because of cartel like behaviour. A public service could provide an alternative for sure but it'd have to be done very carefully and independent.
Actual government stuff is way more legally constrained than private sector stuff. It would be trivially to sue for freedom of speech if I was gov.
Public-private partnerships like chartered banks, and outright cartels like Visa MasterCard, are much more fruitful mechanisms for this sort of civil liberties abuse.
What would the post office do with spam? Their existing business model is chiefly predicated on delivering junk mail.
I’m not sure how the federal government would deal with fraud on the payment side, either. The US does not have a strong system of identity.
Junk mail is advertising mail that someone paid to send to you. You what it is not? Illegal. Scams, fraud, and other illegal things get shut down because of postal inspectors. And there is no anonymity. The USPS knows both ends of the transaction.
> the post office should maintain an official email address for everyone.
Assuming this is a good idea, what is my email address going to look like?
Am I going to have to be xx_toast_xx@postalcustomer like at yahoo? or will it be my address ... if so, what about the other three adults who get mail at my address; do I have to change my email address when I move? Will it be my real name, but if so, what about the other hundred people with the same name as me? (Which isn't that bad, I know lots of people with a way larger highlander list) Will it just be my social security number and we can pretend duplicates don't exist?
What qualifies someone to be an everyone for this purpose?
What's the profit in that?
/s
You say /s, but a government issued and USPS operated e-mail service may be very profitable. In the Netherlands we have a government message system where the tax office, local counties, water companies, etc can send you 'official' messages. Thing is though, each message costs €0.25 to send. I think this is ridiculously expensive for a glorified email, but I suppose they have a lot of certifications and audits and the like. I hope, anyway.
Anyway, email itself is broken, but this system works because if it costs money to send a message, it discourages any spambot and/or misuse.
€0.25 is much less than the cost of printing and posting a letter, and presumably this service comes with proof of delivery.
(There's a similar system in Denmark.)
[flagged]
There's no meaningful attention, here. Until it is on the US Gov't radar, this 'attention' is just a collection of upset redditors furiously posting forum messages which will fissile out in a few months, at most.
Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA.
> "which will fissile out in a few months"
A tangential nitpick: it's fizzle out, from a Middle English etymology meaning "to fart"; not to fission (fissile being an adjectival form), from Latin "to split".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fizzle#Etymology ("Attested in English since 1525-35. From earlier fysel (“to fart”). Related to fīsa (“to fart”). Compare with Swedish fisa (“to fart (silently)”). See also feist.")
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/feist#Etymology
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fissile#Etymology ("From Latin fissilis.")
I’ve never heard fissile out but I love it for describing a problem that will go away once the full consequences have already been felt.
It's fizzle where I'm from in the UK. To fizzle out is to weakly and pittifully end with no meaningful after effects.
Like after lighting a firework that didn't actually go off.
"It's fizzled out!"
"to fission (fissile being an adjectival form), from Latin 'to split'."
Does this mean "Missile" means "to miss"? 'Cause boy have we been using those things wrong :-)
No, 'missile' means 'something that is sent' or 'suitable for throwing'
The missile needs to know how to miss, because it knows where it is from knowing where it isn’t.
https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ
guessing it was autocorrect issue :)
I don't think having this on USgov radar would improve the situation. Since FOSTA/SESTA, and various state level age verification laws, it seems likely that government attention would simply bring a bigger hammer down on games. It's the US anti-money-laundering system that ultimately exerts a lot of financial control, after all.
> it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA
In many countries, if you pay locally, you absolutely can. China's UnionPay, India's UPI, PayNow in Singapore, PromptPay in Thailand, PayPal, Cash App, and more.
And places like Steam take a lot of payment options. Most online services that wanted to have wide international appeal in the 90s and 2000s had to simply because credit cards were rare in many places, and a lot of those services still have a wide array of options
Steam added recently a rule 15th what you should not publish:
15. Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.
