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Comment by brainless | Hacker News Reader

For those outside India and/or non-active users of UPI - it drives so many transactions that even for an engineer, I forget how often I use it:

  - Payments between family members
  - Payments for every tiny/small item - a bag a chips or a cup of tea for example
  - Payments for car mechanic, plumber, or other services
  - Payments for online shopping or services - yes web apps show the UPI QR code and I can pay from my phone by scanning. Mobile apps will simply open the UPI app's payment screen
  - Buses, flights, trams, taxis, trains - online or on road

On an average day in a city like Kolkata, me and my partner make up to 20-30 transactions. I live in a small Himalayan village most of the year and I still make roughly 6-8 transactions a day.

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Systems that are based on one-time codes instead of permanent credentials are really under-appreciated in the anglosphere.

Giving your credit card to your child / friend / spouse / subordinate, so that they can buy something with your money, is a lot more risky than giving them an OTP, valid for a single transaction, which you have to approve in your app anyway.

Poland's Blik is based on 6-digit codes, which makes this feature even more useful, as you can E.G. dictate that code over the phone to a trusted acquaintance at the ATM.

Because those OTPs can be intercepted by any MITM unless you are using on-device 2FA generated by an app.

> intercepted by any MITM

Most things are... even SSH is Trust-on-First-Use. You can really only verify out of band. OTP is quite a bit better than CC or bank account numbers... assuming the OTP is only restricting use (and not giving access to view or modify other account information, etc)

After adding UPI as a payment option to my little microSaaS, I'm finally starting to see sales in India. Was like trying to extract hen's teeth to get an Indian to sign up before that.

Yes this. Anytime a SaaS supports UPI Autopay, I'm 10-100x more likely to subscribe.

For context: it's basically a recurring payment but you open the Autopay section in Google pay or whichever app and it shows you all your subscriptions right there (which is a major +), the transaction history, and cancellation happens in the UPI app itself I don't have to faff around in the SaaS and deal with potentially some dark patterns.

That’s absolutely huge. All your subscriptions in one place that you can just turn off from there directly. It’s one of my favorite things about payments going through the apple App Store.

Unlike the app store, there is no 30% fee. And also. No chargebacks, so it's simple for merchants as well.

Do you have plans for when the government interprets your small payments as terrorism and seizes your bank account?

I think every country goes through this and then goes back to cash, but at different rates.

Do you have any examples?

https://archive.is/4ti7g

For going back to cash, I mean.

This is implied in an authoritarian country like India.

However, the Government is in a fix. Almost the complete stack is subsidized by the Government. This led to an explosive adoption growth for merchants as there is no MDR and payers for ease of transaction as they don't need to carry hard currency anymore. This has enabled the Government gaining complete insights into spending and earning patterns. Withdrawing this massive subsidy will again lead to people using cash. So in order to prevent "terrorism" they will subsidize for the foreseeable future.

India is not an authoritarian country ffs

lol

It’s not, and calling it so is wrong.

But it is a country with extremely illiberal capital controls and a history of questionable enforcement due to perceived corruption.

It’s such a good payment system it’s overcome these concerns in large part, but they are reasonable concerns to have.

Why would they interpret a system being used for the purpose it was designed for as terrorism? Using it for small purchases is one of the intended use cases, e.g. allowing street vendors to accept digital payments, incentivising them to have a bank account and reducing the risk of theft.

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