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Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

We have an app called mobile pay in Denmark, which I guess is similar to Apple Pay in that you link a credit card and it lets you send money to friends or pay for stuff. It’s owned by our banks and it works most places a credit card wouldn’t, like in small stores that can’t really afford to have a credit card terminal. That’s it’s main uses, sending money to friends or buying things. Only they also have an API for the web, so you can now pay for things you buy in more and more online stores.

I use it a lot. It’s never been easier to collect expenses from board game nights, and when I recently bought the first Harry Potter book (in Danish for my daughter) I didn’t have to enter my credit card information.

I think that’s what Libre will be, only global. I don’t like Facebook, but if they actually succeed at this, they’ll become the easiest way to pay for things on a global scale.

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> like in small stores that can’t really afford to have a credit card terminal

Remember that most of those small stores are able to do this by breaking the terms of service. Accepting MobilePay is NOT free for business, it's not even cheap. As a customers is pretty easy to spot, if the stores MobilePay number is just their phone number, they're breaking the terms of service, and you should pay cash.

I understand it is a breach of terms of service but as a customer, why should you care? It is not like it is breaching the law. And small businesses live on a much smaller margin than banks.

I somewhat care because it seems like a bit prone to tax fraud. Not sure if it is easy for the Danish tax agencies to spot this kind of transaction and enforce tax collection though.

Why wouldn't it be? The transaction is still recorded and tied to the person's bank account and national ID, so the person has to justify that income.

The business REALLY should care as all of their transactions are at risk of being voided, and the money returned to the customers if they're found to be violating the terms of service.

Is is free for small businesses. They explicitly state that at least here in Finland. They also state that it is a temporary thing.

Are you sure it’s “most”? I can’t remember the last time I had to pay into someone’s private account instead of one of the correct ways to do it.

I never said it was free, but depending on the service you want, it is significantly cheaper than having a credit card terminal. One of the reasons it’s cheap is because it tells your bank about everything you buy. We worry about social media, but it’s the banks that know what brand of hemorrhoid medicine I purchased last week.

I’m not advocating either solutions, by the way. I’m just pointing out a use case. I mean, I care enough about privacy to not use google or Facebook, and I still use mobile pay because it’s really, really convenient.

This seems doable without Libra. I'm in Australia and my local transfers from the bank app (ING) are both free and instant. At least to banks that joined Osko. That sorts out pretty much all simple/tiny transfers. If Libra can guarantee international transfers for free, I expect that fee will also go away from the banks.

To be fair Australia is also extremely far ahead of the curve. I will be moving their soon and found out about the NPP and Osko a week ago. Very impressed with what the banking industry in Australia manages to implement. Once they have person-to-person transfers through Osko I see no reason for most fintech-y internet wallets (paypal, venmo etc.) to be used in Australia and frankly also credit cards should become obsolete if you have instant payments through the regular banking system.

Not sure about the last one though because Visa/Mastercard seem to be extremely entrenched in the industry, as far as I can tell they have completely replaced any other debit card system.

EDIT: To your last point. I think the problem with fee's is rather that you need to convert currencies when you do global transactions. Banks could offer this at a loss but nonetheless libra has an edge here.

The problem is that every country seems to have its own system. In Belgium it's Bancontact, in Portugal it's MBWay, etc. I'm not sure they have anything that works internationally and instantly.

The SWIFT network is the internal standard. It is of course far from instant but it might be in the future.

I suspect the biggest reason is... nobody's better than them, so there was no rush. Even paypal is not that great. If Libre actually takes off, whether it's good or not, it's likely to force some competition. Kind of like Uber sucks in may ways, but it did get many local taxi companies to improve their services.

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