Online payment fees come from fraud, chargebacks, and credit card points/benefits.
I don’t see how crypto solves the fraud problem. Sure there will be lower fees, but higher risk of fraud.
I don’t see how crypto solves the fraud problem. Sure there will be lower fees, but higher risk of fraud.
Here's a post detailing what I was taking about. Unfortunately OB's interface for these things are awful and I'm not invested in its platform.
1) Moderate the moderators: Great, now we have two problems.
2) Try to tie moderators to a real-world ID: Realising they have to roll back the purported 'features' of crypto-currency (anonymous, peer-to-peer, unrestricted, etc), in order to try to get somewhere close to normal, real-world, commercial transactions.
No fraud protection is a complete consumer non-starter.
Seems to work fine in the Netherlands. If you pay through the most common platform (iDeal.nl) or do an ordinary wire/SEPA transfer, the bank can't simply do a chargeback. The money is gone, but consumers are not generally afraid to buy things online using these methods.
I'm not saying that "chargebacks fundamentally impossible" is a good thing. All I'm saying is that it seems to work in my country despite such a system, so it may (I don't know, just mentioning it as a data point / an option) be an acceptable trade-off because I hear from Factorio and others that credit card fraud and chargebacks are a real problem.
Glad to hear these crypto folks have figured it out.
Furthermore, credit cards aren't just payment methods--they represent credit extended to consumers by banks. This actually influences the money supply, since (1) consumers can potentially carry unsecured debt balances, and (2) consumers have less need to park money in savings since credit cards provide access to liquidity. In other words, there are a lot more factors in play here than just the transaction fees and fraud mitigation mechanisms.
I think this is part of the picture but not explicit enough. You could ask "but why should there be points and benefits when it's just a shell game?"
What I've seen claimed is that the underlying incentive for such programs is that having fees and benefits is a way of avoiding directly charging for credit with interest that is subject to truth-in-lending regulation.
I would be careful about claiming crypto can be cheaper when some part of the fees on credit cards is just interest by another name and not really transaction fees.