Why not look at sepa? There's a whole continent that already solved this?
Ticks all the boxes:
- No fee
- Instant
- Blockchain agnostic
I mean for the actual settlement obviously.
- No fee
- Instant
- Blockchain agnostic
I mean for the actual settlement obviously.
The way that payments work through SEPA is that the merchant pulls the money from your account. Legally they require a "mandate" - this can be as little as a handwritten signature on a document.
Security is essentially provided by easy reversal and strong penalties for abuse.
I've often wondered whether payments providers entering the blockchain space (like Visa/Mastercard) would act as trusted intermediaries for dispute resolution. Kind of a 2-of-3 multisig to disperse the funds in escrow.
Infact you could implement exactly what you suggest in a similar way.
And I actually use crypto for payments more than most people. I used some just last week to buy a replica rolex from a chinese dealer because they gave a better price than credit cards.
It's also really hard to interface with. Afaik, I can't simply get an API token from my bank and send 2-cent transactions to pages I read if they'd publish the IBAN as part of an HTTP header or meta tag for example. Nor do I know that my bank would be happy about a thousand tiny transactions each month
I just tried transferring 0.01€ and it showed 0€ in transaction fees.
Not sure what you're on about.
And if you start receiving hundreds of 0.01c transfers into your private bank account, you will receive a friendly phone call from you bank very soon.
Will take ages for that to become a browser extension, or embed. Too many parties make money off the current way. Similar to the health "care" ("insurance") in USA
"ACH faster" cannot and should not become a browser extension, ever.
You could instead argue that the Fed ought to additionally implement a blind signature service a la Digicash. Then customers could make anonymous digital cash payments to participating banks and businesses. (I.e., the recipient is known but the payer isn't.)
Would you advocate for that? If so, you'd have to battle way more cryptobros than Visa/Mastercard lobbyists. Hell, the cryptobros are already spamming Youtube saying ISO 20022 is an evil conspiracy by banking incumbents. And that's just an XML messaging spec!
Imagine the pushback here on HN if you seriously pushed for the fed to do proper digital cash.