See discussion here for example: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/0/6019100814124...
Maybe they could come out with a client named "Steamy" where they post all the nudie games and take all forms of shady, underground, scandalous payment methods, like btc and doge.
The US also has Discover/Capital One and American Express and if you live in some of the nicer parts people still take checks.
Does that actually help? Because it would send a pretty strong message if the payment screen said, "sorry you can only buy this with amex/discover" (click here for why) but that doesn't seem to be how this plays out.
Because making these products for sale at all in the catalog will cause Visa/MC to pull out for other, "approved" offerings.
You need the government to cajole the market to create safe and free inter bank transfer programs. We're not going to do that in the USA -- no one's buddies would get their kickbacks!
Like FedNow that was launched in 2023? https://www.frbservices.org/news/fed360/issues/071625/fednow... https://www.frbservices.org/resources/fees/fednow-2025
Not even close the service offered by, as an example, Pix in Brazil.
Granted, but Pix didn't have to compete against entrenched political interests.
I expect the meta-plot with FedNow is to commoditize the backend network, then allow private companies to compete on top of it (e.g. Zelle on FedNow), then after adoption as the backbone, finally roll out P2P and P2B type support that finally kills off Visa / Mastercard / Amex (as processing networks).
Not sure why you were downvoted. Pix is a fantastic example of how much more efficient p2p payments can be, without relying on the Visa-Mastercard duopoly.
Of course Pix had the backing of the government, so it had a huge initial boost, and didn't have to compete with entrenched players for market share.
Still, the fact is that it's universal, fast, efficient, lower cost for merchants, and less prone to censoring. What's not to like?
In a way it's more convenient than making congress pass laws to define payment providers as common carriers. With Pix, payment companies are free to chose their policies, but now citizens have options. Unfortunately that's not the reality in the US.
> You need the government to cajole the market to create safe and free inter bank transfer programs
We've had that in EU/eurozone for years, SEPA.
That's great to hear, but this is a US-centric complaint discussing US-centric companies.
It is not really US-centric. VISA and Mastercard actions resulted in delisting content in all the markets globally. Steam and Itch.io pulled games from all regions, Manga Library Z was hit in Japan, Patreon and Stripe are pressured globally. Suggesting to boycott VISA and Mastercard if you have an alternative is valid.
In principle, a service like this could be offered in the US as well, without any credit card companies acting as middle men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow
Germany actually uses their own card system .. or cash. They are very much against visa/mastercard due to their “high commission fees” and “privacy concerns”
Girocard charges a 0,3% fee vs visa/mastercard 3%
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard
You're comparing a regional debit network to an overarching network that includes lots of different fee structures. The USA has debit networks (STAR, etc) with similar cost structures too - Germany is not unique in this regard.
My debit card is a VISA.
That's somewhat outdated and Wikipedia even slightly alludes to it with "Some banks are phasing out girocards". "some" in reality is "nearly all". Girocard is practically dead and I don't see it coming back without state intervention. There's a few holdouts in stores here and there that only accept Girocard and no other cards (my vet for example), but it's on the decline there, too.
"Privacy concerns" won't hold out long against relentless pushes for more deregulation of privacy laws for AI/other tech/"the economy"/etc and removal of data access hurdles for police/security services/etc coming from certain political spectrum - whose voters generally don't have high concern for such fundamental rights issues when at the ballot box.
Unfortunately, that's not enough to shake the MasterCard/Visa stranglehold. Even if all of Valve's German customers used Girocard and Steam sold those particular games only in Germany, they would still have to yield to pressure from MC and Visa because losing them would cost them many more of their global customers.
It's not enough to simply have an alternative to the credit cards, that alternative has to be in the pockets of 90% of your user base before you'd be willing to lose the method of transaction they currently rely on.
>Girocard charges a 0,3% fee vs visa/mastercard 3%
AFAIK all credit cards in the EU have similarly low interchange rates because of EU regulation.
