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Comment by mahyarm | Hacker News Reader

Android was released a couple years after the iphone and it has defined the low end market. From the USA.

A big reason why QR codes caught on in China is because everything else was really bad. In america, credit cards were 'good enough' compared to what was in china, so QR codes didn't catch on that quickly. Also because it's a wealthier nation, the typical merchant could afford the hardware required for processing cards, but QR codes all you needed was a print off and the mobile phone you already had as a merchant, which made more sense for china at the time.

Then network effects kicked in and QR codes became the standard.

You see similar environment specific things that created this kind of stuff. Like whatsapp took over the world because SMS cost something, while in the USA it was effectively free and good enough, so whatsapp wasn't a good enough thing to switch to.

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I'm a Chinese & living China, I shopping almost only with credit cards and cash for privacy consideration.

However, I don't think credit cards in China are as popular as it is in the USA. I could guess most Chinese people don't have any credit card.

Chinese traditional culture encourages saving, not loaning. And taking small loans is exactly how credit cards works. So maybe that's why people here don't like credit card very much.

QR pay (Or mobile pay, OR more specifically, Alipay and Tenpay etc) can acting like a gate way between seller, user and bank. It can pay with the money you already have, no need to loan from the bank. So I think it's a Culture Match.

Beside that, take a wallet (Which is needed for protecting your credit cards from been scratched) everyday is a burden. I could really be happier if I can get rid of it from my EDC (I can't get rid of my phone, so).

Maybe the data doesn't back this, but as a US citizen I find that most of the time when people refer to credit cards they're meaning their Bank card, which often acts as whatever you define it as at the terminal or it has a default status for quick pay options.

There are many people that are happy to just pull out the credit card to buy beyond their means but a lot of the time people are using a card backed directly by their Bank account.

Here in Germany we have a clear distinction between credit- and debit cards. And I guess the culture leans more toward the "saving not loaning" model nickrio describes. So for me it is a conscious decision wether I pay with my bank account or credit.

Unlike China however, adoption of digital, low-barrier payments is extremely low here. I mean, hell, we're mostly buying paper bus tickets, while local public transport is sloooowly starting to roll out RFID tickets & readers.

All I'm saying is, I find the cultural differences and the impact they have on our day to day dealings (which, on the surface, seem to be the same globally) deeply fascinating :)

When I lived to Switzerland, I was pretty surprised my debit card (Maestro) couldn't work on credit card networks (Master Card, heck, the logos looked almost the same!).

I'm surprised Germany is so far behind switzerland though, I mean, even when I lived there 10 years ago I could use my debit card via chip in a kiosk and have my train ticket very quickly.

I don't think standard Beijing city buses take wepay yet. You still hand over paper bills to the conductor or use your beijing transit NFC card.

What the parent meant is that you get a paper ticket, even if you pay per card at an automated kiosk.

Online-QR-code-tickets bought per Smartphone are now common too though.

I think it might be cultural as Germany has suffered massive bank crashes throughout the 20th century people trust

The Nordic countries also have that distinction, indeed credit cards are often charged 1-3% in fees, while debit cards are usually free.

That hasn't prevented the demise of cash, and MobilePay, Swish etc are popular for personal and commercial transactions.

The RFID card works on all public transport all across Denmark. Sweden has regional systems. I don't know about elsewhere.

The leader for this is London, where any contactless payment card works on public transport.

To illustrate how widespread the use of debit cards is - the Norwegian National Bank rolled out a couple of new bank notes in late May.

Only last week did I actually see one of the new 100kr ($12) bills.

Debet card terminals are everywhere, some churches have even put them next to the collection plate - and it is not uncommon to see street vendors using wireless terminals.

Most Danes use a combined visa/dankort which is a credit card but doesn't usually incur a fee. Also generally we don't have a seperate credit line, it goes directly to your bank account as soon as the transaction is registered (and simply overdraws it if you don't have sufficient funds). A lot of danes also seems somewhat confused about the debit/credit card distinction, because the only difference most people see is whether it allows you to overdraw your account.

The Dankort is actually a debit card, mine at least has the "VISA Debit" logo.

I'd guess most Danes realise credit cards are the ones where you often pay 1-3% extra, which is a difference you don't often see in the USA or the UK — there, it's limited to things like plane tickets.

