wtmt

No, a custom UPI ID won’t save you from your phone number being shared with merchants. [1] UPI payments also leak the person’s full legal name on transactions. Whether this is useful in merchant payments (not personal payments to known people) is highly doubtful.

[1]: https://scroll.in/article/1045536/are-your-upi-payments-farm...

> The government aggressively manages the system to prevent any single company from getting too much weight and forces them to address scams or other system occurs in almost real time by the threat of being thrown off the rails.

It’s actually shocking that only a few years ago RBI was concerned about concentration risk of having NPCI (the platform operator of UPI) and invited proposals from banks and companies for NUE (New Umbrella Entity) licenses. Then something changed and it canceled all those proposals.

NPCI has a monopoly on instant fund transfers (leaving aside the RBI run RTGS). NPCI wants to limit concentration risk among its clients by trying to push for lower market share among competitors within its platform, like Google Pay or WhatsApp Pay.

As for scams, there are plenty of them on UPI every single day, and there’s no way to get any fraudulently transferred funds back without filing a police complaint and waiting for them to do their jobs (and greasing their palms depending on the amount for the job to be done).

> UPI is directly connected to your bank account. It does not go through VISA, Mastercard or whatever.

This is technically incorrect. UPI is connected to NPCI, which runs the platform and charges the participating banks for this service. Same for RuPay cards by NPCI.

> EDIT: also sounds like Swish charges a fee to the banks? Sounds a bit outrageous for a payment system trying to be the best in the world to charge a fee.

FWIW, NPCI charges all banks for UPI too. They’ve been eating most of those costs because the government didn’t allow them to charge (now those charges are slowly coming in). Banks haven’t been happy with the zero MDR regime for UPI.

For UPI, which is created and run by NPCI (an organization comprising a consortium of private and public banks), there is an “official” app called BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money). Anyone who has it doesn’t have to worry if the other person is using Google Pay or WhatsApp Pay or another app. Banks also have their own UPI apps or include the UPI feature in their banking app. All these apps work on the same platform, which is UPI, which in turn is supported by all banks.

While I agree with many of your points, in this context, UPI is just a money transfer platform. It’s not currency or a currency equivalent of any sort.

There is a CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) in a pilot phase in India since last year.

> UPI requires bank account but you need UPI id to transfer the fund.

UPI requires a bank account, a mobile phone number linked to the bank account and a smartphone to transfer funds for anything other than a trivially small payment (tiny payments are now supported on feature phones).

> Almost each and every concern is applicable to VISA/Mastercard system too.

Not really, when you make a payment using credit or debit cards, your name doesn’t go to the merchant (and doesn’t have to, since you can enter any name online when entering card details). Your phone number also doesn’t go to the merchant from the card number unless you decide to share it. In the case of UPI, the receiver gets the full name and many a times the phone number of the sender since that’s the most common UPI identifier.

I couldn’t have said this better! Thanks for the detailed comment with drawbacks and criticisms.

This is why banks have never been happy with UPI because their costs to support aren’t fully recovered and it’s a drain. They’ve supported it mainly because of the government pushing them to. MDR (the charges the merchants pay) started coming to UPI too, a few months ago. The “free” party won’t last a lot longer.

Does your “Asia Pacific” presence include countries like India? As others have pointed out, it’s better to read that article “Falsehoods programmers believe about names” [1] and then figure out how you’d like to deal with it. Looking at “Family, Given” or “Given, Family” is shortsighted and may cover only a few east Asian countries.

In India there are patronymic names with initials, mononyms (no “family name” or initials), names with just a given name (one or multiple words) and no “family name”, names where the “last name” is a place, etc.

If you truly want to cater to all kinds, just have one field for name and another for what they’d like to be addressed as.

[1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

The caste system in India is layered like onions. The author says he was born as OBC (Other Backward Classes), but that's not the lowest in the overall scheme. SC (Scheduled Castes) are considered lower in the hierarchy. ST (Scheduled Tribes) are considered even lower (there are variations across states and regions, so please take this with a pinch of salt). While the atrocities and punishments by "upper" caste people on "lower" caste people continue, even OBCs oppress SCs and STs quite badly, sometimes along with other "upper" caste people and sometimes by themselves. [1] It's a sad fact that the oppressed themselves don't understand it well enough to avoid oppressing others. If they could get together and lift each other up, things could be very different (or at least not as bad as they have been and are).

[1]: Searching for news on atrocities and punishments on "dalits" would yield many results from as recent as a few days to long ago in the past.

This is a bit off topic for the post, but relevant for some of the comments here.

For those who are commenting about payment systems in India and comparing this to UPI (Unified Payments Interface), this is not like UPI in a few ways.

Firstly, this is more closer to a faster version of RTGS (Real Time Gross Settlement) in India, which is operated by the RBI (Reserve Bank of India). Speaking from experience, RTGS in India can take several minutes or even 20 minutes or longer, belying the “real time” in its name (this is true even now). The FedNow system is supposed to be real time (we’ll soon know how well it performs in comparison).