0.2%
> Payment service providers shall not offer or request a per transaction interchange fee of more than 0,2 % of the value of the transaction for any debit card transaction.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2015/751/oj/eng
So does Russia, Denmark, Belgium/Netherlands, Iran, China. I’m sure there’re others. I know someone working on unified payment platform for games in Africa. They have dozens of different payment systems instead of the two.
Germany also sold Eurocard to MasterCard.
> Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA.
Why not? Lots of people, especially in lower income brackets, don't have ANY credit cards at all. I know many. They buy groceries and gas with cash and pay their utilities by ACH or mailing a check. Everything else they need, they buy locally.
What you mean to say is that it's _inconvenient_ for you personally to boycott Visa/Mastercard. Which may be true enough.
Visa and Mastercard run debit networks for majority of banks and credit unions. They get fees there as well.
Even lower income citizens use debit cards more than cash nowadays.
You would need to use different networks like Discover and American Express to effectively boycott them
I use cash for 90% of my expenses, and I bank with a local credit unions, but this and every other bank and credit union around use visa or mastercard for debit card services and I have to use the card for most online purchases.
That depends entirely on who you are paying. Many places reject checks, fail to setup ACH, etc. Those aren't direct competitors anyway: that would be American Express, which is often rejected since their business model is centered on customer bonuses funded through high transaction fees.
Well, we are discussing an online storefront/distribution service for a digital good (with obvious relevance to people here). Are you suggesting that it's merely inconvenient for Valve and its customers to not transact in cash?
> Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA.
Every single time I have the option to buy an event ticket by SEPA transfer or credit card, which is actually very often, I choose SEPA transfer.
One time I even used Bitcoin.
It does seem to be mostly event tickets that have this option, for some reason. And I'm not talking about the TicketMaster monopoly, either.
You can switch to Amex, but here in Argentina like half of the postnets don't recognize it.
Also there are a few QR networks, some made by the banks like "Modo" and other no-a-bank ones like "MercadoPago" and a few minor ones. Even the guy/gal that sells hot bread on the street accept most of them.
Amex is only available on Steam in the US. I have a basic free Amex card as a backup, but I wouldn't be able to use it for my Steam purchases. Presumably because the processing fees are just that much higher.
Somehow I'm able to use a JCB card though. As far as I'm aware, JCB cards aren't even available here.
> You can switch to Amex, but here in Argentina like half of the postnets don't recognize it.
To this point, it was even a punchline in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
You can, if you switch to using American Express and Discover cards. They’re both closed networks that only take their particular card.
It’s almost trading one for another but it would be an effective way to boycott these companies
Whole heartedly agree. I would also rather the discussion be how can we disrupt the problem rather than a mob mentality to take down Visa (which is never going anywhere anyway).
It is on their radar, but they only care that the whole world pays a US tax via these payment providers. The US does look to kindly on local payment systems.
Honestly I hope this comes under the EU's radar.
EU is already working on an alternative: Wero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)
Honestly, I'm really critical towards EU, but this is one of the few things that EU does well. When the market is stagnating, it's better than nothing to propose an alternative or some kind of benefits in order to change the market a bit. Like the Roaming in EU.
Regarding the rest, the EU is mining competition with the obsession of regulating everything.
> Regarding the rest, the EU is mining competition with the obsession of regulating everything.
Like with DMA/DSA that force gatekeepers to open up? SEPA that mandates free immediate bank transfers? Caps on credit/debit card transaction fees? The million infrastructure projects? Ensuring that AI can't be used to make life or death decisions if it's decision making can't be explained (which the AI act boils down to)? Ensuring there is competition on e.g. railway operations?
It's such a common refrain that EU is just stifling competition with "regulating everything", but quite oftne EU regulations are actually forcing competition where none was possible before.
