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Comment by PearlRiver | Hacker News Reader

The only good use case for a credit card is if you are buying something from someone you do not trust. I have a CC and it use it a few times a year. But using them to pay for groceries or ordering something from Amazon is just moronic.

The way I see it: you are either rich and don't care or you are poor and need to spend money that is not in your account (no judging I grew up poor and had to hide from debt collectors when I was a kid).

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Note that this is highly location dependent. In most of Europe, credit cards are basically all that exists (that is, even "debit cards" are just credit cards with a balance); and regardless of the type of card, because all payments are either chip & pin, biometric based, or verified with some additional 2FA, it's extremely hard to dispute a charge, whether a charge to a credit or debit card.

There's also "contactless" credit card payments in the UK and are common for buying things in shops/pubs etc. I don't know what the situation would be if you were to dispute an incorrect contactless charge.

Those are common in all of Europe, and they are still based on either biometrics (if using your phone) or the card's chip. They do typically include a transaction value and count limit below which the biometrics or pin don't actually get checked, for ease of use. But, given that this limit is controlled by the user, I expect that the contract terms also prevent you from disputing transactions below those limits - though I haven't read carefully enough to be sure.

I don't think I can control the contactless limit on any of my cards (I'm in the UK). Occasionally, the contactless device will prompt to enter a pin, but it happens fairly rarely (probably more common if the payment is at a new location).

I also haven't examined the various contracts, but I'd be surprised if there was no option to dispute transactions below a certain limit as that could be exploited by banks or thieves (but I repeat myself) or shops. An unscrupulous shop could double up transactions or change the amount paid and customers would not be happy if the bank turned round and said "it's below the £50 limit, so we don't care". The bank is more likely to push the problem onto the retailer and simply refund the customer and charge the retailer.

Personally, I don't like contactless due to the change of responsibility between the customer and bank and prefer to use PINs. As far as I know, I can't get just a PIN card as they all have contactless enabled.

Third option: You have the money and like paying less than people paying with non-rewards cards.

Fourth option: You use tap-to-pay and pay the balance in full every month for the convenience at zero cost.

Do American debit cards not have tap?

I'm in Australia, I have my credit card set up as the default to tap.

Means one payment from my savings account a month to cover all daily expenses.

In some places Visa/MC is the default way to pay. Such as large parts of Europe now that the fees are capped. The cashier asks you to pay, you hold your card up to the terminal, and you've paid. Some places like Australia have their own local systems that are more commonly used by locals and probably have lower fees, but those POS also support Visa/MC. It's just the default way to pay internationally now.

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