Money Horror

&quot;Yes transactions are paused on the weekend. Thats like google would do a break on the weekend.&quot;<p>This is correct. The correct response to payment and settlement &quot;pauses&quot; for silly things like weekends and holidays is derision. Contempt. Ridicule.<p>These settlement timelines are based <i>literally on horse and buggy schedules</i> from the 1800s. They have no place in our modern workflow.

I once tried to rent a car at an airport rental car place while my car was in the shop. They wouldn&#x27;t let me do it without a credit card. They wouldn&#x27;t accept my debit card, they said, unless I had flown in (despite that my card can be ran as a credit card).<p>Lyft happily accepted my debit card and probably cost less in the end anyway.

This is a bit &quot;don&#x27;t do that, then&quot;; almost all the vital things take debit cards, including through contactless.<p>It would certainly be nice to have something like Vipps in more countries; EU Faster Payments is getting there but not quite as usable. And it&#x27;s 24-hour.<p>For any of the peer-to-peer solutions, you <i>have</i> to consider the fraud problems. The problem with micropayments is microfraud.

&quot;Only with a credit card. I am a student, I have no real world use for this kind of card&quot;<p>Yes you do, that vending machine you&#x27;re standing in front of

&gt; we have an vending machine where you can pay with a credit card<p>&gt; I have no real world use for this kind of card<p>Seems to me that he does.

To be honest, I always kind of lol at these kinds of rants. Wishing for the &quot;one true payment system&quot; is like thinking that everyone will switch over to speaking Esperanto in the near future. NEVER going to happen.<p>Also, many of his gripes seem ridiculous. I don&#x27;t know if the situation is different in Europe, but in the US I think pretty much everyone should have a credit card. You can use a secured card if you have bad credit, and most debit cards in the US can be swiped as a credit card. All of his non-existent problems seem like they could be fixed by getting a credit card. Credit cards also have better fraud protection, let you build credit, and usually have better rewards for consumers. There is virtually no difference in privacy benefits between credit and debit cards.

This makes me glad to live in the UK, where it seems to me we might just have the best payments industry in the world.<p>\* Faster (instant) payments 24&#x2F;7.<p>\* All purchase transactions are generally assumed to be debit card, credit cards are never required and very much optional (I don&#x27;t have a credit card)<p>\* Contactless payments are instant, easy and completely standard, everything from the corner shop upward has them. You don&#x27;t need your PIN for less than £30 (£45 quid from next week).<p>\* A banking industry that is quick to refund anything from any fraud without asking, which makes for a low case of fraud because they pro-actively block odd transactions.<p>\* Up to £75k insured per bank<p>I&#x27;ve often heard stories about payments that I just can&#x27;t relate to because it seems our payment industry is so good. We have no need for bitcoin and the trendy start-ups don&#x27;t even gain much traction because the banks own apps are normally just as good anyway.

I think most day-to-day problems are easily solved by just getting a credit card, there are lots of no-fee cards that pretty much anyone can get. They work everywhere, and have fraud protection (edit: In North America at least).<p>For me, the biggest problem is trying to move large amounts of money around, especially across borders. It took me like 3 phone calls and a trip to the bank to figure out how to move my money from my US bank account to my Canadian bank account without having to pay an absurd $40 wire fee. And of course currency conversion is a pain as well - if you are converting a large amount of money you either pay a tonne of fees through the bank, pay a fairly large amount of fees (~1%) through something like Transferwise, or pay no fees by going through the hastle of Norberts Gambit.

I feel his pain.<p>I emigrated to Canada from Australia, and it was exceptionally hard for me to get a credit card. Apparently no credit rating is the same as the very worst credit rating. It also took time to get paperwork like a drivers license and SIN number (a bit like an SSN), and without those there was no chance. I had to go a few years without one, and the number of things I couldn&#x27;t do without one was immensely frustrating.<p>Visa debit sounds great, but I find it doesn&#x27;t work for a <i>ton</i> of transactions that want a credit card.<p>In the end I had to put $1000 into a special locked-in account that I couldn&#x27;t touch before the bank would issue me a $1000 credit card.

Would it be correct to assume the vending machine only accepts credit as it likely doesn&#x27;t have a direct connection to a banking system to authorize the payments at time of purchase?<p>I seem to remember credit being a requirement for making purchases on planes for this same reason.<p>I&#x27;m curious because I live in the UK and pretty much all terminals here accept debit cards, although I think the UK in general has been a bit ahead in terms of payment standards (chip &amp; pin, contactless etc.)

&gt; <i>we have an vending machine where you can pay with a credit card or cash. Well, there is the issue already. Only with a credit card. I am a student, I have no real world use for this kind of card</i><p>I think you&#x27;ve just proven that you have at least one real-world use. It may still not be worth the bother, though.

Using Bitcoin as a settlement layer has enabled services to crop up that provide interesting crosswalks of other payment layers, see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ln_strike" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ln_strike</a>

I like the optimism of imagining, in April of 2020, that the mild inconveniences of various payment systems will continue to qualify as &quot;money horror&quot;!

There is just one thing, that he has forgot about it. He feeds a huge survailance capitalism machine with his data. The horror is not where he envisions, the horror is in, f.i. google tracking all his expenses.<p>Not that they know who are your contacts (android contacts synced, gmail contacts, images uploaded,...), where you surf (googletags, google analytics), what you search (google search), what software you use (google play, google spyware framework,...), now they also know where you spend your money.<p>Now this is real horror.

Use a stable coin... USDC if you are worried about regulations and risk.