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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

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).

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> 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 :-)

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.

> 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.

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

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?

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.

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