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>No one should be required to carry an attacker-controlled tracking device

What about being required to carry a your-own-government-controlled tracking device?

Because the US or Chine government can't harm me in Europe via the data they collect from me, But the EU authorities can if they want to, so naturally I fear them more if they were the ones hoovering my data.

What are the odds they're using this on-shore tech grab to implement their own domestic version of China's social credit score system, to easily get data on their own citizens who commit "wrong-think", without having to through the effort to twist the arm of US entities every time they want to do that?

Food for thought, but I do think we're living the last years of online anonymity, it's inevitable.

Carrying this device is the key here. Eventually we all need to carry it around, track us everywhere.

Yeah it seems that some politicians have noticed that they can enact a lot of self serving authoritarian legislation that wouldn't fly otherwise if they push it as populist independence-from-US thing. Can't let a good crisis go to waste, of course.

One only needs a few looks at what the EU Commission has been doing lately to see that if left unchecked their plan is a UK-like total surveillance state.

> It's funny that the EU uses all this mobile attestation BS more than the US does

Attestation in on itself isn't unwarranted which (to me) is an important security measure. Attestation as commonly implemented on Android via Play Integrity (the way banking apps are known to do) is restrictive, sure: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu... / https://archive.is/snGEu

GrapheneOS in Spain?

https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...

> Police in Spain have reportedly started profiling people based on their phones; specifically, and surprisingly, those carrying Google Pixel devices. Law enforcement officials in Catalonia say they associate Pixels with crime because drug traffickers are increasingly turning to these phones. But it’s not Google’s secure Titan M2 chip that has criminals favoring the Pixel — instead, it’s GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused alternative to the default Pixel OS.

EDIT: Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44473694

The problem isn't just getting something that works across all European countries. It's getting something that works globally.

While we may make most of our payments within EU, basically everyone still occasionally pays for something outside of EU, either online or when they travel. This means if the new thing only works in EU, every European will still need and have a MasterCard/Visa even if they use it less often than before.

This is still a massive amount of leverage - MC/Visa still have the ability to block payments made from EU citizens/companies to outside.

SEPA gets blocked immediately when you try to buy something expensive, like a top-end graphics card (8k+).

I've been in Portugal sometimes, and to me MB was synonymous with "we accept credit cards", and in fact it is in the sense that you can pay using Visa or Mastercard in those shops. But, is it a standalone system that doesn't require anything outside Portugal in order to work? With their own non-Visa credit cards? And can you use them when abroad in the EU, for example?

Show me a german webshop that supports modern payment methods. It usually old school bank transfers still.

SEPA would be a decent solution with instant QR code generation and app payments, but the transfer fees are ludicrous for daily use (~1-2€ per wire). Or maybe it's just my bank being greedy fucks as usual.

> I never invited the extra surveillance middleman

What's an extra layer of surveillance? Why accept the "credit and debit" surveillance middlemen but not the google/apple middlenmen?

What the world needs are "cash cards". Something equivalent to cash not tied to your identity that you can use in the real and virtual world.

I simply do not understand why governments or the private sector do not provide such options.

I'm with you. Low-tech works just fine. I hate the idea of having to depend on a working phone just to pay for things.

But isn't the promise of Apple Pay that you never expose your real credit card # to the merchant? So they can't track you? I know Walmart in Canada really resisted Apple Pay for a few years because it would mean no more ability to track people by their payment methods.

Yes, but in Spain all of our cards are Visa or Mastercard, afaik, so you can't really avoid using American tech in your daily payments (unless you use cash, which remains a very convenient method, by the way).

I put my debit card in my smartphone case. Best of both worlds.

Thanks! ANOTHER SANE voice of reason! Nothing tops the simplicity of using plastic, either via chip or NFC. Leave the friggen' phone at home!

Visa bought Carte Bleue in 2011. Yep.

What would Google prevent from taking a similar cut as Apple is taking?

Never mind russians putting starlinks on flying bombs to blow up Ukrainians. But those poor Russian Internet users you invented. While it’s jailable offense in russia to own starlink.

