Visa Backs Jack Dorsey's Square | Hacker News Reader

Visa Backs Jack Dorsey's Square

blogs.wsj.com

52 pointswyclif10 comments

Whoever Jack Dorsey hired to do his PR should win some sort of award. In under a year this guy went from almost zero media presence to:

* having a glowing profile written about him in Vanity Fair

* appearing on Charlie Rose

* being anointed as the second coming of Steve Jobs by TechCrunch

* having the media at large make Evan Williams look like a jerk and return to Twitter as Executive Chairman

* getting The Wall Street Fucking Journal to title an article "Visa Backs Jack Dorsey's Square"

The Vanity Fair profile was brilliantly written.

Yes, it was. It discusses Jack's habits, Jack's preference in suits (Prada, practically an advertisment for them), Jack's preference in wristwatches (Rolex), Jack's ideas, Jack's relationships, Jack's friends, et. al.

It discusses Jack's Nouveau riche tendencies - Oh look i'm rich, let me show it off and pretend to be sophisticated. Does he really admire the quality of a Prada suit or a rolex watch? Very very doubtful, those even slightly in the know despise cheap fashion like Prada.

I want his PR rep's number though, they are masters. If Jack is his own PR, kudos to him.

For what it's worth, I hadn't heard the name until thirty seconds ago.

Square is awesome but I wish someone would do what it takes to kick the shit out of the broken mess that is the credit card system instead of attempting to fix some of the problems at the edge. Admittedly this is in the Seriously Hard category of problems.

This just makes financial sense.

1) Assume that square being successful will increase the number of credit card transactions.

2) Assume that Visa will make some money off of a fraction of those transactions

3) This means that an investment by Visa at market value will payoff at above market value since they make more money than just the market-value returns from their investment.

This is very big for Square.

The main issue with their flagship product is security. When every other country in the world is moving fast to accept chip card transactions a United States company comes out with a so called "innovative" product which reads the magstripe only.

Visa have been heavily pushing chip card technology so for them to push this product shows they are willing to allow Square some slack in the security requirements.

The reason Visa (and the other card networks) have been heavily pushing smartcards/RFID/etc. is that it is an excuse for them to move liability for fraud from the banks/merchants to consumers. So as a consumer who has some doubts about the security of the chip technology, I'd have to say that I welcome any slowing of the transition.

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