It is not just inertia; it is government malice. The government loves that there are effectively only two payment processors, because this lets them exercise policy pressure without the inconvenience of a democratic mandate.
That’s how most law works, actually. There’s a question of how detailed the regulations are, but mostly you don’t go to court, and if you do, whether it looks bad to the judge or jury is going to make a difference.
I’m wondering what you’re expecting from democracy? More oversight from a bitterly divided and dysfunctional Congress? People voting on financial propositions?
The technical necessity is there; for your chase-backed visa card to pull money from chase and deposit it into your shop's citibank, there needs to be some infrastructure. Whether a private company or the government provides this infrastructure is another story.
(Although if the government provided you could argue that there would likely be even more political headaches that prevent what goes across the wire).
such as?
Maybe I’m missing something, but the above comment reminds me of the blockchain naïveté of 10 years ago. I don’t mean to be dismissive; I’m suspending disbelief long enough to ask what you mean in detail.
I think the above is quite wrong (with moderate confidence). Is the above claim consistent with survey data? It is my understanding that:
1. companies care a lot about risk reduction. This includes protection from chargebacks.
2. companies benefit when customers have credit: it enables more spending and can smooth out ups and downs in individual purchasing ability
3. Yes, quick transfers matter, but not in isolation from the above two.
There is, it's a layer-2 on Ethereum called zkSync. It's not totally satisfactory (the company that makes it can steal your money, centralized sequencer, etc), but it's pretty mature and works quite well. To replace Visa you want high throughput and low latency and zk-rollups like zkSync can provide both. (There are other options too, like Starknet, but AFAIK zkSync is the most mature.)
Still faith in magic on HN
But it is a permanent and final transfer, no easy charge backs like with a credit card, or fraud protection from debit cards.
You have to know which account you are paying into (sort code and account number), which is the main part of what Visa/Mastercard do. They are the layer in front of the bank account which means customers don't have to send money directly to an account.
I suppose now everyone has a smart phone it would be easier to hook up something like Faster Payments in a user friendly way with an app and a QR code/NFC reader that the merchant has. But Visa/Mastercard are entrenched obviously.
Someone is going to mention flashbots or something. “See this specific example proves…”
The real way crypto will work or not work is programmable money. If that works that will be huge, if it doesn’t then maybe someone will pick it back up 50 years from now.
The ones that don't (eg Tornado cash) end up being used for money laundering so on/off ramps won't touch them. We'll see what happens with the ZK-based chains, but this seems a systematic problem that is difficult to fix.