The fucked up thing is how they are enforcing archaic puritan ideals on the whole world. Acting as self appointed global censors. (Eg. not allowing adult games on Steam or Itch.io)
The most confusing thing for me is why. I have read a few theories, but nothing convincing. What could be a strong enough motivator to do such a bizarre thing?
Also we need governments to keep them in line. We cant have private corps acting as de facto censors like that. Its completely undemocratic and unethical.
This is an important topic. I wonder what it is that makes duopoly so prevalent in tech e.g. Apple vs Google for mobile, Apple vs Microsoft for desktop, Uber vs Lyft for ride sharing.
As for the linked article, it reads too much like AI slop for me to be bothered to analyze any of its specific points. If it's not AI, someone please correct me.
China is a footnote in the article, but their story here is interesting. China's WTO accession commitments in 2001 agreed to open its financial services sector, including payment card services, to foreign companies, except they never did.
MasterCard just started being full offered in 2024. VISA still has not. In the meantime, China built their own dominate offerings, essentially avoiding the duopoly.
The credit card duopoly is another instance where the EU has done a good job with regulation, but everyone just takes it for granted until they’re reminded how much worse the rest of the world has it.
In the EU, card payment fees are capped at 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards. In the US, these interchange fees are about 2%.
US businesses pay over $100 billion annually in these fees to card networks. If the fees were capped like in the EU, 85% of that money would stay with the businesses rather than feed the duopoly.
Brazil central bank introduced Pix a few years ago. It took over the country as the public basic infrastructure for money transfer. Totally free and instantaneous transactions between people and companies, available to all banks.
Then, just last week, the US presidency launched an investigation considering Pix an unfair trade practice against the US.
Actions like that may show the current direction of the US government is aligned on preserving status quo. But still, I wonder how impactful a public digital infrastructure for the dollar would be.
> I wonder how impactful a public digital infrastructure for the dollar would be.
The future digital dollar is being quietly sabotaged as the current administration realizes that crypto isn't just capable of anonymous bribery, it's the ideal medium for it.
it's important to note that Pix took over Brazil because it was mandatory. The US Federal Reserve built equivalent infra: FedNow, as of 2023, is the rails for instant settling, $.04 bank transfers. But adoption is meh
in like 2011 I saw Daniel Radcliffe in How to succeed in business without really trying, and there's this line
> And other men may carry cards, as members of the Diners
that i did not understand until a few years ago someone mention the show, I remembered the line. And now at this moment, where this article reminded me of the Capital One acq. of Discover which happened to own Diner's, I can't help but think of this zombified credit card company limping along.
Sign me up for the Diner's platinum, which I have to assume will get 5x points at the five-and-dime.
Speaking as someone who tried (and failed) to build a competitor, merchants don’t actually care about the fees. We built a mobile payment system using bank transfer rails (ACH debits and FedNow credits) for ecom platforms. QR payments, just like AliPay, but for the US. We studied past failures at this same idea, and targeted specifically high ticket items (jewelry, luxury), because the fees are a bigger problem, and we could solve other problems with pay-by-bank like limiting botting/scalping and providing digital proof of purchase for resellers.
We raised some money, built it, and demo’d it to dozens of different business. Instant clearing, way cheaper fees, bundle fraud insurance, digital proof of purchase. But it was an uphill battle- people didn’t want it.
Merchants might say they care about the fees, but in practice they care about conversion and getting sales. If you want them to act you need to promise to bring in new revenue, not reduce their cost of existing revenue.
Second problem is the rails. Your only option to debit is ACH, and ACH’s can be returned by the customer for any reason up to 60 days after the debit. Even with return-risk profiling, we had issues with Russian fraudsters using stolen SSNs to onboard as a merchant, do a “custom jewelry” sale for thousands, then as soon as the merchant gets paid out, ACH R10. The “merchant” has RTP’d that money away so when we try to debit it NSFs.
RfPs on FedNow (if they ever get widely adopted) would solve this, because at least they’re irreversible. Until then the only competitor is crypto, but good luck getting US consumers to use a different currency at checkout without tanking your conversion (people have tried!!)
The last section in the article speaks about RuPay but isn't this just one of the many implementations of UPI[1] ? In any case, imo, it is the start of the end for the duopoly and it is my hope that an truly open standard and protocol (unlike UPI) emerges (and no, the blockchain is not it -- crypto would just be accidental complexity in any potential solution).
