'March to independence': Christine Lagarde wants EU to ditch Visa, Mastercard for own platform
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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.
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I’m really confused. I thought multibanco was just what we called the atm! Even went to my wallet to check my banco ctt card. Can ELI5 it to me?
The commonly shared software by all ATMs in Portugal is very cool too though. Lots of additional features like charging your prepaid sim or even paying your taxes too.
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Aren't EU technically a Social Democracy ?
The EU is not a country.
Some countries in the EU currently have or have had Social Democratic governments, but mainly they have governments which are neoliberal, though a milder form than the US: generally the mainstream Rightwing around this parts has policies which are to the left of the Democrat Party in the US, though not by much, so for example nobody has a Healthcare system which is as bad as the US and even in the worst countries Public Transport is better than the in US.
Then again at least one country in the EU - Hungary - currently has Fascism whilst the other ones which are said to have Far-Right governments (such as Italy) politically sit between the US Democrats and Republicans.
In the things which are the responsibility of the EU (i.e. trade-related subjects), the EU is significantly more pro-consumer than the US, with for example the precautionary principle - i.e. proven safe before allowed, rather than the US' method of allowing until proven unsafe - being used for chemical substances which people tend to come in contact with, with consumers having way more rights than they have in the US, all across the EU (in the US it massively depends on the State) and stricter rules when it comes to pollution and more broadly Environmental damage.
I supposed that in the things which fall under the responsibility of the EU, it tends to be sort of half-way between Neoliberal and Social-Democrat, for example it's very Neoliberal when it comes to Finance, but it's Social Democrat when it comes to consumer protection, especially for things like food. I suspect this is a lot to do with what different countries care the most about and hence the politics of countries which care more about a specific subject getting more strongly imprinted in legislation at an EU level.
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Most card transactions in Norway go through a local system called BankAxept, and have for decades. A lot of Norwegians don't even know, because the same cards also support VISA, and they think that's what they're using.
I know that both Portugal and The Netherlands also have their own local systems, but you can't really use the system of one country in another country.
What's really needed is some sort of pan-european pay system, ideally one which also gets accepted in the rest of the World.
As things stand now, if for example from my Portuguese bank account I want to buy something from an online store in Germany, the payment gets processed by Visa.
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The EU is not a country.
Some countries in the EU currently have or have had Social Democratic governments, but mainly they have governments which are neoliberal, though a milder form than the US: generally the mainstream Rightwing around this parts has policies which are to the left of the Democrat Party in the US, though not by much, so for example nobody has a Healthcare system which is as bad as the US and even in the worst countries Public Transport is better than the in US.
Then again at least one country in the EU - Hungary - currently has Fascism whilst the other ones which are said to have Far-Right governments (such as Italy) politically sit between the US Democrats and Republicans.
In the things which are the responsibility of the EU (i.e. trade-related subjects), the EU is significantly more pro-consumer than the US, with for example the precautionary principle - i.e. proven safe before allowed, rather than the US' method of allowing until proven unsafe - being used for chemical substances which people tend to come in contact with, with consumers having way more rights than they have in the US, all across the EU (in the US it massively depends on the State) and stricter rules when it comes to pollution and more broadly Environmental damage.
I supposed that in the things which fall under the responsibility of the EU, it tends to be sort of half-way between Neoliberal and Social-Democrat, for example it's very Neoliberal when it comes to Finance, but it's Social Democrat when it comes to consumer protection, especially for things like food. I suspect this is a lot to do with what different countries care the most about and hence the politics of countries which care more about a specific subject getting more strongly imprinted in legislation at an EU level.
I didn't say EU was a country, who do you think I am ?
An American ? -
I didn't say EU was a country, who do you think I am ?
An American ?Then why did you ask what the current policies of 27 countries' governments were as if there were only one?
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Hey now, we were able to standardize the curvature of cucumbers.
Standardise*
European spelling is superior to US spelling!
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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.
But all of that is possible now. What exactly are we trying to change?
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??? relevance to parent comment?
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But all of that is possible now. What exactly are we trying to change?
It's possible in principle now. But not actually. There's no button the ECB can press.
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This is a CBDC that she wants, something they have been talking about for years. Likely they want this because many European countries wont be able to survive higher interest rates caused by aging demographics, as the US high interest rates suck up global liquidity, which they cant afford due to debt load.
They will be able to slow inflation using the programmability of the money to prevent you from surpassing your allotted climate credits, as they are already forcing companies to measure their c02 usage in a system called the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). They will also be able to increase inflation via issuing expiring stimulus, which would allow them to do what they do now without worrying about the 18 month lag for interest rates to kick in.
What Europe also wanted was a global climate change system, where they collected revenue from carbon credits, which would be charged to foreign emitters. Trump recently front run this with his own tariff system.
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??? relevance to parent comment?
Overruled.
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California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii would also like to request EU status and new non facist payment methods
You forgot New Jersey.
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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.
Oh, they can go in one sentence, if done right.
Nano offers fast transactions on a decentralized network while using very little energy.
Strictly speaking it's not just one blockchain, but one per account, which only the account owner can update (add blocks to it).
This asynchronous design is what makes Nano so fast, because there's no need to wait for others when updating one's own blockchain.
What it doesn't have (yet?) is a sufficiently large network effect, which it may never acquire.
But it is one example of an attempt at making digital money based on blockchain technology, which is not just a copycat, scam, rugpull or other malicious nonsense.
Monero comes to mind as well and maybe a handful others.
Sadly almost all around blockchain is not just not innovative, but outright evil.
