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Comment by hnpolicestate | Hacker News Reader

Visa and MasterCard get a lot of hate as they are definitely a duopoly. But imagine they never existed and PayPal or some other Fintech was the non-cash payment monopoly.

Far less things you'd be permitted to purchase, far more random account closures for violating intentionally nonspecific TOS. Worse customer support than we have now and even less consumer protections.

MasterCard and Visa hearken back to a time when KYC was far less aggressive.

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Visa and mastercard have been flexing their muscles in Japan recently deciding what people can and can not purchase.

They've done it in the US before with Porn.

They should at least be relegated to a dumb pipe, if you don't (or can't) accept mastercard and visa you might as well not exist at all in today's age.

>Visa and mastercard have been flexing their muscles in Japan recently deciding what people can and can not purchase.

Any links on what happened?

What sorts of things can you pay for with VISA/MasterCard that you can't pay for with Paypal?

Firearms, ammunition, cigarettes, drug paraphernalia,and more

https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/acceptableuse-full?locale...

I wonder if it's against TOS to pay a sex worker? Then there was that freakout over PayPal potentially closing your account for doing things in your irl that it doesn't approve of. I think they backed down?

Most normal shops.

I don't think I've ever seen a physical shop that accepts PayPal.

PayPal won't even allow me to pay for most stuff since I moved to another country - they don't support the option for humans moving to another location in the world. So... many things.

Also, PayPal regularly block transactions for incorrectly detected "fraud". Visa/MC never did.

Groceries, transport tickets, hotels, restaurants, cash withdrawals

Many European companies have — or more often, had — their own, national equivalents.

"Sure, the situation sucks, but imagine how much worse it _could_ suck!" That, uh, is not where I hoped we'd be as a society in 2024. Sure, I guess I could be getting kicked in the nards every hour, and it's great that I'm not, but surely we can demand better.

Indeed, we should demand better. But it's important to emphasize the bitter lesson that a lot of naive people don't want to learn: identifying a bad thing and then tearing it down will often just cause it to be replaced with a worse thing. Power abhors a vacuum, so before you create that vacuum, you better be prepared to replace it with something that will resist the influence of the powers-that-be.

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