Maybe the idea of BTC was fine. What wasn’t fine is the idea of mining.
The mining is how BTC, etc are decentralised & secure (so the idea of btc and mining are the same idea in my head).
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rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 days agoMaybe the idea of BTC was fine. What wasn’t fine is the idea of mining.
And maybe payments over the Internet or over PSTN are fundamentally different from messaging, conferencing, downloading files, all that stuff.
But what’s important is the ability to pay for a service with something resembling cash IRL in the sense that an ATM machine from which you took that cash can’t take it back because you are paying for an adult journal with it.
But at the same time how can there be so few payment processors that they can affect a platform’s decision to do a kind of business?
That’s where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
That’s where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.
Because you essentially need a global presence to at all be worth using. That is why it is a joke that NOBODY accepts American Express and only the shadiest of international ATMs accept Discover (saved my ass in Germany back in the 10s though)
You are literally saying that we need to look at why there aren’t more global mega corporations.
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 2 days ago
I’m going to be really dumb
Why does a payment processor need to exist?
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
I am an artist in OtherCountry. You want to buy art from me. How do you do it?
Physical money? Okay. You now need a way to track that YOU sent 40 bucks in the mail and that I received 40 bucks in the mail and that is (at least) two different national postal services involved. And now I need a way to convert 40 YourLandia dollars into OtherCountry pounds. AND we need to make sure all of that happened quickly enough that exchange rates didn’t meaningfully change
Digital money? Who is running the site? How many different sites do I need to have accounts on to accept payment from all the countries I want to sell to?
At the end of the day: For any transaction that is not face to face transfer of hard currency (and even then but…), you need an intermediary that both parties trust. Payment processors are that intermediary. Sometimes they are the person taking my IOU and turning it into money so that you can give me a hamburger. Sometimes that is effectively a courier making sure your money gets to me no matter where on the planet we are.
wellbudyweek@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
You seem to know a lot of this, in order for your point to click for me, could you explain why some extra payment processor is needed? Would a simple bank transfer not work? If you give me your IBAN, we could let our banks take care of it, right?
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 2 days ago
Hmmm. Something still isn’t clicking in my head.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 days ago
GNU Taler is supposed to be a solution. Sort of a federated one. If I understand it correctly.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
I am not particularly familiar with that but it will have an uphill battle. Replacing online transactions is a challenge but is feasible.
Getting to the point that you can pay for food on holiday is a much less feasible one for a purely software project run without the backing of Special Interests.
jadedwench@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
As a daily AMEX user, I think I have only run into 1 place that doesn’t take it here in the states. I do remember England being hit or miss at times, but that was over a decade ago. I don’t remember it being much of an issue in Germany either, but I didn’t use AMEX as often at that time.
Mubelotix@jlai.lu 1 day ago
Mining is fine when you have a predetermined and adjustable energy consumption that is halved every 4 years. Which Bitcoin does
JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 days ago
Payment processing should be treated like a utility.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That “treated like a utility” approach involves reliance upon the state, which is sometimes controlled by the hostile parties. This is what I don’t like in Internet political discussions, such solutions feel as if they assumed that you make it good once and it remains good.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 day ago
It doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be ran by the state.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Enforcement.