Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem I see coming with "cashless societies" is severe technological fragmentation. For mobile payments, in China you can get around with WeChat Pay and AliPay; in USA you use PayPal, Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay, Venmo, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. In Australia you have PayWave. What about plastic? In Singapore you have NETS, in USA you have Amex, Visa, MasterCard, in China you have UnionPay, ...

And guess what? None of these systems talk to each other. Even PayPal USA doesn't talk to PayPal China for goodness sake. Most payment systems require local addresses and phone numbers to even register an account, so if you're a short-term tourist or business traveller, you're out of luck. If you're a frequent international traveller, cashless societies are going to be absolute hell unless we come up with some kind of internationally-standardized protocol, which doesn't seem to be happening any time soon because each payment system has a corporate agenda behind it.

Plus, every electronic form of payment includes fees. Their sole purpose of existing is to collect fees to pay the owning company's investors.

The effect is that in the middle of all monetary transactions, there is a mandatory and forced private profit scheme. That's insane.

Cash is free to use, and bears no intrinsic fees. The same is often true of personal checks in the USA. While these are the most labor intensive ways of transferring money, they don't incur any intrinsic shrinkage in their use. All the digital and fully automated systems of transferring money are more expensive at face value.

True. PayPal is currently free for interpersonal payments, but who knows in the future. Now that banks are not processing so many checks they have to compete using their own "easy pay." Chase has QuickPay, which I haven't used because it's yet another network, but it is free to send money to someone at Chase or another bank in the ClearXchange network. Maybe if they can stay in the game and expand their interoperation payments will stay free.

The closest to something standard there is is the combination of IBAN and BIC/SWIFT. Works flawlessly and cheaply within the EU plus surroundings (.ch, .no, ...) thanks to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area . By November, only the IBAN will be required anymore.

This is a problem. I see Chase's QuickPay can talk to a few other big US banks, but I haven't tried it because then I always have to ask the other person who their bank is. This is no different than asking if they have a PayPal account, but it's still a pain. It sure would be nice to have a convenient, distributed EFT-like standard for these things.

Not to mention every bank creating their own buggy mobile app and of course the usually buggy and slow bank websites.

Ya, this. I can't even log into my ICBC account online because it requires a stupid SMS verification with a number I can't use in the USA. Some US banks do this as well, and I stayed clear of them.

I'm not sure what you mean about those systems not talking to each other? I can take my Australian PayWave cards (which are actually Visa, Mastercard & Amex) and use them in Singapore and across Europe. I was using them in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria & Slovakia.

Cashless makes travelling easier. It's far easier than managing different currency for each country: SEK, DKK, SGD, EUR, AUD, some USD for those US trips, and all the small change you can't get rid of in each country. Why not use the same tap-to-pay cards that you use when at home, considering they work everywhere?

If you mean receiving money from someone while travelling, perhaps that is a more awkward case right now. But Paypal seems to work across many countries.

> Cashless makes travelling easier.

When it works, yes. I believe you about Europe, and perhaps Australia and Europe are politically and culturally friendly enough with each other that the businesses there made it work. But try Japan, China, Korea, for example. My Visa card wouldn't work in Japan, and in China UnionPay is pretty much the name of the game.

Also not to mention, every time I use my Visa card abroad, the fraud center tries to call me to "verify" transactions. They always call my US number (like, hello, I'm abroad, I probably can't take calls). My phone answers with a recording that says the only way to reach me is by e-mail. They don't e-mail (we're in the 21st century, hello). Then they disable my account, rendering me unable to pay for my meal in some foreign country where I can't speak the language. Then I have to call the Visa customer center, from the middle of the street, yelling my social security number and card number in open public space, "verify" some stupid transactions that I have no way to verify without logging into my account at a computer, to get my card reactivated again before I can pay and leave. Great security they have, making customers yell personal information over the phone instead of typing it in.

And yes, I tell them I'm leaving the country before I do. But they still do this. And their geography sucks. I told them I was travelling throughout Eastern Europe once and they disabled my card in Bosnia because they didn't know it was a part of the region I was travelling to.

So now, whenever I travel, I carry a spare $1K USD in cash or traveller's checks, split up and stashed on different parts of my person and luggage, for emergency situations like this, so at the very least I can buy a one-way flight ticket home if all other electronic payment fails. Cashless just doesn't work, yet.

Argh, that definitely sucks. That's not how it should work :(

Some of that seems bank related: my Australian bank emails me fraud notifications, I can add international cell numbers for txt if desired. Their website / app lets me tick off individual countries I'm visiting, and log-in to update it if I change my travel plans. If your US bank is using SSN for verification, that's dodgy :(

I feel you though, and I still take a (small) cash reserve when I travel. But I also take backup preload cards: Travelex offers Cash Passport, and both Qantas & Virgin offer Mastercard tap-to-pay built-in to their Frequent Flyer card (which also earns points). All three support Japanese Yen natively, so should work in Japan, but China and Korea are probably a no-go.

Some countries suck, though. Denmark has many misconfigured payment systems that block overseas cards (they misinterpret "Address Verification Not Available" as a decline), and you probably don't want to use cards in countries with high skimmer fraud. So we're not cashless yet, no :)

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