RuPay is debit/credit card as domestic alternative to Visa and MasterCard, while UPI is the digital payments platform. Both technology stacks are owned and managed by NCPI (National Payments Corporation of India is an Umbrella Organisation that facilitates services like UPI Payments, Bharat BillPay, RuPay Cards, FASTag, NACH, etc.).
Reading Barrett Brown's "My Glorious Defeats" at the moment, being reminded of that time Anonymous went after Visa, Mastercard, and others, in retaliation for them blocking payments to Wikileaks.
An action the payment companies took extrajudicially at the behest of the US government because the US gov was't happy with Wikileaks. Wikileaks' crime was that they'd been very successful at getting true information to the public about what governments were doing.
This was quite shocking to me (and at least some others, presumably) at the time, in 2011. I guess if we were taking it seriously, we would have been obliged to say: oh, how fundamentally authoritarian and anti-democratic.
When progressives/democrat/left types shout "fascism!" now on account of something Trump did or said, the cynical part of me says that a lot of them probably just want Obama/Clinton/Biden-flavoured authoritarianism rather than "ugly" lower-middle-class Trumpian authoritarianism.
Not a total duopoly, almost all cards in Norway are dual network - the local network BankAxept + Visa/Mastercard, the cheapest option (BankAxept) is selected invisibly for the users when possible while the cards still works flawlessly all places that only accept Visa/Mastercard globally.
8/10 card transactions in Norway are BankAxept. I think many other countries have similar solutions, and if not they should implement them. It won't end the duopoly, but it does decrease the consequences.
I’ve always wondered how that is even really possible, especially today … ignoring the likely bribery, aka lobbying. For example, in Germany there is something called an EC patent network (there are others in different European countries), they process what are effectively debit card payments like would be done on the visa network. I do not see a reason other than corruption and maybe lack of an initiative, for all of Europe to e.g., put all of Visa, MC, Amex, etc out of business by having a universally payment processing network standard for all payment types. It is effectively nothing different than the BPE and Mint making currency, why could the government not have a universal payment processing system for all transactions in America?
India has had UPI since 2016 now and recently overtook Visa and Mastercards global transaction volume with 650 million transactions per day [1]. These payment processors seem to be basically levying a 1-3% tax on a nations entire GDP and enforcing their own ideas of what transactions should or shouldn't be allowed. With UPI and Pix etc. paving the way and showing its possible, it actually sounds insane to give so much money and power to some private company that provides a worse product, for nation-critical infrastructure.
I spend many months in India every year and I've been paying with RuPay and UPI for the past 5 years exclusively. It works, and India saved 1-2% of all digital payments going to some leechy foreign middlemen who do nothing.
V/M would love to "but fraud" us sadly the actual payment fraud % is much lower than claimed and easily dealt with by the issuing/receiving banks.
India did great by introducing UPI and subsequently RuPay to face these duopoly behemoths. UPI replaced queues to ATMs in general since one could typically scan a QR code and have the amount transferred in seconds. This is far more modern than ACH equivalents US has. But the downside is that it is a debit transaction; if you're scammed, there is usually no way to retrieve it unless a court orders so.
I work in Banking, and RBI (India's Banking Regulatory organization) has enforced stringent norms for UPI transactions behind the scenes, especially for chargebacks/disputes, to ensure that the UPI transactions are processed faster and easier by the Banks and intermediary processors, with the aim that customers get transparency and accountability in digital payments.
So stringent in fact, that RBI shut down PayTM Payments Bank which was most popular market leader in that sector, because PayTM flouted the mandated norms for digital payments and payments banking.
That is also beside the fact that UPI platform has high uptime and rarely faces any outages.
> But the downside is that it is a debit transaction; if you're scammed, there is usually no way to retrieve it unless a court orders so.
in a practical sense, UPI is primarily positioned to facilitate digital transactions in a cash-first economy. while it would be nice to have safeguards against scams, especially as qr codes become more ubiquitous by the day. however, paying with cash did not have any inherent safety features either, so it is equivalent in terms of risk imho.
although i do have a personal anecdote of getting a payment reversed when a pos double charged me. i did have receipts and had to wait a few weeks, but in theory it is possible in regular scenarios (i.e. when it is between an individual and a business).
