you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]ManWithABanana 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 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.

[–]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