> they are trying to quickly create alternatives to anything American

They're the same bright minds that ensured no alternatives could naturally come out of the European market trough relentless bureaucratic central planning. I have zero hopes of a good outcome

Starlink was never available in Russia due to the sanctions regime. It's only use by Russians was via grey import terminals on the frontline in Ukraine (made possible due to complications of geofencing).

> a lot of people in Russia stopped using any other form of internet access

What you're saying is just plain false. No one has ever used Starlink in Russia. It doesn't even work here. It never did. Russian troops were using Starlink on Ukrainian territory, that's what was shut off.

> Starlink just shut off all of Russia

What are you talking about? Starlink never worked in russia. It worked in Ukraine, and it was shutdown in Ukraine by using a white list for which any Ukrainian can easily apply.

The goal was to shutdown Starlink usage by russian drones in Ukraine and by anyone on the occupied Ukrainian territories.

> Because Starlink was so cheap and easy (and stable for the last 4 years of the war), a lot of people in Russia stopped using any other form of internet access.

What are you smoking ..err.. any source to your claim ? (Which is between bizarre and just plain wrong).

But right now many of us are concerned with not being able to run e.g. GrapheneOS without locking ourselves out of all basic digital infrastructure. We shouldn't wait until it gets untenable for the EU to lock us into Google and Apple, we want independence from the start.

What does Belgium's capital has to do with this? Do you imply Brussels = European Union?

None of what you’ve mentioned has anything to do with Visa and Mastercard. Visa and Mastercard are just payment networks, their whole business is literally just transporting transaction information from payment terminals to banks and payment processors, plus keeping track of all the numbers (which is pretty important).

Payment networks don’t provide credit or any kind of liquidity whatsoever, that entirely provided by the various financial entities that communicate via the payment network. The reason Visa and Mastercard haven’t been easily replaced is simple network effects, nobody wants to integrate with a payment network where there’s nobody to transact with.

There are many countries where debit cards are the norm and credit cards are extremely rare. In France, people are so afraid of consumer credit that cards are renamed ‘deferred debit cards’ rather than credit cards, otherwise people do not want them.

> For many consumers there isn't sufficient money in the account to settle all the one-time and ongoing transactions they are liable for

This is a uniquely American viewpoint. In most of Europe you don't buy anything on credit ever.

> credit cards are giving you a revolving loan

I'm confused - is it not the issuing bank that gives you the loan, and the credit card company just provides the infrastructure?

Btw. having an overdraft limit of a few hundred Euros is quite typical for those liquidity issues. You don't need a credit card for that.

I shouldn't have to pay for your usury economy if I'm using cash. If that were really the issue, these companies would have no problems with businesses charging different prices or offering discounts for cash.

> credit cards are giving you a revolving loan, there's risk it will not be repaid, and that risk ends up reflected in processing fees

Neither Visa nor MasterCard are loaning customers their money. It's the European banks that hold the bulk of the risk for European credit card transactions.

Cash flow and fraud, yes. Credit, not much in most of Europe. AFAIK nobody has had something close to real credit cards until recently. They were called credit cards but it was a debit card with payment and deferred to the end of the month and backed only by the cash in the bank account linked to the card. I guess that no financial institution did like to risk any money on the behavior of European customers.

I agree the risk transfer is very important, but Visa and Mastercard don't do that (they just facilitate it)

> For many consumers there isn't sufficient money in the account to settle all the one-time and ongoing transactions they are liable for -- credit cards are giving you a revolving loan, there's risk it will not be repaid, and that risk ends up reflected in processing fees

This is really much less of a thing in Europe, or at the very least in Germany and Spain. Mostly it's the overdraft from banks that you can use as what you call a revolving loan. Most of the visa and mastercards I've had in my life simply debit from my main account.

Visa/MC have built walled gardens which provide many services.