I have gone full on cash-only mode, people would freak out with the amount of fees they pay without knowing it.
I only have debit card, no credit card at all, in many places AUD$0.30-$0.50c is added to the goods price on debit cards.
With cash, many places are offering 5-15% off when buying with cash only which is awesome.
If you are a gamer, you most have heard within the last 3-4 days now that Steam, Itch.io and others removed +18 games from their store because of a psycho Australian activists group called Collective Shout, who used words like rpe, child prngrphy forcing Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and a Japanese payment system to force those games stores to remove the games or they wouldn't have a processing payment.
Thanks to Visa/MasterCard monopoly, everybody was forced to do it.
Many players don't even have +18 games filter enabled, for us in general this isn't about the +18 games but about US payment systems telling us what we can buy or not.
Visa is getting its ass busted in Japan already with a Japanese politician joining the fight with gamers.
Dedollarisation has never been this strong, countries are already doing international trades using their own currency over the US dollar.
I am not even getting into BRICS.
It is not a surprise that the US isn't happy with PIX in Brazil, it is a huge country, imagine all the money Visa/MasterCard are no longer making.
Based on market data, it suggest an ESTIMATE around USD2.5-USD4B in 2024-2025 revenue lost lmao
> According to the Federal Reserve, over 100 billion debit card payments were made in 2021, compared to 51 billion credit card payments. In terms of transaction value, debit cards processed $4.6 trillion, while credit cards reached $4.9 trillion, indicating that credit transactions tend to be about double in average value.
Interesting that debit cards are twice the swipes that credit cards are. Didn't know that. I wore the debit card hair shirt for decades. They have a ~0.73% transaction cost vs 1.5% to 3.5% for credit card swipes. But I never once got any benefit from this lower transaction cost.
So now I have the Trifecta and a Savor. I work my credit cards aggressively and use their benefits to exceed their annual fees before even accounting for 3% cash back and Membership Reward Points and signup bonuses.
I am winning on this. Consequently someone else must be losing. It seems to me that the debit card users are subsidizing me.
Here in Canada, Interac has somewhat displaced that (even though most people still use Visa/Mastercard for transactions with businesses). That being said, it's especially useful for transfers between individuals as the transaction fees are relatively low, which makes services like PayPal or Cash App much less appealing domestically.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 80.8 ms ] threadThe most confusing thing for me is why. I have read a few theories, but nothing convincing. What could be a strong enough motivator to do such a bizarre thing?
Also we need governments to keep them in line. We cant have private corps acting as de facto censors like that. Its completely undemocratic and unethical.
As for the linked article, it reads too much like AI slop for me to be bothered to analyze any of its specific points. If it's not AI, someone please correct me.
The US sued (presumably on behalf of VISA and MasterCard) and won in 2012: https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-...
MasterCard just started being full offered in 2024. VISA still has not. In the meantime, China built their own dominate offerings, essentially avoiding the duopoly.
In the EU, card payment fees are capped at 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards. In the US, these interchange fees are about 2%.
US businesses pay over $100 billion annually in these fees to card networks. If the fees were capped like in the EU, 85% of that money would stay with the businesses rather than feed the duopoly.
I envision a third payment processor that isn't Visa or Mastercard and not even crypto.
It isn't Stripe or PayPal either, something completely different.
Thoughts?
Then, just last week, the US presidency launched an investigation considering Pix an unfair trade practice against the US.
Actions like that may show the current direction of the US government is aligned on preserving status quo. But still, I wonder how impactful a public digital infrastructure for the dollar would be.
The future digital dollar is being quietly sabotaged as the current administration realizes that crypto isn't just capable of anonymous bribery, it's the ideal medium for it.
> And other men may carry cards, as members of the Diners
that i did not understand until a few years ago someone mention the show, I remembered the line. And now at this moment, where this article reminded me of the Capital One acq. of Discover which happened to own Diner's, I can't help but think of this zombified credit card company limping along.
Sign me up for the Diner's platinum, which I have to assume will get 5x points at the five-and-dime.
We raised some money, built it, and demo’d it to dozens of different business. Instant clearing, way cheaper fees, bundle fraud insurance, digital proof of purchase. But it was an uphill battle- people didn’t want it.
