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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

You are missing the point.

Yes, there are transactions that occur in cash, bank transfer & such. Fail to present a Visa/MC when you rent a car in Dublin or Brussels and you will be in for a surprise. In Dublin, standard practice is to compromise by making you pay a 5X rate... insurance or whatnot. Maybe there is a no-card option somewhere in the city, but it certainly isn't most places.

Yes, you can be an electrician or consultant without accepting cards. No, it is not practically possible to run a store or most customer facing businesses. Even most electricians and consultants accept or at least use cards.

There's no meaningful difference between Europe and the US. This is a powerful and hard to avoid duopoly.

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I wonder if it differs across Europe. In the UK at least, you are very right. Debit cards run via the visa and mastercard networks and every store that accepts debit cards also accept credit cards.

German banks are stubbornly clinging to their Giro cards, much to the inconvenience of iPhone users. The cards are usually Maestro-compatible, but domestic transactions use the domestic system.

I'm sure the privacy aspect of it must be very tricky; Apple collects a lot of information when using Apple Pay, and I can imagine that German banks might be hesitant to share such granular details.

Here in NL Apple Pay works fine with a lot of banks -- and they're still just Maestro cards.

I suspect that it's related to the high degree of decentralization. Sparkasse and Volksbank are each federations of hundreds of independent local credit unions. You can do business with them if you accept that the standard interchange fees and conditions are set in stone, but if you want preferential treatment, you need to negotiate with every local member bank individually.

I'll go out on a limb and assume that the standard fee structure does not afford wallet manufacturers a per-transaction fee.

There is a major difference: VISA and mastercard offer credit cards. Not many people use credit cards in Europe, they are all debit cards. Most stores I know do not accept credit cards at all, you have to have a debit card. You can easily refuse someone credit and scrap their credit card. It is a lot harder to deny someone access to their savings.

Most international (and even local only) european debit cards are owned or serviced by Visa and Mastercard. A store isn't denying people either Debit or Credit. It's only denying them bananas & laundry detergent.

This is totally tangential, but I would actually argue that denying someone access to their credit is not that different. Credit is what money is. Our European attitudes towards debt and credit is intensely responsible for our two tier system. Credit for the rich. Debit for the poor. Policy debate about where and how the border between these two should be.

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