Comment on Phonecall campaign to tell MasterCard & Visa to stop censoring adult content
duchess@feddit.org 8 months agoThere aren’t any other options than credit cards in the US to pay without cash?
the card NETWORK is the part at issue; not the type of payment
the same is roughly true for europe and the rest of the world too: payment processors facilitate transactions over various card networks which communicate between banks
a single payment probably involves at least 6 different business facilitating the transaction, and only a couple of them are your bank, and the business you’re paying
There are only 4 credit card networks in the US, regardless of the credit card brand: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover. Anecdotally Visa and Mastercard are by far the most commonly used and accepted, but I couldn’t tell you why, beyond it often being the default debit card issued by banks.
Lower fees.
I can offer a clue.
Discover was Sears’ in-house charge/credit card. It got spun off by itself but a lot of companies never really started accepting Discover.
American Express, their whole thing is exclusivity. It’s the card you use to pay at fancy places. They charge merchants more in service fees, so a lot of places just don’t do business with them.
A really great gag in Futurama is that American Express survived 1000 years, but still no one accepts them for payment.
What happened to diners card?
No, even our debit cards use credit card companies for the actual processing
Ditto for PayPal, ApplePay, and Google Pay.
Gold bullion?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Here are the options:
Some online places accept bank transfers, but that’s mostly for paying regular bills, not anonymous checkout.
There are some fringe ones like money orders (basically cash), cryptocurrencies (very rarely accepted), and Venmo (mostly just food trucks, fairs, and small restaurants).