Forget Google - It's time to break up the payment processing duopoly of Visa and MasterCard

submitted by magnora7 from medium.com

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[–]ManWithABanana 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

I think people have been trying, for years. Credit cards are pretty safe to use for consumers in the sense of fraud, so everyone wants to use the big names. Consumer Credit protection laws worked well and really entrenched them.

Cryptocurrency is one way to break their backs. But it's missing a key component of most currencies - stored value. Playing with Bitcoin is like playing the stock market, not safe.

Everything else seems to fall down and give up. I have read countless stories about this or that payment system that disappear. The latest entrant in the race seems to be Venmo, which might finally catch on with people so addicted to their phones. I don't use it since they desupported use of a computer to access their system. Maybe they'll just sort of fade away like Paypal has - all I see Paypal as today, is something weird I have to use sometimes to get charges onto my credit cards.

Realistically, the way to process payments without Visa/Mastercard is to use cash.

[–]hector_died_of_aids 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

we need a new law like consumer credit protection, consumer ACCESS protection, disallowing censorship of ppl's commercial activity

[–]magnora7[S] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Cash or cryptocurrency is another way to get around payment processors.

[–]jamesK_3rd 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

You know I've seen several retailers and restaurants recently who refuse to take cash, they have signs abound that state this is due to the ongoing pandemic and cash is inherently risky.

[–]magnora7[S] 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

And there's this ongoing "coin shortage" in the USA that seems artificial, to drive people away from cash as well

[–]apoliticalinactivist 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I disagree that stored value is a key component in the short term adoption phase. Your premise of transactional safety is based on relative value based on the value of a traditional currency, when the whole point of a crypto currency is so that you don't have to "cash out" back into traditional currency. In crypto, 1coin will always be worth 1coin and when you stop comparing it to purchasing power of normal fiat currency, it's easier to put in your $20 every once in a while and spend it where you can to support the tech/philosophy.

You're actually touching on a big debate in the cryptocurrency community, store of value vs. ease of transaction. This difference in dev philosophy is the root cause of the fork between bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash (BCH), where BCH is focused on having low fees and reasonable sized blocks so it can be useful for many small daily transactions.