Some of the services include: - Consumer Credit - Fraud protection - Payment network - Discount service (rewards, etc) - Concierge services - Rental/Ticketing services - etc

No one is denying the utility of what they have created. The problem is they’ve built monopolistic walled gardens where these are all bundled together which raises overall costs while also prevents competition.

These services can easily be unbundled (for example in India the payment network is open and cost free, so anyone can provide those other services on top of the payment network).

What has made this far more urgent, however, is that these companies are located in the U.S. which has recently leveraged the power these networks have to attack EU citizens for frivolous reasons.

So even if the MC/Visa business model was perfect, it would be foolish for even American allies to rely on them given the actions of the current administration.

> If you want to switch the world to a debit-based system where economic transactions are limited by cash on hand, I'd argue that's a poorer and less dynamic world than the one we're operating in today.

Disagree. Credit has its uses, but debit is superior for the vast majority consumer transactions: lower fees, lower risk, instant settlement, easy P2P transfers, and broader accessibility. That we've become used to credit card payment system in the West is largely a historical aberration that needs correcting.

Also, I'm a bit biased since I live in China, but WeChat Pay and Alipay are so far superior to the credit card system that I can hardly find a single redeeming quality in the latter. China was lucky in that it leapfrogged the traditional credit card system since it didn't have that historical baggage.

You know here in Europe you can just overdraw your bank account anytime without bullshit fees, just with interest that is still way lower than average US Credit Card Interest (around 11%)?

Also bank transfers are easy, instant and free.

> For many _businesses_ managing cash flow is existential -- as merchants they want to be paid as quickly as possible, but as B2B customers they want to have 30-60 days to sell the input goods they've purchased so they can pay for them upstream. There is a premium for that flexibility that gets reflected in processing fees.

Yes those businesses use a bank loan for this, no need for a credit card again.

> If you want to switch the world to a debit-based system where economic transactions are limited by cash on hand, I'd argue that's a poorer and less dynamic world than the one we're operating in today.

Thinking that the world doesn't have credit just because they use debit cards is one of the most idiotic things I've read today

Hmm, maybe for countries with strong consumer protection, yes.

I lost 3 credit cards INSIDE an airplane (hello AirAsia!). I only realized it when I turned on my phone while queuing at immigration and was bombarded with dozens of "Successful transaction" messages. That's ~30min from stepping off the airplane. When I checked my statements, I saw dozens of physical transactions (swipes/taps) with different merchants in different cities from the airport.

All 3 cards have different PINs. All require a PIN for transactions above ~USD200. Yet the banks rejected my disputes because "it's a physical transaction, so you must be the one doing it." Apparently, they all think I could fly to different cities, buy different items, and fly back to wait in immigration, all in 30 minutes.

Isn’t that financial risk of credit cards borne by the banks doing the lending? It’s not really any different to a debit card transaction on a bank account with an overdraft facility.

> - For many consumers there isn't sufficient money in the account to settle all the one-time and ongoing transactions they are liable for -- credit cards are giving you a revolving loan, there's risk it will not be repaid, and that risk ends up reflected in processing fees.

Their risk is covered multiple ways (as reflected in their profits). You pay an annual fee to have a card. You pay per transaction, you pay for paywave, you pay 21% in interest.

They cover their risk by hitting every possible angle.

You're mixing debit and credit cards.

In the EU, debit cards are pretty common, and largely its a network effect. You need to get terminals that are supported by your payment provider.

A lot of merchant terminals are provided by banks, and frankly they are itching to get a sweet sweet cut of each transaction. Not only the information, but the cut of each transaction. Something like 0.2-1.5% of each transaction. (I'm sure mastercard and visa give them a cut)

For Credit cards, the banks/operator already handle most of the risk, and then pay visa a percentage for the privilege of charging usury like rates

> For many _businesses_ managing cash flow is existential

Err, no - for _all_ businesses managing cash flow is the _only_ NR 1 crucial thing, because if they dont, they will disappear by tomorrow :)

This risk is all covered by the banks, not the interchange networks?

That's all the bank's problem, not the network's.