Secondly, UPI is a payments system by a consortium called NPCI that’s owned by private, public and foreign banks in India. It is not owned by RBI. FedNow is owned by the Federal Reserve, and not by a bunch of banks.

With both RTGS (and the slower batched transfer system called NEFT) in India and FedNow in the US, the interbank settlement is done via the central bank (RBI or Federal Reserve).

The government could issue money that can be tied to a specific purpose (allowed to be spent with specific merchants or establishments) and have a time limit. Think of the COVID-19 assistance that was given to people. If — instead of just transferring normal money into people’s accounts that allowed people to do whatever they wanted with it whenever they wanted and wherever they wanted - the government could force recipients to spend it across certain things and not others, and gave a deadline to move the money around, would that be something that’s in the best interests of the receiver? By expiring money or by applying negative interest rates, the government can offload its burden on to the people who hold and have to use this money.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36137261

That was posted earlier than this and has more comments.

A few comments and advice on investing in India.

The target audience for this would know this, but it's useful to be reminded. INR (Indian Rupee) depreciates on average about 4% each year against USD (US Dollar). When you look at the gains from investments in India in USD terms, it would be lower due to the continuously weakening currency. As an emerging market and one with a still-developing stock market, the returns could be comparatively a lot higher along with volatility.

People in India who "invest" ("gamble" may be a better term) in the stock market are used to larger double digit returns and chase "multi baggers" (check some financial publications in India and you'll find many headlines about multi baggers). This makes the same bunch beat a retreat at the first sign of a downturn.

Tax laws in India are getting more complex and onerous (because the government believes everyone to be a tax evader unless proven otherwise), and it seems like the government wants to slow down the outflow of money from the country while getting a larger slice in advance. Though the government wants to attract non-resident Indians to invest (they've historically sent a lot of money into the country), it's also reluctant to provide an attractive taxation and tax compliance experience. If you choose to invest through this or any other platform, keep an eye on the changing tax laws so that you can exit before things suddenly become painful with very little notice. As an example, though the union budget with tax changes was presented in the beginning of February in the parliament, the government made a slew of changes that impact whole classes of mutual funds just a few days ago with no discussion in parliament and passed all of those (because the ruling party has a majority).

Lots of disturbing things in the report, but I’d like to highlight a slight parallel elsewhere in the hopes that people can see where this could be headed if it’s allowed to proceed without opposition — India and its deeply flawed Aadhaar system. When Denmark lands on biometrics and 360° surveillance by linking various accounts and documents, it will get far worse.

This “unique” number in India is assigned to residents (not just citizens) based on biometrics (probabilistic) across a population of more than a billion people (which magnifies the effect of even tiny error rates). Aadhaar is claimed by the government as saving money, but its results have been denial of benefits, including causing deaths due to starvation and people not getting pensions that they’re entitled to.

It has also suffered a lot of scope creep where it is now the only document that the government as well as private entities demand as an identity document for various purposes.

> Armed with questionable data on the amount of benefits fraud taking place, conservative politicians have turned Denmark’s famed safety net into a polarizing political battleground.

> The perception of widespread welfare fraud has empowered Jacobsen to establish one of the most sophisticated and far-reaching fraud detection systems in the world.

Same thing happened in India. The “savings” were also debunked through information obtained from the government (though the Supreme Court of India just took the government’s words on savings at face value and eventually decided that this whole program is constitutional).

> The bill was backed by all of the major political parties in Denmark and became law in April 2015.

In India, though the opposition political parties opposed the bill, there has been no difference on the ground. All the state governments, including those where the opposition parties (centrally) are in power have embraced this number. All of them have a standard formula:

a) link Aadhaar with everything

b) deny subsidies to beneficiaries due to network issues, biometric issues, etc. (Aadhaar is a centrally managed database that requires network connectivity for authentication)

c) deeply cut or remove the subsidies entirely after some time

> Jacobsen says her algorithms don’t actually cancel benefits—they only flag people as suspicious. Ultimately, it is up to a human fraud investigator to make the final call, and citizens have the right to appeal their decisions.

In India too, the law says that nobody shall be denied any benefit for want of Aadhaar. But the reality is that nothing moves without it working.

At least Denmark would have to consider privacy issues and privacy laws. India does not yet have a privacy and data protection law. It’s been open season for a lot of private companies (and probably other countries) for a long time with the amount of data that has leaked and/or is cheaply available.

> 4. Reserve Bank of India creating a CDBC enabled savings account program to allow citizens to hold money without intermediary banks.

It won’t be a savings account program in the sense of earning any interest. The Reserve Bank of India is quite cautious not to hit the private banking system by introducing competition with it, and hence will only offer zero interest accounts (and possibly experiment with small negative interest rates after a few years).

> The goal was to understand how much cash remained in the system, and to move away from a cash-based economy.

This is absolutely rewriting history. The stated goal at that time was “to remove black money”. The Reserve Bank of India knows how much cash is in the system at any point in time. That’s why we get periodic reports about it.