As far as payment terminals go, there is no effective difference between credit or debit cards, and in the USA they accept both :)

There are some differences behind the scenes.

A week ago I was in this restaurant and I had almost no cash (as usual where I live in Northern EU); the restaurant terminals were rejecting debit cards from the two biggest banks in the country. After several attempts, I just paid with my credit card (which is configured to pay immediately from the account, not at end of month) and that worked.

That's probably because a credit card can go through with a transaction even if some of the involved parties fails to respond.

I think in the US, that type of card is referred to as a 'check card', and is basically a bank debit card with the additional ability to run it as a credit network (usually Visa) transaction with signature instead of PIN entry. Is that similar to what you have?

I am not sure, they both operate with a chip and pin code. I think it really is just a difference on how the banks settle the transactions between themselves.

Absolutely understood there is a major cultural difference - in this case, I was more hoping to shed light that with regards to the US, most people aren't aware of the difference most of the time since the difference tends to be more relevant to the vendor rather than the customer. There is a subset of people who use credit cards extensively, but my experience is that most are unaware that there is even a difference most of the time.

I think most people pay their balance off every month in the USA. Credit card doesn't mean borrowing. The big problem with credit cards in China is fraud: banks like ICBC will put the burden of proof on the card holder when a fraud transaction occurs, rather than the merchant as in the west. I really hate ICBC.

Anyways, debit cards work just like QR pay does, just like UnionPay already does. The problem QR codes are solving is the lack of a POS terminal and stream lining the swipe. Many countries have an even better technology in NFC contact (including China, many newer UnionPay POS's include NFC, though the card must have a chip to support it). Then you could just glue your debit card to the back of your phone...(or use NFC in your phone via something like Apple or Android Pay).

http://time.com/money/4213757/average-american-credit-card-d...

> Many countries have an even better technology in NFC contact

NFC isn't "better technology", just different to QR code. NFC also handles 1 payer at a time whereas QR can handle multiple, in parallel depending on the physical display size.

NFC is better than QR codes in many many many ways. You don't have to line up the codes with the phones, paying is much faster, and the "1 payer at a time" limitation is actually the 99.9% use case for payments.

Until recently I'd have agreed with you about much faster, I always found QR codes a bit clunky and slow.

However I think the image recognition processes must be improving as the last couple of times I've used them (for TOTP setup) recognition was very fast, < 2 seconds of the camera app. coming on as I was moving the phone into position.

It really depends on the software, I have the obsqr app (based on a native library) on a 600Mhz android phone from 2010 and I get recognition in probably less than 0.5 seconds after pointing it at the code.

Meanwhile the whatsapp web code reader on the same device and same qr code takes more than 6 seconds of careful aligning, and even on modern devices there are still some hilariously bad code readers (having to manually align the corner squares with an overlay)

+1 for Obsqr, great app. And I use Talalarmo from the same devs as my daily alarm. Love that team's no frills style.

QR requires pointing, but NFC requires proximity; I can't imagine a street musician using NFC.

NFC requires special equipment. QRs can be displayed on screens and printed on paper which makes them incredibly more accessible and far-reaching.

NFC is invisible, which looks better IMO that a block of pixels with the occasional ill-fitting logo in the center. But tbh at the end of the day they are doing the same thing, the big difference being one is using some new sensors and electromagnetic frequencies to do the job, while the other is using visible light and a sensor that is installed on every phone in the world and everyone is familiar with already.

I agree that QR codes killer feature is that they are extremely cheap to deploy, which is why they've caught on in china. But they aren't better than NFC, even if cheaper.

> You don't have to line up the codes with the phones

A good QR reader does not require much lining up, just pointing the phone in the general direction of the code is sufficient, I'm consistently surprised by how fast some QR readers match codes.

That's significantly less work than having to bring your phone right next to a reader.

Every time my friend and I went to costas, I would check out much faster than him with a basic unionpay debit card while he was using alipay and it took time for the baristas to setup their equipment then to do the scan.

How do you verify payment with QR code?

In Scandinavia, usually just by showing the "payment sent" screen to the merchant. The merchant can check their own device for the notification if they want confirmation.

