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Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

A payment processor is useless without the possibility to pay with a credit card. And that means you depend on Visa, Mastercard and Amex.

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I think we should have some sort of internet money that can be used to transact without any central authority.

Definitely being worked on: https://interledger.org/

Found this recently I think it fulfills your idea https://dogecoin.com/

But without a central authority how would everyone agree on what's the truth? How would you avoid double-spends, protect against Sybil attacks and basically prevent people from creating money out of nothing? If someone could solve that it would be truly revolutionary. /s

So far every option has a usability problem that's been solved by companies with the same KYC requirements as credit card processors. This will remain the case as long as people also want to transact in fiat currency, and that will be true as long as it's how people pay the bills and buy food.

Any crypto-only platform that solves the problem of everyone needing a copy of the ledger and gains meaningful adoption will face the same legal, PR, and regulatory pressures as anything else in the same place.

FedNow would also make this theoretically possible, no? No middle man, just transfer money between accounts.

A government program has to abide by First Amendment protections. Most restrictions payment processors and banks put in probably wouldn't survive a civil rights lawsuit.

Bank transfers are still a thing, aren't they? And payment processors built around those? I can't recall when was the last time I paid on-line using my card.

On that note, the whole reliance on cards for on-line feels like a stupid hack that got way out of control. A card is just a physical access token for the account - it shouldn't be reused on-line like this. You should be able to generate per-payment tokens on demand instead. The whole mental model around online payments is bonkers - it's just taking the meatspace model and adding "but with computers!" to it, where it's the meatspace practices that are a kludge that digital doesn't need.

This partly exists. But could of course be much simpler to use:

1) some banks/fintech offer virtual cards. For example, whenever I need to pay with credit card at a site that seems to be using some homegrown system I create a new virtual card in transferwise and destroy it right after.

2) I've seen banks offer virtual cards with CVC codes that change every 24h hours.

Re 1), virtual cards are useful if you can get them (banks that I use stubbornly refuse to provide them; same story with subaccounts). But it feels like doubling-down on the bad mental model.

Cards make sense in meatspace, not on-line. Virtual cards are stretching the analogy already. Short-lived virtual cards are pushing it to the limits. What users need is the ability to generate single-use payment authorization tokens. Talking about "cards" carries too much irrelevant meatspace baggage; we've already worked out different, better-fitting abstractions for digital use.

You talk about "users" as if the majority of people are tech-literate. They are not. Imagine explaining to your parents what a "single use digital token" is. Now imagine explaining "it's a card that you only use for this".

Outdated/meat-space abstractions are useful for both driving adoption and getting laypeople to understand intuitively what you mean. And beyond that, most of us encounter dozens of them a day without blinking. Think about that the next time you check your electronic mail on your general-purpose computing device you call a "phone".

FYI Google Pay actually creates a new "credit card", i.e. a single-use token for every payment, something along those lines would probably be great if more widely adopted.

https://support.google.com/pay/merchants/answer/6345242?hl=e...

I agree with the other post that keeping meatspace terminology isn't bad. Offering a "Single use credit card" would be an easily understandable feature.

That being said, there are several initiatives that can hopefully challenge the visa/mc hegemony:

https://payid.com.au/ is gaining wide adoption in Australia. It seems like Australia has abandoned their homegrown payment rails (EFTPOS) in recent years and all bank cards are actually visa/mc. But maybe with PayId on phones this will change again.

https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta... is coming to Europe and hopefully will see similar adoption to PayID.

As mentioned often, America is behind the rest of the world by at least a decade but maybe they can leapfrog similar to developing markets.

eftpos has been quiet while doing quite a lot of innovation (eg - [0]). ATMs and any CHQ/SAV transaction still run on their rails, and there’s a lot of iceberg below what you see in terms of branding at point of sale and plastic cards.

[0] https://www.eftposaustralia.com.au/news/eftpos-has-started-c...

I suspect the big limits on payments migration is that many people live on credit.

Someone else mentioned the future promise of FedNow. I'd expect that would be "any legal use is permissible" for legal reasons, but it can only replace debit payments at best. If you had a lender who worked atop FedNow, you'd reintroduce the problem of having a private party who is not legally obliged to serve all possible customers.

Not necessarily, there are plenty of bills that cant be paid with credit cards - the credit cards themselves for example.

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