> It seemed more of a failure immediately afterward, but with 6 years of hindsight doesn't seem as bad.

A very badly thought out and badly executed move that resulted in about 150 people dying does seem very bad to me. The digital economy did not need such a stunt. Also, the amount of cash in circulation has more than doubled since that event in 2016.

The same attitude of “we’ll tell the people what’s good for them” repeated again during the COVID-19 pandemic with sudden lockdown announcements that left hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers without work and without a proper way to get back home (or have access to food and water).

As a private citizen, I would like others not to suffer so much because someone thinks they know better than everyone else and issues diktats that harm people.

I don’t see the need for a retail CBDC in India right now. India already has a TCS (tax collected at source) for outward remittances beyond Rs 700,000 in a financial year. This is a tax that’s collected first and refunded or adjusted later. The tracking of these transactions across all authorized forex dealers is already done by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). So a CBDC isn’t going to add value here. But I think it will be made a case since CBDC for retail is a solution searching for a problem.

The CBDC being a zero interest instrument, only a scare created about lots of counterfeit paper currency could increase adoption, IMO (just like a fake bogeyman about “black money” was told when declaring more than 80% of the currency as invalid in 2016. [1]

Cash is simple. Cash is easy. Cash doesn’t need smartphones. Did you know that less than half (or half) the population in India has a smartphone? At least one major “too big to fail” bank [2] is distributing an Android app for the CBDC on its website as an APK file. [2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...

[2]: https://www.icicibank.com/personal-banking/online-services/f...

> We currently offer Mozilla VPN in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the US.

This list really needs to expand a lot more, and quicker. Mozilla is “literally” leaving money in the table by not serving many other countries. The market size may not be as big, but there is the Mozilla brand name recognition among people who work in tech and there are people who’d like to support Mozilla Corporation directly.

> I doubt anything will ever change under Tim Cook. Maybe some day Scott Forstall will return in Jobs-like fashion and correct the company's course.

I really disliked Scott Forstall being fired from Apple, and have felt that he could’ve added a lot more value to Apple’s products if he’d been around. Apple Maps is still terrible (outside the US and a couple of other countries). So it’s not like firing him resulted in great progress quickly.

Recently John Gruber had posted about it being 10 years since Forstall was forced out of Apple. [1] I’m guessing many others feel similarly that his presence could’ve made a positive difference. Now it’s Tim Cook’s ego that would block him from being hired at Apple again.

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/10/31/forstall-10

Many people wouldn’t see an issue until they’re either personally affected or are the kind to look at privacy and freedoms deeply.

The question for you is whether the government has a need or the right to know every penny (or whatever fractional currency you can legally use) that you move around. This shouldn’t be confused with the government having a need to know about incomes and/or wealth for taxation purposes. Sales or consumption taxes collected by sellers don’t typically care who exactly pays it or what the mode of payment is.

Trusting a nebulous entity like a government to track every expense and every money transfer would be draconian, and would be understandable only in dictatorships and authoritarian regimes (and the ones very close to becoming one).

Off topic: I can’t read this article because it’s behind a paywall. I’m not bothered much by paywalls and paid articles, but FT seems to be quite expensive. It doesn’t have any currency related adjustments or discounts either. So I’m curious to know how those who subscribe to it manage or if they get discounts or get it for free through some other affiliation.

The modem is less than a year old. But airtel doesn’t give an IPv6 address. This is in one of the major cities where one would expect technology to be advanced.

NPCI, the organization operating UPI, is owned by public and private banks. It is approved by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and is marketed by the government. About two years ago, RBI had concerns about NPCI having a monopoly and wanted more players to create and interoperate similar services, but it canceled that plan (reasons unknown).

UPI is not a money holding account by itself. It’s an identifier for your bank account. You can have multiple identifiers for the same bank account (like email aliases pointing to one mailbox).

UPI is primarily available on smartphones through an app. The setup process involves the UPI app (could be bank’s app or a third party app like Google Pay) sending an SMS with a specific code to NPCI (the private consortium operating the UPI service).

If you lose your device or uninstall the app or the UPI account is deactivated due to inactivity, you just fire up the app and get it to send the SMS again for authorization.

FWIW, airtel broadband, one of the largest (or the largest?) fixed line broadband providers, doesn’t offer IPv6 for all customers. It seems like mobile broadband from even a lower ranking provider (like Vi) does offer it. I doubt if all ISPs will meet this goal by the end of this year.

Source: My current Internet connections.

> intuitive because it has an actual file-system

I disagree with this. Most non-tech people don’t know or care about file systems. As long as they have the sharing options they need and find them easier to use, they’re satisfied. FWIW, iOS/iPadOS has a Files app that exposes part of the file system.

At least from the Indian experience, I’d wager that tons of iPhones from the US find their way into other countries because it’s way cheaper to get it from there than pay local prices that may include higher customs duties, higher (than US) taxes, etc. It’s possible that a lot of iPhones in Cambodia are/were originally sold in the US.