Your comment seems to miss the point. It is totally possible to enable the first two of your bullet points without Visa or Mastercard, for example banks could just give lines of credit directly to consumers. Indeed, the myriad of loan products is run without Visa and Mastercard.

They are taking a percentage point or two on the entire consumer payment system.

I think there's plenty of money to back all the activity.

Especially if there are central banks willing to back them

Replacing EM dash with "--" doesn't take away LLM smell.

Switch? We mostly use debit cards today.

man who has only used the american financial system: the world not singularly using the american financial system is less dynamic. surely there are no counterexamples to this.

In the Netherlands, before VISA, there already was a national debit card standard called PIN [1]. Sure, times have changed and it's probably not super easy, but it's also not going to be super hard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIN_(debit_card)

India built RuPay, China built UnionPay. There's no reason why Europe can't do the same.

My takeaway from the episode was that its actually really easy to setup up visa, you just need to get the banks, vendors, and card issuers onboard, which should be easy if you're the government

> Because at a minimum you want American tourist dollars and Europe isn't going to start issuing European credit cards to Americans or other citizens around the world.

It could be handled similarly to how tourists in Brazil can now use Brazil's Pix payment system.

One way Brazil handles it is with 3rd party digital wallets that tourists can install on their phones such as Wallbit [1]. Another way is with 3rd party services that let you pay from your own digital wallet or bank app and the service makes the Pix payment [2].

[1] https://www.wallbit.io/en/blog/brazilian-pix-and-a-payment-a...

[2] https://www.pagbrasil.com/lp/pix-for-international-travelers...

> Well you have to deal with American and European financial regulations, KYC, &c. - you have to vet merchants, you have to run the infrastructure to process transactions, refunds, direct payments from bank accounts to pay for cards, and all of those things. Those are real, genuine business activities that are non-negotiable and while they may seem simple, in practice they are not at all simple.

Those are partially or completely taken over not by the card network but by the bank that is issuing you the card, so a change in the underlying technology will be transparent.

> Buying a bottle of Calvados in some remote area? Yea just tap to pay with your Mastercard.

Hard disagree. Until Covid, many small shops didn't take cards in Europe. Taxis, restaurants, market stalls, even trains were often cash only not that long ago. I in the UK ran accounts in companies that had people travel extensively in Europe. We used to issue travellers with EUR200 for the things that cards couldn't buy. Most shops didn't take Amex due to fees. Americans will either have to bring a compliant card or change some cash at the airport.

I also think you have misjudged the mood. I guarantee there are a large number of people in rural Europe that would be very happy never to meet another American tourist, even if it costs them. Americans can look forward to worse service everywhere. I wouldn't be suprised if some people in rural France refused to let you have the Calvados at all.

> Today you can, at least as an American, just walk in to the subway in just about any country and tap to pay.

Is that really true? I remember wanting to buy a train ticket at Charles De Gaulle airport, and the machine only took French credit cards. That was around 2010, so I don't know if something changed.

This last summer, I couldn’t use my US-issued Visa or Mastercard credit card in most places in the Netherlands.

Had to use debit.

About your point in [1] yes it is complex but maybe 50% is done by the issuing bank/institution

And people do underestimate the complexity of it

Rather than a moat of details, it's first-mover advantage. Anyone can run a credit card network, but merchants and banks need to support them. Many others exist, but the issue is that they don't have widespread adoption. Solutions that work exist, which means the lesser supported alternative is not widely used, which again reduces reason for wider adoption...

Regulation changes "why bother" to "oh crap".

> If there's one thing the EU really does have, it's the capacity to revise regulations.

This is the central power lever of the EU and one that is frequently underestimated.

European power projection doesn't work through tanks and aircraft carriers. It works with regulations, trade deals and economic incentives. Remember how a few years ago everyone was scrambling to get GDPR-compliant? That wasn't some random event. That was the EU projecting power.

Why do iPhones have USB-C now? European soft power.

Why are things like Champagne and Prosciutto di Parma protected brands that can only be sold if they're from the actual region? And I mean not just in Europe itself, but everywhere it has deals? Canada, Japan, India, China, Mercosur, etc etc? European soft power.

