• boaratio@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Why do Visa and MasterCard exist? The middleman that jacks up the price while offering the end user nothing? Thanks capitalism.

    • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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      10 hours ago

      They offer credit to losers to spend more than they should. But the credit rates are what used to be usury when the mob did it.

    • CummandoX@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Before smartphones, credit cards were the cashless option.

      Now that we all have a more than capable payment terminal in our pocket, Visa and mastercard are obsolete

      • tangonov@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        Sorta. Whomever does payment on your behalf has to be willing to extend credit for an immediate transaction while the very slow process of exchanging money happens at a delay. This is especially so if the transactions are international. I truly wonder how the phone with just an ordinary bank account does this. Is it Google/Apple who extend credit? If so, is that better?

        • cardfire@sh.itjust.works
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          11 hours ago

          Most other countries don’t have to rely on the antiquated network the US uses for resolving those bank to bank transactions. In South korea, Street vendors have what looks like a phone number posted on signage around their Wares or snacks and people just make effectively debit pushes from their bank to the merchant’s bank in real time with zero margins.

          I kind of expect this is how the rest of the world operates and it’s only the us then sits on using its own infrastructure which it made one time, in the 1960s, and has refused to move off of since. This created a lot of the market need for a bunch of private companies to make their own little piggybacking solutions like venmo, zelle, square cash, and all the others.

          Too be fair, a lot of major businesses in the US now just exist as financialization institutions extending debt to their large-scale clientele, under the guise of being manufacturing or data services. Like GM. Or Oracle.