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Comment by AdamN | Hacker News Reader

Agree that nobody considers it a sweetheart but you're wrong on the ex-US issue. Paypal is big in Germany for instance and I literally know nobody who uses Paypal in the US (maybe for eBay stuff??)

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Part of this is just the banking here in Germany being so bad. Fast ('instant') transfers are relatively new for many banks, online banking has always been quite poor/limited, and many of the cards they used to offer were Girocard (or Maestro) and didn't work with online retailers. Paypal has always been a great buffer to those problems.

Well, to be fair, even for many customers 'instant' transfers are new. Even if their bank offers them for months now. Some folks still consider 'online banking' a novelty.

In 2015 when I still lived in South Africa, you could do near-instant online transfers - but there is/was a cost involved (I think about $0.45 for transactions under $250). Online banking was super common then, I imagine it's become even more so in the last 10 years. I was quite shocked by how outdated the German banking system was, although it's definitely improved in many ways in the last decade.

Even in 2006, in Australia you could do interbank transfers with near instant availability (certainly within 60s), usually for free.

In 1995 I could give anyone in Germany my PostBank konto number and they could “wire” me money by calling the bank.

In 2026 I pay contractors working on my US house by logging into my bank and instructing it to mail a paper check.

The only exception is Venmo which everyone expects will be enshittified.

That’s interesting, because every time there’s something about a money transfer service, there are a ton of posts saying “Oh, the United States is so backwards, in Europe you could do this forever.” Apparently, by Europe, they mean the particular place they happen to live in.

Europe isn’t a monolith and some countries are weird about cards. Here’s two examples.

In Germany, cash is strongly preferred or was the last time I was there a few years ago.

In Norway, cash is nigh nonexistent.

Don’t mistake Germany as representative of the median European country when it comes to card transactions.

Trite comment. Debit/credit cards never took off in Germany because everyone had a Giro card that worked perfectly well for cashless payments. And for online payments, PayPal filled the gap quick enough. The average German saw no reason to request a Visa/MasterCard from their bank for a heavy fee when PayPal did the job. That's also the difference: Germany never had the "Here, have a free credit card" culture.

A Giro card is a debit card.

With a more benevolent reading of my comment you could have seen that I do consider them equivalent for cashless local payments. My first sentence was meant as "[American] debit/credit cards". This doesn't invalidate anything I said.

Probably not very long. Multiple companies, including Amazon, started supporting Wero for payments. And most banks already support it. You scan a QR code or open a link that opens your bank app, show your fingerprint, see the amount and which account and to who, and you approve. Very easy and costs nothing to the seller nor the buyer.

Next year we'll get this in the physical stores...

You’re overestimating their ability to change. I still regularly have to pay in cash in many businesses here in Berlin.

Wero is a great start but I suspect that PayPal will stay around for many more years.

At the same time you’re underestimating it. Before covid almost no small businesses would offer card payment; now it’s common.

Sure there are some that are against digital payments and they won’t accept Wero neither, but I would argue the number is very small. And sure in bars/clubs/nightlife it’s cash only but that also won’t change - it’s for tax reasons.

People don’t like PayPal and only use it for the lack of a better alternative. EC is widely used and I bet that Wero will be as well.

Source: lived last 15 years in Berlin

As a principal I boycott places that only accepts cash in Berlin. There is absolutely no reason for them to accept money only in cash in 2026, except for tax evasion and money laundering

What about a principled stance that a payment should remain anonymous, without being logged by a domestic bank, let alone a foreign company.

I used to go to a bar in Copenhagen with that principle.

Read my comment again. I said I boycott places that only accepts cash. They can absolutely accept both cards and cash and the only reason they do that is to not pay taxes. I would rather everyone pay taxes without any exceptions

I understood it.

The bar with the privacy principle didn't accept cards, and had a sign to that effect on the bar.

> There is absolutely no reason for them to accept money only in cash in 2026,

When I was young, cash was beloved by some as a matter of principle because of the fact you didn't need any authority's permission to accept it; coupled with its anonymity.

If you were running the city's only LGBT bookshop, you didn't want your till full of signed, dated checks - and card processors wouldn't do business with you even if you wanted to accept cards.

I don’t mind if they accept cash, but my problem is that some places ONLY accepts cash. That’s purely to evade taxes

Or perhaps it's a matter of principle. They think that digital payments take society in a dangerous direction so do their part to push back against that and raise awareness.

Yeah right. For profit businesses being altruistic and moral. Delusional much?

There are tens of thousands of those, yes. Pretending these don't exist, edgy nihilism much?

I didn't realize that obtaining a business license caused one to immediately lose sight of his core values and morph into a comic book villain.

Privacy.

Stalkers.

Abusive ex’s.

And if you think it’s assholes targeted this way, look at all the women being stalked via flock by cops.

And if you think finances aren’t abused the same way, why do you think the Germans are so worked up about this? The fucking stasi.

A certain type of person will use literally anything they can find against you, including to harass you if they literally can’t find anything you did wrong.

And what better for them than a nice list of all the places and people you have some kind of important vendor or business relationship with - which is why there is money changing hands.

Grocery stores. Gas stations/subway fees, rental payments or mortgage payments. restaurants, gifts or family transfers, work, you name it.

I don’t know who traumatised you, but you need therapy, not cash payments

Cash payments are great therapy.

Also, ask an older German if you think I’m kidding.

What about costs? For low margin businesses, especially small ones, the cost of card payments is significant.

Was true in 2016, but not in 2026.

Likely casual tax fraud

What, why would you need Wero for that? That would just be an EPC-QR-Code using SEPA. Wero is just some cancer in between to sniff off user emails and phone numbers in my eyes.

Since banks want a product they can sell.

The European Central Bank is working on regulation regarding the "Digital Euro" which is a bit in a marketing hype loop using block chain and other terms as a hype, while fundamentally trying to come up with a Euro-Zone-Wide approach to create a mostly anonymous digital currency, with some offline capability. If they come up with a final working concept paper, this would become legally mandated with low charges.

Wero is a product by banks, trying to be faster. Trying to have an established platform under their control, which is well established before ECB is ready with D€.

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