I stated quite clearly that not every regulation is bad. But it seems that you want to hear that every decision made by the EU is right. I'm sorry, but I'm not a religious person. And I think self-criticism is a great privilege of democratic (not dictatorial) countries, so let's use it.
> Ensuring that AI can't be used to make life or death decisions if its decision-making can't be explained (which the AI Act boils down to)? Ensuring there is competition on, for example, railway operations?
It's such a naive question that I can't understand how you can take it seriously.
Just because you can explain how you arrived at a specific decision does not mean that failure does not exist. Every machine is fallible. Every human is fallible. Moreover, you cannot determine decision-making made by humans. So how can you trust humans? Why should you trust them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot
I would like to see the data, not the social or individual biases. It's only a matter of "when" AI will prove to be safer than humans at performing task X. I find it absurd to deprive ourselves of such an advantage, supported by data, just because our understanding isn't absolute.
Can we prove the safety or determinism of what we use or do on a daily basis? I doubt. Shouldn't we experiment with physics because our understanding is limited, and we might accidentally create a black hole? I doubt.
Also, I find it such a generic definition... Google Maps implements AI, and accidentally sends you into a ditch. What do you do? Ban AI from Google Maps? What doesn't put people's lives at risk?
I totally understand the skepticism and fear. The risks, etc. But I'll leave it to the fortune tellers to pass judgment before it's even "a thing".
> It's such a common refrain that EU is just stifling competition with "regulating everything", but quite oftne EU regulations are actually forcing competition where none was possible before.
Is killing the car market "forcing the competition"? How?
> I stated quite clearly that not every regulation is bad. But it seems that you want to hear that every decision made by the EU is right. I'm sorry, but I'm not a religious person. And I think self-criticism is a great privilege of democratic (not dictatorial) countries, so let's use it.
But you still said that you think most of the EU's are bad, so I'm opening the discussion with multiple that I consider to be good.
> Just because you can explain how you arrived at a specific decision does not mean that failure does not exist. Every machine is fallible. Every human is fallible. Moreover, you cannot determine decision-making made by humans. So how can you trust humans? Why should you trust them?
Of course not, but being able to explain the decision, and thus prove that it is wrong, and have humans being able to correct it, is good. It means that stuff like United Healthcare Group using algorithms to decide if care can be paid for, with a terrible failure rate, and employees just shrugging "computer said no" cannot happen in the EU. The fact that this kind of things are considered as "EU is killing AI with too much regulation" is really concerning to me.
> Is killing the car market "forcing the competition"? How?
How is the EU killing the car market, exactly?
> But you still said that you think most of the EU's are bad, so I'm opening the discussion with multiple that I consider to be good.
I understand your point, but I see no reason to invest time defending the EU's positive aspects. What's the point?
> Of course not, but being able to explain the decision, and thus prove that it is wrong, and have humans being able to correct it, is good. It means that stuff like United Healthcare Group using algorithms to decide if care can be paid for, with a terrible failure rate, and employees just shrugging "computer said no" cannot happen in the EU. The fact that this kind of things are considered as "EU is killing AI with too much regulation" is really concerning to me.
I don't see why "asking for less regulation" concerns you. The EU seems to listen to people like you, not people like me. I should be the one who's concerned, haha. I'm worried because bureaucracy is a slow-acting cancer. It's a process that's easy to start but incredibly difficult to stop or reverse.
The problem with bureaucracy, regulation, and welfare is that they all come with a price. Increasing costs require a strong, cutting-edge economy to sustain them. Yet, no one seems to be concerned. In the US and China, new technologies are constantly being created, while in Europe, innovation is stagnating. No one seems to care that Europe's wealth is fragile, based mainly on "old" companies or banks.
Of course, no one is against welfare; my concern is its unsustainability. As an Italian (living elsewhere in Europe), I find the situation worrying. The demographic decline is dramatic, and pension and healthcare costs are skyrocketing. In Italy, a worker under 40 often earns less than a retiree. With such a sharp demographic decline, retirees have enormous political power.
