Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

> "On top of that, all payment systems are American: American Express, Visa, Mastercard. Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe."

On one hand, this shows how important it is for paper cash to have first-class citizen status when it comes to legal tender.

On the other hand, how does the largest single currency zone in the world not have its own debit card settlement system? The Germany-only Girocard appears to have been mostly phased out, and doesn't work outside Germany unless it's co-branded with MC/Visa. Same with France's Card Bancaire. Besides that, 39% of online purchases in Germany are made through PayPal or MC/Visa.

[0] https://stripe.com/en-ca/resources/more/payment-methods-germ...

There’s a digital euro launching next year AFAIK which is designed to replace Mastercard and Visa. It’s been in the works for ages and is coming online at a pretty critical time it seems.

It comes with a full digital wallet infrastructure part of it too. So some of the fundamental tech scene is definitely changing in Europe.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...

GNU Taler is not coming? :-( Whatever happened to NGI Taler program anyway?

It's still going. NGI ("Next Generation Internet") is a Horizon Europe program, part of the EU's mission to strengthen European economy. It doesn't mean that any of the projects that receive subgrants from that pot are officially adopted for anything. It is the NGI grantees who decide which subgrantees receive funding, not the EU (in this case, NLnet Foundation). Hundreds of open source projects have received financial support from this pot.

> Besides that, 39% of online purchases in Germany are made through PayPal or MC/Visa.

This is currently being solved with Wero, which is intended to be an EU-wide online payment platform which can replace PayPal/MC/Visa, and a bunch of national payment systems.

Antagonizing it's allies is having exactly the effect on US soft power as expected.

Wero is just a layer on top of the already working SEPA.

(And a layer that is potentially worse than Visa / MasterCard, as long as it's only implemented on Google / Apple smartphones.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com