'March to independence': Christine Lagarde wants EU to ditch Visa, Mastercard for own platform
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Innovation and blockchain do not go in one sentence. Blockchain is a near dead technology. It has its use cases but if you want a fast moving money transactions option, you should look into UPI by India.
We'll see. I believe in the blockchain technology, but not in the way it is used as today. IMO it's like the early days of the internet. Only for the nerds, until they started to build RWA. But again... we'll see.
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It was a bigger deal in the US than elsewhere due to how hard it is to do bank transfers there,
Is it? Now I'm curious. Care to elaborate?
Except for apps like PayPal, Venmo, Zelle and Google Wallet, all of which allow you to transfer money to an email address or phone number, there is no convenient electronic way to transfer money from individual to individual in the US. The only other real alternative is handing over cash or writing a check. You can technically do a wire transfer, but those are really designed for stuff like buying a house or something, and usually either cost money, take days to settle, or usually both.
I can't speak for every other country, but in Norway we've at least for a couple of decades taken for granted the ability to just initiate a transfer of money to someone else's bank account. You just enter the number and amount in your Internet Bank, and it gets transferred free of charge either overnight or instantly. It's how we've done everything my whole adult life.
In the US, the prevalent way to pay rent is still to either write out a physical check or enter the numbers from a check into some web interface which is then somehow able to suck money out of your account. Sometimes a bank will offer to mail the check on your behalf, but it's still very much a check.
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Except for apps like PayPal, Venmo, Zelle and Google Wallet, all of which allow you to transfer money to an email address or phone number, there is no convenient electronic way to transfer money from individual to individual in the US. The only other real alternative is handing over cash or writing a check. You can technically do a wire transfer, but those are really designed for stuff like buying a house or something, and usually either cost money, take days to settle, or usually both.
I can't speak for every other country, but in Norway we've at least for a couple of decades taken for granted the ability to just initiate a transfer of money to someone else's bank account. You just enter the number and amount in your Internet Bank, and it gets transferred free of charge either overnight or instantly. It's how we've done everything my whole adult life.
In the US, the prevalent way to pay rent is still to either write out a physical check or enter the numbers from a check into some web interface which is then somehow able to suck money out of your account. Sometimes a bank will offer to mail the check on your behalf, but it's still very much a check.
I did not know that and I think it's wild that the largest economy in the world still operates on such prehistoric methods.
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Hey now, we were able to standardize the curvature of cucumbers.
Maybe there was a more important need for it. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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For real? What the f that's absurd
Yeah they can exert a lot of influence
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Yup. For example, the game "Seeds of Chaos" had to change their introduction on account of demons trying to corrupt the protagonists through blackmail, and the removal of the minotaur scenes.
Visa and MasterCard are why we have never had a blockbuster minotaur movie
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I can recommend the Aquired Podcast Episode. A 3h long Story of how VISA became the world leader and how much profit they make year over year. It is craaaaazy. We need to get rid of Visa and other US bases payment providers ASAP!
Back before crypto because a speculation vehicle we very nearly got rid of all this bullshit. Unfortunately it just wasn't convenient and widespread enough before people decided holding on to hashes forever was gonna make them rich.
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Sometime in the future maybe people will look back on this as the beginning of money units being "credits" as in familiar sci fi terminology.
Money is the credit mechanism originally (and still is in most developed countries). Coins and paper bills are IOUs from the central bank or the government, which will be exchanged for gold on request. Even though most countries moved away from the gold standard.
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They got CCPA
What I imagine that to contain:
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USA! USA! USA!
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Communism bad!
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See 1 and 2
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I would like this. I enjoy playing hentai games, but MasterVisa bans or alters the games by denying their services to creators and stores alike. This is an affront to free speech.
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Request-To-Pay is actually pretty innovative on that note. That allows you to pay stuff from your bank account directly from a bill send to you.
But companies and banks need to adopt it first.
Read further: https://paycy.eu/
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When you're looking at your bank balance you're seeing bank Euros, for which your bank has to hold a certain percentage of actual (central bank) Euros in reserve (that's what fractional reserve banking is about: Not just the central bank, also ordinary banks can create money), when you transfer money to another bank the receiving bank will have to make sure that it has enough central bank Euros to back up the recipient's balance. SEPA is a standard interface and procedure to negotiate such transfers.
The Digital Euro is central bank money, just as bank notes and coins. It's a (possible) step towards a full-reserve banking system without having to actually keep actual notes and coins around. And the ECB is very aware of this which is why they're talking so much about limiting how many digital Euros you can hold at one time so the current banking system doesn't get completely up-ended over night.
I just thought we've had this forever, so maybe that's why I'm confused.
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My main takeaway from the comments on this post is that basically all of Europe solved this a long time ago at the domestic level, but that international interoperability is lacking.
https://www.docs.pay.sibs.com/payment-methods/
Ideal, bizum, bancontact, cartes bancaires, Mbway are all euro based. I wonder why they are not interoperable.
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Humm, this will probably mean that the EU will need to look into if we need to setup a European mainframe manufacturer.
I am talking AS400/iSeries type stuff.
MasterCard and VISA process a huge number of transactions per second, and there can't be any risk of loosing a transaction in progress, so you need an extremely stable central processing node with very high redundancy.
At the moment I believe that only IBM and Fujistu makes mainframes these days, IBM is American which has now shown to not be an ideal long term trading partner, Fujistu is Japanese, with a strong presence in Europe, but they made the UK Post Office computer system, which makes me want to stay, far, far, far away from them.
Either one, whoever we pick will make it easy to get the system going, but to migrate away will be a nightmare.
I wonder if we could build something on open hardware like Risc-V, this make me wonder is Risc-V would even be suitable for this application
Tech guy here. There’s no way in hell a new system would be mainframe-based. A distributed queue with delivery receipt and many nodes to process messages along with many distributed read-only DBs is the way to scale this thing. And you can be isolated form local power and connectivity issues. Tech isn’t the problem in this situation, market penetration is.
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My main takeaway from the comments on this post is that basically all of Europe solved this a long time ago at the domestic level, but that international interoperability is lacking.
No, not all of Europe solved this. The systems the made are for internet payments. Many European nations are still on the Visa Debit or Mastercard Debit for card payments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card)
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I did not know that and I think it's wild that the largest economy in the world still operates on such prehistoric methods.
It's not in the incumbent oligopoly's interest to innovate.
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GNU-Taler is ready
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What I imagine that to contain:
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USA! USA! USA!
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Communism bad!
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See 1 and 2
Aren't EU technically a Social Democracy ?
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I just thought we've had this forever, so maybe that's why I'm confused.
I mean technically, yes, the accounts that banks have with the ECB are exactly this Digital Euro thing: Digital central bank money, it's not like banks are storing banknotes in vaults nowadays. What's new is that not just banks will have access to that kind of account.
What I missed before, another thing that this enables is a way for the ECB to do helicopter money. Back during the financial crisis the ECB was battling deflation, lowering interest rates didn't help as banks were risk-averse and simply didn't want to lend any more Euros from the ECB, and one dead-simple and ludicrously effective way to battle deflation is by increasing the monetary supply by just giving everyone money. The digital Euro would provide infrastructure for that. Another interesting idea would be to pay out the seigniorage (money the ECB makes by collecting interest from the banks) directly to the people, currently it's (aside from financing the ECB itself) landing in the coffers of the central banks of the eurozone members, and from there in the general state budget. Wouldn't be much, like 3-10 Euros a year per Eurozone resident (probably should be citizen but don't make me look up that number), but at least it would nip certain conspiracy theories ("the state is indebting everyone with fiat money) in the bud.