Europe is aging, and so is its appetite for innovation and risk. Yet, we keep adding costs upon costs. Even if the goals of initiatives like GDPR, the AI Act, and the Green Deal are "right", we can't deny that they come with a price. This added cost inevitably makes companies less efficient in Europe. This is a simple consequence. Can we truly afford this?
How long can we keep going? The rope will break sooner or later. And why doesn't anyone seem to care?
> How is the EU killing the car market, exactly?
1) https://commission.europa.eu/topics/eu-competitiveness/dragh... 2) "The Draghi report: In-depth analysis and recommendations (Part B)" 3) Page 146
I think this report its quite comprhensive to state what its not going that well in EU.
I dont agree with everything in the document, but i think its a good starting point.
> I don't see why "asking for less regulation" concerns you.
Because the "less regulation" is in response to the EU saying you can't have algorithms making life or death decisions if they can't be explained and can't be escalated to a human. People are literally asking for companies to be able to shrug behind "computer says no" with no recourse. We have the UK Post Office scandal for a closer to home example on why this is a terrible idea. "Less regulation" here would be plainly terrible for everyone.
> No one seems to care that Europe's wealth is fragile, based mainly on "old" companies or banks.
Along with migration, it's probably the two most discussed topics. Funnily for it too, everyone says "nobody cares", yet it's literally among the most discussed things.
> Even if the goals of initiatives like GDPR, the AI Act, and the Green Deal are "right", we can't deny that they come with a price. This added cost inevitably makes companies less efficient in Europe. This is a simple consequence. Can we truly afford this?
I get what you're saying, and there's a point at which I would agree; but I also fully consider that allowing companies to let people die and hide behind "The Algorithm" is something so fundamentally wrong, that we cannot (humanely) afford not to have regulations against it.
> In the US and China, new technologies are constantly being created, while in Europe, innovation is stagnating
Because you're comparing massive economies with lots of capital to burn, vs a loose collection of much smaller countries. There is tons of innovation in various European countries, it's just of different types, and doesn't scale nearly to the same extent. And that is a problem (because, as you said, a lot of the economy is reliant on big old players, which isn't necessarily bad, but is lacking in economic diversification).
> As an Italian (living elsewhere in Europe), I find the situation worrying. The demographic decline is dramatic, and pension and healthcare costs are skyrocketing. In Italy, a worker under 40 often earns less than a retiree. With such a sharp demographic decline, retirees have enormous political power
It's the same in France too, and it is indeed worrying. Public budgets are getting increasingly more complicated to balance.
But, allowing companies to deploy AI to make life or death decisions won't change anything around this. Allowing them to harvest personal data without even knowing what they have won't change anything around this either. Allowing gatekeepers to stifle any possible competition (not having DMA/DSA), same thing.
The biggest changes needed are capital investments to help the tons of startups all over Europe scale; and complex policies to help minimise the demographic collapse. Some of it is natural and nothing can be done about it (if a couple doesn't want kids, no amount of aid is going to change their mind), but for others it's a matter of being unable to afford (more) kids.
> Along with migration, it's probably the two most discussed topics. Funnily for it too, everyone says "nobody cares", yet it's literally among the most discussed things.
Its disscussed here, still nobody is acting. This is a bubble.
> I get what you're saying, and there's a point at which I would agree; but I also fully consider that allowing companies to let people die and hide behind "The Algorithm" is something so fundamentally wrong, that we cannot (humanely) afford not to have regulations against it.
This sentence is fundamentally wrong, no one is dying. And for me, it perfectly sums up the issues we're discussing.
We've reached the point where if there's a risk of something happening, no matter the probability neither the magnitude, something must be done. Even if the solution is totally destructive, inappropriate for the problem, etc. Or even worse, deciding when the problem does not yet exist. Or the technology is still in its early stages. Like AI. This is what you are proposing. This is what I criticize.
