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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

We already have that in many countries. It doesn't change much, because the vast majority of consumers prefer to use a payment method that does have chargebacks and various other consumer protections. As long as you have a majority of customers who want to pay via Visa or Mastercard, then the vast majority of merchants will need to accept those payments and play by their rules.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payment_System_(United_...

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The premise is that the thing consumers want is "chargebacks and various other consumer protections" but in practice the problem is that those things are really hidden costs, i.e. merchants have to pass on the cost of chargebacks and fraud to honest customers. In a normal market this would result in the merchants passing on those costs to the customers who require a payment method that incurs them, i.e. there would be a 5-10% discount for using a different payment method, or more than that for industries with a high rate of customer chargeback fraud.

But then the payment networks prohibit merchants from providing the full value of the discount to people not insisting on payment methods that impose those costs, which ought to be an antitrust violation because it's obviously uncompetitive to prevent an alternative with lower costs from actually passing those lower costs on to the customer. And then fraud is rampant, costs billions of dollars, makes certain types of services non-viable, but gets folded into the price of ordinary goods and services to keep ordinary people from realizing that they're still paying it.

Could not agree more.

Have never used a chargeback and wouldn't want that ability in the vast majority of transactions. If I'm buying something on steam I know what I'm getting and they already have a robust refund capability regardless. If there was a good alternative to CC I'd happily use that.

I use cards because they're the defacto standard for online payment, but that's the only reason.

(side note: This issue becomes more obvious with the addition of the afterpays of the world, which charge iirc 7% fees to the merchant but forbid them from surcharging the difference)

> because the vast majority of consumers prefer to use a payment method that does have chargebacks

Do they? Or are they "forced" into it by intentionally hidden fees?

If consumers were given an explicit option to save x% and forego chargeback protection, I think most would.

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