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Comment by DevX101 | Hacker News Reader

0.2% should be about the correct rate. WeChat in China has zero transaction fee in the system and a 0.1% fee on withdrawals. Visa/MasterCard amounts to a private tax on the economy. Unfortunately I don't see this changing anytime soon, since the US allows rent-seeking middlemen like Visa/MC, TurboTax, and PBMs (pharmacy drugs), to continue their operation as long as they keep funding the right politicians.

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As far as I understand with WeChat you can't disputes purchases and do things like chargebacks. If your phone is somehow stolen and account drained (they'd need to know your pin..) then you're probably be screwed?

So there isn't the concept of insurance as far as I understand.

Not to defend the credit card companies in the slightest.. but its a bit apples to oranges

EDIT: Arguably "insurance" is actually an artificial problem creates to justify the cards' fees. The intentionally didn't implement CC chips for the longest time, insisted on signatures, and now support insecure things like contactless payment - thereby ensuring theft/fraud still exists and necessitating insurance (for a very marginal increase in user convenience)

The only plus side I can see is that you can buy stuff from shady ass websites and sleep comfortably knowing you can do a chargeback later.

What are UnionPay's fees? That's the correct comparison, not WeChat.

PayPal/CashApp have zero transaction fee as well for person-to-person transfers.

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