Slowing down or stopping everything because MAYBE it's the right thing to do, MAYBE something we don't like might happen. This comes at a cost, especially if you apply this principle to everything around you in small doses. It's poison for productivity and efficiency.
I don't know if you are for or against nuclear power. I am quite pro nuclear power. But everyone knows about the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) project, it is a failure in terms of costs and bureaucracy. China and South Korea are able to build reactors quickly and at low cost. The same EPR reactors built in China have low costs and short construction times (I am referring to the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant). The problem is exclusively European.
In the name of some ideology, we are destroying our productivity and efficency. Again. Why?
And I know very well that the answer is always the same. Safety. But it's just an excuse to sell you the services of yet another bureaucrat. There are very precise risk analyses that show nuclear reactors to be orders of magnitude safer than all other energy sources. So why this ideological obsession? Safety has nothing to do with it.
No one cares about risk analyses. Because the answer will always be “it's never enough.” But at what cost? Again, no one cares.
And thanks to this choices, in the name of safety, building reactors in Europe is difficult and expensive. But in the meantime, it is perfectly legitimate to build gas or coal-fired power plants.
Europe is full of this kind of hypocrisy.
> Its disscussed here, still nobody is acting
No, it's discussed everywhere, at the EU and the local level. There has been plenty of action at various levels (like in France, under Macron first as minister of the economy and later president; and he's been decried and criticised a lot, but has also gotten a ton of reforms through).
> This sentence is fundamentally wrong, no one is dying. And for me, it perfectly sums up the issues we're discussing.
That's the point though. Literally the main thing the law does is that if the AI can make decision that can result in deaths, there should be a human escalation and its decision making should be explainable. That's it. If that's too much burden, something is wrong.
> Or even worse, deciding when the problem does not yet exist. Or the technology is still in its early stages. Like AI
But the problem already exists, again, cf. United Healthcare Group in the US. We know they're killing people and hiding behind a well known faulty "AI". We don't want that shit in the EU.
> I don't know if you are for or against nuclear power. I am quite pro nuclear power. But everyone knows about the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) project, it is a failure in terms of costs and bureaucracy
If you're pro nuclear, you should know what the real problems with EPR are. The main are failures at EDF with the quality of their work, due to lack of qualified personnel, like welders. This has been well documented for Flamanville and Hinkley Point, and EDF has even written extensively about all the lessons learned from those disasters that have been incorporated. They even flat out say that Flamanville has allowed them to build industrial capacity and human know how to be able to build the next ones.
Do you have anything to back your claim that somehow bureaucracy is to blame? EDF are a state owned company, but I'm pretty sure that the British wouldn't stop yapping around if EDF were bungling Hinkley Point because of French/EU bureaucracy. There should be at least as much material on it as there are about the quality control issues, right?
> The same EPR reactors built in China have low costs and short construction times (I am referring to the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant). The problem is exclusively European.
Yes, because we stopped building reactors for decades, and nobody is around that knows the intricacies of that. Hence the investment in EPR, to improve on the failures at Flamanville, Hinkley Point, Olkiluoto, and be able to reliably deliver EPR reactors with predictable costs.
I don't even think this is a problem of competition (although more is welcome).
This is just Visa+Mastercard abusing their market position and the EU should come down on them like a ton of bricks. Incur heavy fines or break them up if necessary.
How is "abusing their market position" not a "problem of competition"?
The only reason they have that market position is because there is insufficient competition.
It is a problem of competition.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
Go to Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan and see that there are 20-30 payment systems at every convenience store, electronics store, grocery store, etc... Then go to the US where there's effectively 2. The government claims this is because Visa and Mastercard have prevented competition.
I disagree. The need for regulation in this case stems from a lack of competition.
Regulations are empirical decisions, based on a very limited amount of data, whose implications can be endless. Regulations are a shortcut capable of poisoning the market and competition. Just look at what's been done with energy, automobiles, AI, GDPR, etc. Bureaucrats are not gods; they often make mistakes and don't predict the future. Regulations should be the last resort.