The EU is playing a different game from the other major players. Not one of brute force, but one of shifting the foundational rules of commerce in their favor. And they're very good at it.

Very good examples. I'd add that Trust and connections are also huge in payments. Even if your technology is perfect, you need to integrate with tons of different systems to get full coverage, and the people who run those systems don't sign contacts with just anyone.

Don't forget stand-ins, much of this hasn't discussed that credit card networks do a lot of "stand-ins" when the issuer is unreachable (bank goes down, latency too high, etc). It's a bit unclear how things like Wero would operate when a network issue hits as Wero and EU rails won't just assume the liability for the transaction and hope it clears later as it does on Visa/Mastercard.

What about it?

If the entirety of Europe comes up with a single system I think that'll be more than enough incentive for merchants to update their pos software to accept the new network. I hope that they are eventually so successful that merchants here in the US support them too. I'd love to stop using visa and mastercard.

If we could create a single solution on Europan level, based on cellphones first and order banks to provide service of access to it for all of their customers, free of charge, for the privilege of remaining in the market, it could be done.

Crypto is also a shit payment method though. Expensive and difficult to run and with high transaction fees. And if you use a chain with low transaction fees, there's no consensus on which chain that is (otherwise transaction fees would be high) so you have to support all of them. Then you might as well outsource the whole thing.

So there are 3 kinds of "debit cards" in Canada:

1. Debit Mastercard/VISA. These are Debit Cards that use the Mastercard/VISA communication system to process transactions. While they are not "Credit" cards because you are using cash in an account that is your money, they rely upon the VISA/Mastercard system and merchants will be charged the Mastercard/VISA fee like a Credit Card.

2. Interac Debit Card. Interac was the first company to offer a debit card type system in Canada, and they are the traditional bank card. These cards use the Interac system (so does eTransfer) and Merchants are charged by Interac for using the system. Its typically less than Mastercard/VISA, which is why you see these "Debit Card only" signs.

3. Mastercard/VISA and Interac hybrid cards. These are newer and combine both Mastercard/VISA and Interac cards in one. The merchant can choose how they want to proceed.

Most of these "Debit" only signs are really saying "Interac only", but because for 30 years Interac was the only provider of Debit cards in Canada, it became the common vernacular to say "Debit" when you mean "Interac".

Most merchants don't work with Visa and Mastercard, they work with payment processors like Fiserv, or other middle men even further removed from the card networks, that already abstract all the different cards (including existing local debit cards) away into a unified flow.

> Want to accept russian MIR cards?

Thankfully, this use case has been solved by Russians themselves.

Fraud is mostly resolved by the two banks involved. The network is just that, a network.

Indeed, no one seems to ever talk about the banking monopoly in Canada so it's not a big political issue. It's not nearly as controversial as the telecom or airline monopolies.

There are some new banking startups popping up in Canada like Neo Financial (from the guys who made SkipTheDishes) but they are online-only and have limited integration with stuff like Plaid.

Canadian banks still live in 2006. They can't even make EMT transfers more convenient, so people could request a payment or pay with QR.

Sometimes I feel like they don't actually refuse to do things, maybe they are not capable to improve. Something in their chain of command is broken and doesn't let them change.

You can do this in multiple steps. Start with a credit card usable only with Canadian merchants, which will cover a great majority of transactions of a great majority of Canadians. I'll have an MC for travel and the ordering from non-Canadian merchants, and this Canadian credit card for the other 95% of my expenses. If a significant percentage of Canadians have such a card, major non-Canadian services will add it as a payment option (e.g. ChatGPT or Claude). Then you branch out by either joining or co-branding with the EU credit card company if such a company succeeds.

A world with a patchwork of payments processing options will look different for travel and business, in some ways worse, but such is life in a "multipolar world" which the Americans elected their leadership to conjure up.

The payment processing rates offered vary by country. It rarely goes above 1% in Germany unless you're really not shopping around or are really low volume.

