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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone please steel man the opposition argument for Pix?

You can’t create a moat to skim 3% of the economy as a for profit venture.

The brazilian government can choose to start taxing every single pix transaction at any time. Due to the electronic and centralized nature of the system, such taxes would be utterly inescapable. The only thing stopping them is the sheer unpopularity of such an action.

It's already being used for data cross referencing, tax collection and investigation purposes. There are plans to implement into these payment systems pretty much everything that cryptocurrency maximalists warned us about. It's a convenient system but at the same time quite dystopian.

Nothing stops US government from doing the same to Visa/MasterCard networks.

Not really coming from the US gov but it already happens in very weird ways:

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/hot-money/episode-8-inside-p...

This argument works against all payment systems that are conceivably bannable (likely all of them). If a payment system doesn't collaborate, the government can ban it.

> The only thing stopping them is the sheer unpopularity of such an action.

This is the intended functioning of democracies I guess.

FWIW credit/debit card transaction fees are capped in the EU/SEPA, to 0.3% for credit and 0.2% for debit. 3% is absurd.

Minor annoyance, but just a few limitations and restrictions, after all you need a smartphone and internet connection.

So.. when paying in a store, you need to open your banking app in your smartphone, and if you’re in an area with bad cellular connection (inside a few buildings or in a countryside), you need to connect to the store wifi. Only then you can scan the store QR code and make the payment.

So a single payment can easily take a few minutes, as opposed to a contactless card payment which takes a few seconds.

My main issue with pix is the even more reliance on a smartphone for our day to day life.

From the comments it seems that it is essentially the same as using cash as far as no buyer protection if you want to challenge a charge like you can with a credit card.

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