Furthermore, we're talking about a US monopoly here. The goal would be to grab a share of the pie through honest competition, not to enstablish golden collars.
Regulation should facilitate competition, not legitimize the status quo.
"under the radar" means not noticed
Oh the EU will happily pass new laws to screen your entire life when you'd like to buy a game (and to record and store everything you talk about with fellow gamers in case you say something that goes against EU policies).
EU will even arrange a special new bank account for ya outside of Visa Mastercard called CBDC.
No problem. EU is here for ya! /s
What are you even talking about?
1984 took place in the EU. I mean, if Brexit hadn't happened and the EU existed in 1984, of course.
That’s factually untrue. 1984 takes place in Britain (now known as “Airstrip one”) which in the universe of the book is part of Oceania along with Australia, southern Africa and the Americas.
The other two superpowers are Eurasia (which as the name suggests is Europe less the UK and Ireland but with Asia) and Eastasia, which is South-East Asia more or less
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_geography_of_Ninetee...
You can just say it happened in Europe.
> Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA
Most countries have some kinds of domestic transaction systems, or at least a more local credit card brand. They're also usually instant. It's more or less an US-only situation that people use Visa/Mastercard even for intranational stuff.
Most countries I've been to use Visa as their most common card. Living in a major Asian country and every bank and credit card company offers Visa as their main card as well.
China is kind of an outlier with Union Pay, and while a large number of countries offer their own alternatives, I'd say most are Visa-first. Apparently about 37% of cards around the world are Visa, so that's a huge chunk. JCB is the biggest non-Chinese non-American provider by revenue, and even they're a minor player in their home country.
That is absolutely false. In pretty much any western country, you're forced to use the VISA network, even for debit cards. Take a closer look at your locally branded card, and you'll almost certainly see a VISA log tucked away somewhere.
Depends, in France for instance all the cards are dual "VISA/Mastercard" and "CB ". They will use CB in france and use the partner network in foreign countries.
The EU should certainly look into this though. I don't always like what they do, but a conglomerate of many large markets (countries) means that these shitty fucking companies and scumbag executives get forced to sit up and listen.
You can boycott both but say goodbye to saas purchases and being tracked.
Does the government view it as 2 throats to choke and so the risk is 'worth it' or is it just a condition of gilded age II and corp and political greed and corruption?
Why did we make all those monopoly laws only to completely forget they exist or why we ever made them?
It's mostly just the way things turned out without government intervention.
American Express' card started in 1958, as a pivot of their then already 100-year-old business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Express#1920s%E2%80%9...
Visa also in 1958 as a Bank of America (and friends) card, which quietly expanded into the mid-60s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.#History
Mastercard in the mid-60s from banks who BoA wouldn't invite into the Visa clubhouse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastercard#History
And Discover in the mid-80s because Sears was big enough to be its own financial services firm: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discover_Card#History
This is the kind of problem that Bitcoin was designed to solve.
Isn't Bitcoin impractical for these sorts of transactions (slow, high fees, no privacy, etc)? People always say Bitcoin was designed to solve this sort of thing but whenever I've looked into it it's been fairly impractical for use in most day-to-day transactions.
Bitcoin is so much faster than a credit card transaction that it's not even close. A lightning transaction is near instant, regular bitcoin transfers take in the order of 10 minutes. Credit card transactions take weeks before you get the money, and after that the money can be yoinked back for a multitude of reasons beyond your control as a merchant. The fees are often lower, too. Bitcoiners are for some reason opposed to solving that last issue (no privacy) despite the technology existing in monero. NIH syndrome, I guess.
The real unsolved issue for cryptocurrency is between chair and keyboard. People make mistakes, people are afraid of being robbed. Your average person does not want to be their own bank. You can have a bank or payment processor manage your money for you, but then we're back to the regulated world where Visa and Mastercard can determine what games you're allowed to buy.