A % of that also goes to the issuing bank*, not to MC/Visa, so I suspect the mentioned 0.2% is talking about what MC/Visa has as their cut.

*: That's also how banks can profitably offer things like cashback.

This is incorrect.

Visa's processes ~$14T in transactions. At 0.2% thats roughly ~$28B in revenue (VISA posted ~$40B in revenue in 2025) versus 2% is $280B in revenue.

EDIT: The 2~3% you're talking is the payment processor fees which get divvy'd out to acquiring processors, acquiring banks, gateways, merchant processing, etc. etc.

The amount going to Visa/MC is 0.1-0.13%. The vast majority of CC interchange fees go to the issuing banks, not Visa/MC.

Not in EU.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/fees-for-...

> Specifically, the regulation:

> caps interchange fees at 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards and at 0.3% for consumer credit cards;

I think this is one of the biggest issues here, that the EU is actually forbidding to charge credit card users the transaction fee. On the contrary, it should make it mandatory that card users have to pay the transaction fees themselves. This would automatically force card providers to reduce their fees, because nobody wants to use cards with high fees. It would also get rid of nonsensical cash-back systems.

The official Apple store (McShark) in Vienna used to pass this ~3% charge on to consumers (a few years ago, not sure if it's still true today - and also there is a real Apple Store now).

France has CB. Germany has girocard. The entire problem is that these are national and not interoperable across the EU.

Very European approach: the winner is chosen by law. Is Wero really a success? According to this article, in 2024 it processed over €7.5 billion.

Polish BLIK, which is not even mentioned in the article and which has joined the EuroPA Alliance, processed €83 billion in 2024, with a 30% y/y increase in H1 2025. I understand that BLIK is much older, but it invested significant effort and money in marketing and promotions while delivering a good user experience. BLIK is now trying to expand to Romania and Slovakia, yet Wero is getting all the hype on Hacker News. Maybe this is a case of East, South, and West Europe being treated differently. Is the only “European” solution one that comes from Western Europe?

The competition is high with online ordering (which accepts cards), so the incentive is to not lose customers. in fact people have become so desperate for more sales that they would let you take something and pay later but not lose you as a customer.

If previously 3 merchants had visa / Mastercard out of 10 who only accepted cash or cheques, then with UPI all 10 now accept UPI but 7 or 8 accept a universal POS which allows more type of payments. If previously 10% payments were via cards that costed them 2%, then now if sales are 2-3x because of UPI and online payments, letting go of that 2% for even 20% share of cards is fine because they captured a larger market with more sales. Not so long ago, India was a cash dominant economy so UPI actually opened that up. UPI actually helped Visa and Mastercard. Credit card spending has gone up a lot because of digitalization.

If in EU a local payment system captures the cash market, then the habit of using digital payments will actually also help Visa and Mastercard make more sale.

I currently don't have a credit card, but when I do, I find paying by a Visa/MasterCard much more preferable than UPI, simply because it's easier by tapping.

And also much of East and Southeast Asia as well: AliPay (CN), Kakao (KR), PayPay (JP), JKO (TW), GrabPay (SG/MY), QRIS (ID), etc. with various interop compatibility between them. If you build it they will come.

Italy has a similar size economy as Russia and they also have their own payment network. Technically there is nothing special. Countries have to come together and decide on a solution together.

On the other hand, if you step back a little bit, Russia is currently stuck in a Sovjet civil war, so I don’t think the Kremlin way is that great.

> seamlessly

It's not seamless if it includes a war, global isolation, exodus of all business and disconnection of the banks. This means they were left with no alternative, in which case, sure, it's 'seamless' to use the only alternative method.

Europe will have a lot of friction with consumer habits and Visa will always be relevant for buying things from outside EU. These are all competing entities which hate anything that makes them seamlessly lose their business.

This isn't about the payment network. The EU already has their own payment network, too.

It's about card payment and even if things ending up in your network they first going through visa.

And it's about online payment (PayPal).