The annoying background video shows it: http://mobilepay.dk/da-dk/Pages/mobilepay.aspx

Seems a bit slower than NFC, but I haven't seen it in action

(and the payment sent screen can be spoofed)

For tips it seems fine

For most situations, spoofing a sent-screen that usually displays the vendor or persons name, is not too easy to do in the heat of the moment, without preparation, so it's not really been a problem yet.

I am not sure if it's true. It would be good if there is some data on this. But when I was living in the US, more than a few of my friends were in debt either via credit card or student loans. It's quite common compared to Chinese students which usually pay in full.

Hmm, I guess you are right:

http://time.com/money/4213757/average-american-credit-card-d...

Strange, I never carry a balance, and I still get all the points common in the credit card system.

That's not strange, the CC processors still get a % from the merchant for each purchase.

Why credit cards and not debit cards?

I can't pay with credit cards in a lot of places online (I'm from the EU)

With a credit card, you're spending money that you don't have, but with a debit card, you need money in the account it's connected to.

Credit cards have rewards. Often some percentage back from the purchase. I have one that gives me 2% back on everything, which adds up. It makes sense to use it on every purchase and pay off the balance at the end of each month.

It doesn't matter how American's treat credit cards.

Traditionally China is known as a nation where people save, and debt was not seen favorably at all.

This is a cultural thing, which has likely been wearing out since the 1990s.

This is completely unrelated to credit cards, but if you told me that 10 years ago, I would have agreed. Today is much different, I have plenty of friends who are $500k in debt on housing investments.

Of course, China's rapid rise in personal as well as private and public sector debt is evidence of a changing society.

> Today is much different, I have plenty of friends who are $500k in debt on housing investments.

While that is a lot of debt, it is nowhere the same as saying you have $500k of debt on credit cards. Credit cards are unsecured debt; it's debt with little or nothing behind it.

Mortgage debt, though, is a secured debt. In theory, you could sell the houses, maybe for more than you paid for them, and possibly or likely more than you owe on them (that is, you gain the equity). Of course, you could also be upside down, but you still have the property, and you could just sit on it, rent it out, and continue to make payments on it from rent (or whatever) until the market comes back.

Debt has never been seen favorably in almost any culture - even in the US, before the 80s.

I think it was the Reagan administration made credit card debt interest tax-deductible and the cat was out of the bag.

interesting! i had no idea that it used to be deductible (until 1986 apparently). i never really agreed with mortgage interest being deductible, but i at least understand the purported reasoning (eg. home ownership, american dream etc). but credit card interest? wow! that seems like a terrible idea all around.

> I think most people pay their balance off every month in the USA

You would be surprised to learn that this is far from the truth.

www.gallup.com/poll/22879/Credit-Card-Owners-Average-Balance-More-Than-3000.aspx

The article you linked to states that 59% of Americans always or usually pay off the full amount each month.

To me, "most" implies "at least 95%". That's because it's used to exclude a possibility: If most programming languages have if statements, then if I hear about your new language I can assume it has if statements without checking further.

To use a simple majority means that you'd have to accept a simple statement like "Most programmers use Javascript"[1], and that's too weak to use for any reasoning.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160317205014/http://stackoverf...

> To me, "most" implies "at least 95%".

https://www.xkcd.com/1860/

No, it can also mean more than half.

I asked a few friends how they use the word, and apparently there are people that use it to mean "nearly all" and people that use it to mean "more than half", and the first group doesn't realize the second group exists.

This paper[1] gives a couple interpretations, none of which are as strict as the one I use. I wonder if I mixed up "conversational implicatures" with a heuristic for logical implication.

In any case, I've apparently been wrong about the meaning of a basic English word my whole life, and I can't find a good cover story to hide the mistake.

[1] http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/fileadmin/mitarbeiter/solt/Most...

>This paper[1] gives a couple interpretations

If we're talking grammar, then it is "a couple of interpretations".

Most is more than 50 percent. 'Most all' means almost all which sounds like what you meant :-)

The average american has something like 10k in credit card debt.

That actually does not at all address whether most Americans carry credit card debt or not.

True fact. I wonder what the median credit card debt is.

"Average" presumably meaning "mean" here... How much debt does the median American have?

I'm not disagreeing with anything you said but I suppose I am more commenting on the difference in attitude and execution.