I'll have to look at the lightning transactions. My problems with crypto are generally less philosophical (I've known people who ran legal businesses that had trouble getting access to banks so I'm sympathetic to having ways around traditional banks/payment processors) but more practical, the times I've tried it in the past the experience just hasn't been good.
"Credit card transactions take weeks before you get the money" Where is this the case?
The only time I have experienced this being true is refunds, they usually take a bit longer to clear.
When I pay for something online or in person the payment is cleared within seconds, and I get a notification from my back that it has went through.
You will want to look into Lightning which fixes that issue.
Yes. Thankfully 15 years later we do have crypto solutions addressing previous crypto problems
Honestly buying a digital game is perfect. Steam can just give it to you right away, and if the transaction doesn't clear they can just revoke the game later.
That's only addressing one issue with Bitcoin but the issues abound. I don't know all the issues that would happen but even my rudimentary understanding of payments can see that the high transaction costs are a problem when most of the games I buy are less than 5$.
There are ways to design around these glaring issues but Bitcoin is just a worse product for many transactions (and it's not like payment processors are a particularly good product to begin with).
Only in the presence of DRM—an evil I'd prefer to do without when possible.
It might have been but it is very much not. It's non fungible and transparent resulting in coins, wallets and transactions getting easily traced and blacklisted meaning they can be put into a limbo where nobody is willing to accept them anymore burning there value.
The actual solution would be a fungible and private coin like monero where any of that is impossible by design.
Yes, I agree that Monero is likely a better option. I am also a big fan of Nano because of its instant transactions and zero transaction fees. However it has the same privacy problem as Bitcoin. It would be interesting to see a hybrid of Nano and Monero.
[flagged]
why cant we? are you self-censoring because there's some policy forbidding us to talk about something clandestine here?
i dont have access to the joke, or inside club, or inner sanctum, and maybe theres other people like me that want to know more and if the mystery is self-imposed then i might respectfully push back that we cant talk about it
Looking at their comment history - they're just a garden-variety conspiracy theorist who think Jews control the world.
Some selected comments:
* sarcastic use of "gentiles are evil": https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43139725
* "dig deeper" with a Jewish-founded company: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39043221
* repeated sarcastic reference to "chosen people" : https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=42723812 , https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43412398
It's a meta discussion, but comments who go against popular opinion amongst HN commenters get increasingly down voted, flagged, [dead]. And it's rarely any extreme or rule-breaking comments. I wrote "against popular opinion", but that might not even be it. It could be that there's a minority of very active users who see it as their job to prune this message board of undesirable opinions.
Probably a bunch of them have opened my submission history in a new tab by now to mass downvote or look for evidence that I'm not a human, but in fact a bot, a paid shill, an AI, a Russian citizen, etc.
> Probably a bunch of them have opened my submission history in a new tab by now to mass downvote
Two things work against that. First, it requires a sufficiently high karma to downvote something. Not that threshold is that high, but it takes more than a casual person's activity to get quickly.
Secondly, you can't downvote something older than 24 hours. So nothing you said yesterday would be down-voteable.
You can also vouch for something that has been marked dead if you believe that something written contributes. If one believes that it is a minority of highly active users that prune undesirable opinions, then vouching for those would make those comments viewable again.
That said, make sure that vouching for things isn't based on a desire to be contrary. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512
In this case, the popular opinion that would get them down voted is "The conspiracy theory that the world is secretly run by evil Jewish people is both false and racist."
Comments that vague-post about "I would say something but people would down vote it" should be expected to be down voted. Either it is too vague to add anything useful, or it expresses the same belief that they believe will be objectionable.
Worrying about your internet score is a sucker's game. Post what you believe, or don't bother.
Even this comment of mine has already been downvoted and flagged. Makes one wonder, doesn't it?