In theory merchants can notice some fraud signs so shifting fraud losses onto them gives an incentive to take action on those signs. In practice banks have a better overall view of fraud and this is just externalizing bank fraud losses onto stores.

It does but there aren't really any SEPA transfer point of sales. It's too asynchronous. You always use card or cash there. SEPA transfer can sometimes be used when paying for things asynchronously online, and they won't ship the item until they receive the money.

SEPA instant transfers aren't guaranteed instant as they might still be withheld for fraud checks.

How do you do your groceries with that?

That's interesting. In Belgium the pre-integration Payconiq could not do that.

I think the recent stories of the International Criminal Court judge being forbidden to use VISA and Mastercard, making his life somewhat more challenging, did make some politicians aware of the risks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Guillou

When I sold my car, the buyer wanted to use instant payments. Sounds good!

It didn’t work for the amount we needed (over 15k).

This is what these peeps advocating for an "EU-based payment system" don't get, as they typically don't travel worldwide. VISA + Master just work. Have a debit plus credit for one each. (And no, Google / Apple pay won't do it, everyone who calls themselves a "hacker" should know that you too often can't even pay for transport using a rooted phone).

Capital One just switched too.

"Just" get another bank account before travelling. Right...

As far as I know the "digital euro" should allow for offline payments. At least in principle I should be able to offload to an offline/on-device wallet and give money to anyone without the servers knowledge.

But I'm sure there are plenty of villains and idiots that will try (and succeed) in diluting those principles and will get some dystopian (trace everything) version of that.

I can assure you that south east asians also still have cards, despite not making most of their payments with it. Not all ATMs support withdrawing with just a QR code from all banks, for one.

There are benefits to non-QR based payment systems, such as not wanting to pull out your phone, open an app, scan a QR and approve to make a payment that takes me 2 seconds with regular contactless payments.

Physical cards are also a nice fallback to have in cases of running out of battery, theft, etc.

I don't really understand why this is better than tap and pay with a card. Why would I want a single point of failure for both my communications and my ability to make payments?

Qr apps just sound cumbersome compared to contactless tap to pay.

> Far less fraud as a result.

Who returns your money to you if you purchased something on mail order with this, and it turned out to be fraud?

Annecdata. Not reliably feasible.

I think the misunderstanding is that when I say “credit card,” I do not mean a physical card. I have not used a physical card in years. In the US, when people hear Mastercard or Visa, they usually associate that with a credit card (virtual or physical), meaning the money is not taken directly from your bank account. You pay the balance later, which gives you credit and strong dispute protections.

Debit or ATM cards are different. They pull money directly from your account and can exist independently of Visa and Mastercard. For example, some credit unions still issue ATM only debit cards that are not part of the Visa or Mastercard networks.

Cards are also online payment. You can already pay with such systems in some physical shops and restaurants, alongside google/apple/alipay.

Wero bought Payconiq which allow to pay at the physical terminal with a QR code to scan with your phone. So, they can cover the physical payment without having to issue cards.

I have always wondered what kind of shenanigans Mastercard or Visa did to convince so many banks to use their networks for debit cards.

When did banks actually make that switch?

It must be relatively recent, because I remember not that long ago my credit union ATM card was not part of Mastercard. Now I have a new one and it suddenly has a Mastercard logo.

North Korea would be very excited about this

https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240...

> The Wero app can be installed on any mobile device or tablet running iOS 16 or later, or Android version 9 or later. We recommend updating your device to the latest version of its operating system for maximum performance, convenience and security.

> It is not possible to use Wero via a web browser or on a computer.

That's a great point. With more open systems there can be multiple winners, instead of a single winner that takes all.

> You can get a prepaid SIM from a grocery store and register it with them

After you provide your gov ID

https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/sim-card-regist...

So now this phone number is tied to your gov ID and bank account, amazing design of a single point of failure based on a broken protocol (GSM).

I would rather give out my Phone Number than watching my account for sketchy direct debits if I was wary of some person

Good thing is, if we can live with the volatility, we the people, who want that, can have it. No matter what the EU wants.