While services like Android/Watsapp were created in the West and do service the lower end market, they still follow the "leader", isn't seen by the population as "cool/hip/etc." Even with credit cards, there are many merchants here that don't accept them (especially Amex) and Visa because of the prohibitive fees. The attitude in America is, define your market (high end/low end) and then extract the absolute amount of wealth you can, and defend your market share by any means possible.

In contrast, as you saw with the busker in the article, when it is rolled out in China, it is truly (almost) for everyone. They try to use economics of scale to get everyone on board so the entire nation is moving as a collective. Another example is the high speed rail; I recall reading an article that even though wages doubled, the fares didn't budge at all. It just allowed more and more people to take advantage of a good service. In America, you'd bet they try to increase fares as much as possible to extract as much as possible out of the consumer. Obviously there are problems, as with inferior phones, but when everyone is on board, there is an acceleration in innovation and they start solve those problems. Then you see things like people wanting higher end models and companies are forced to innovate. A company like Xiaomi which dominated suddenly drops to 4th place and needs to innovate - that is a sign of a healthy market.

Chinese banks are pretty bad innovation wise, which is why it took tencent and alibaba to run this through. Even unionpay, with lower fees, fails to catch on because the banks kind of suck. Try dealing with a fraud report to Icbc, for example.

Having lived in China during the time these online payments were launching, I have a different view. China launched a new online banking innovation law a few years ago. I can't find any sources, but I remember the banks complaining that this would give online payment providers an unfair advantage or something like that. The main players today Alibaba (Alipay) and Tencent (WeChat) were attacked by the banks in a big public debate. Today, they're the leaders.

I think it's rather a classic case of disruption. The incumbent banks are afraid of destroying their high credit and debit card fees, so don't invest in alternative products for payment transactions. Meanwhile, political interests don't make it a priority to innovate in the banking arena. Whereas the Chinese government basically said to the banks screw your concerns, we think this is a good idea and want to do this. Hence, when you have payment innovation in the US, it's limited in scope (PayPal and Google Wallet on the Internet only) or has to build on top of existing payment transaction infrastructure (Square and Stripe edit: and Apple Pay).

I bet if not for lack of political will against the banks and other incumbent interests, the US could make a similar banking innovation law and Facebook, startups, and the like would get in on it really fast. There's nothing inherent about QR codes that make them less preferable than tapping credit cards. In fact, I prefer QR codes.

"In america, credit cards were 'good enough' compared to what was in china"

I disagree. CC fraud was unknown to me until I moved to the USA. The security chip was not used for a very long time in the USA and just started to be a thing. First version of chip enabled CCs had no pin. I am not sure about good enough.

The chip doesn't add any additional security to the card compared to what was available previously; US credit card companies have only added it to avoid additional legislation from Congress.

Also, the whole reason Europe had the chip and the US didn't was because phone lines in the US were better than ones in Europe, so it was vastly easier to do a quick authorization check in the US. The phone lines were not "good enough" in Europe, so the chip and pin system was created as a way to authenticate locally.

Actually, the data on the magnetic stripe was in plaintext. The chip has a digitally signed copy of that data. This allows the bank to authenticate the card as valid and eliminates attacks where a fake card is made with stolen data put onto the stripe.

This does nothing for online payments but very effectively curbs fraudulent card present transactions.

It goes beyond that, unless the US implementation is different to the one i am (somewhat) familiar with.

The chip is an active participant in the authentication.

it will receive digital signatures from the bank and the terminal, and if said signatures are found valid, release the payment info stored.

I do know the US implementation is different, but I do not know if it is different in regards to this highly relevant information.

A reverse example in the US is money transfer, in Europe it's extremely easy to send money between bank accounts instantly and for free. But in the US it is more difficult to companies like Venmo popped up.

"Android was released a couple years after the iphone "

This is a really interesting history rewrite, since it was released a year and 3 months later.

It also didn't define the low end of the market, since at that point, the iphone was just getting apps (2 months earlier is when the apple app store was released)!

To be clear you are calling the fact that the iphone was only released 15 months instead of 24 months before the first android a history rewrite?

To be clear, you are converting a vague term like "a few" into a specific amount of time, and converting it to an even more precise measurement (months)?

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