Merchants might say they care about the fees, but in practice they care about conversion and getting sales. If you want them to act you need to promise to bring in new revenue, not reduce their cost of existing revenue.
Second problem is the rails. Your only option to debit is ACH, and ACH’s can be returned by the customer for any reason up to 60 days after the debit. Even with return-risk profiling, we had issues with Russian fraudsters using stolen SSNs to onboard as a merchant, do a “custom jewelry” sale for thousands, then as soon as the merchant gets paid out, ACH R10. The “merchant” has RTP’d that money away so when we try to debit it NSFs.
RfPs on FedNow (if they ever get widely adopted) would solve this, because at least they’re irreversible. Until then the only competitor is crypto, but good luck getting US consumers to use a different currency at checkout without tanking your conversion (people have tried!!)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
An action the payment companies took extrajudicially at the behest of the US government because the US gov was't happy with Wikileaks. Wikileaks' crime was that they'd been very successful at getting true information to the public about what governments were doing.
This was quite shocking to me (and at least some others, presumably) at the time, in 2011. I guess if we were taking it seriously, we would have been obliged to say: oh, how fundamentally authoritarian and anti-democratic.
When progressives/democrat/left types shout "fascism!" now on account of something Trump did or said, the cynical part of me says that a lot of them probably just want Obama/Clinton/Biden-flavoured authoritarianism rather than "ugly" lower-middle-class Trumpian authoritarianism.
Big businesses only pay 0.0475% + ~0.003 USD per transaction for BankAxept: https://bankaxept.no/hjelp/priser-for-bankaxept
8/10 card transactions in Norway are BankAxept. I think many other countries have similar solutions, and if not they should implement them. It won't end the duopoly, but it does decrease the consequences.
[1] https://organiser.org/2025/07/22/304055/bharat/a-fintech-rev...
V/M would love to "but fraud" us sadly the actual payment fraud % is much lower than claimed and easily dealt with by the issuing/receiving banks.
So stringent in fact, that RBI shut down PayTM Payments Bank which was most popular market leader in that sector, because PayTM flouted the mandated norms for digital payments and payments banking.
That is also beside the fact that UPI platform has high uptime and rarely faces any outages.
in a practical sense, UPI is primarily positioned to facilitate digital transactions in a cash-first economy. while it would be nice to have safeguards against scams, especially as qr codes become more ubiquitous by the day. however, paying with cash did not have any inherent safety features either, so it is equivalent in terms of risk imho.
although i do have a personal anecdote of getting a payment reversed when a pos double charged me. i did have receipts and had to wait a few weeks, but in theory it is possible in regular scenarios (i.e. when it is between an individual and a business).
I only have debit card, no credit card at all, in many places AUD$0.30-$0.50c is added to the goods price on debit cards. With cash, many places are offering 5-15% off when buying with cash only which is awesome.
If you are a gamer, you most have heard within the last 3-4 days now that Steam, Itch.io and others removed +18 games from their store because of a psycho Australian activists group called Collective Shout, who used words like rpe, child prngrphy forcing Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and a Japanese payment system to force those games stores to remove the games or they wouldn't have a processing payment.
Thanks to Visa/MasterCard monopoly, everybody was forced to do it. Many players don't even have +18 games filter enabled, for us in general this isn't about the +18 games but about US payment systems telling us what we can buy or not. Visa is getting its ass busted in Japan already with a Japanese politician joining the fight with gamers.
Dedollarisation has never been this strong, countries are already doing international trades using their own currency over the US dollar. I am not even getting into BRICS.
It is not a surprise that the US isn't happy with PIX in Brazil, it is a huge country, imagine all the money Visa/MasterCard are no longer making. Based on market data, it suggest an ESTIMATE around USD2.5-USD4B in 2024-2025 revenue lost lmao
The US is encountering the perfect storm!
Interesting that debit cards are twice the swipes that credit cards are. Didn't know that. I wore the debit card hair shirt for decades. They have a ~0.73% transaction cost vs 1.5% to 3.5% for credit card swipes. But I never once got any benefit from this lower transaction cost.
So now I have the Trifecta and a Savor. I work my credit cards aggressively and use their benefits to exceed their annual fees before even accounting for 3% cash back and Membership Reward Points and signup bonuses.
I am winning on this. Consequently someone else must be losing. It seems to me that the debit card users are subsidizing me.