Comment by 202508042147
1 month ago
One obvious thing missing from any of those lists: Visa and Mastercard alternatives. This is the protection money that is never brought up by the US officials when they say that America was paying for our security.
Wero is coming. Currently it is only available in a few countries.
And within those countries in only a handful of banks. We've been here before, but as of right now, I'd give it a better chance than I'd have given just four months ago.
No it's not.
Wero is another name for iDEAL, it has been pushed by Dutch, but it is an engineering fiasco.
There is no way Poland would adopt it. Blik is just on another level price- and feature-wise.
I am unfamiliar with Wero. Can you explain why it is an engineering fiasco?
Side note: Looking at their job listings I don't see any engineering positions (with the exception of a security engineer which is a grey area in a bank IMO), only managers and business roles.
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The big European countries adopt it, so if Poland will adopt it or not won't matter in the short term, in the long term merchants will accept it as they do it with Alipay and other more obscure stuff
I recently heard of Wero and it seemed promising. What makes Blik so much better in your opinion?
+1 for Wero! Unsure where I can see their timeline.
Wero is a land grab by the banks who fumbled building a PayPal alternative for 20 years, now desperately trying to stop the digital Euro.
Sure I'd rather use Wero than PayPal -if it was decent- and building it on top of SEPA instant transactions is neat. But the lack of buyers protection is a deal breaker for me! And quite frankly I'd rather use a digital Euro governed by the ECB than some rent seeking hobby project by a bunch of private banks. Especially because they will inevitably enshittify it with ads and hostile BNPL like PayPal.
I wish GNU Taler would become more concrete.
https://www.taler.net
It seems like Taler has been coming along great and the biggest things it’s missing are more interest and adoption. There has been some first ‘real-world’ use recently, but it’s still far from becoming widespread, which would be a dream come true.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
The digital Euro has not been implemented yet. Some analysts are skeptical but this is the EUs answer for Visa/Mastercard.
For small transactions right? I haven't looked much into it but I thought the main purpose was to save people all the transaction fees.
That's not the main purpose. The main purpose is tech independence.
The big European countries still have their National Systems that work very well. If the US would nuke Visa/MC in Germany, payments inside Germany would still work very well via Girocard (except for some people that bank with cheapskate neobanks)
Wero is coming and it should work across Europe
In Belgium, Maestro card was halted and my bank switched to MasterCard. Then I paid on some USA website and they managed to pull money from my account based on only the card number, without using the bank website's chip+pin. I was flabberghasted on how we silently managed to get such a huge setback in both security and national independence. I stopped payments using non-EU entities.
France has the CB network for example which I believe still dominates most credit card transactions although it's declining as more and more cards are not co-branded anymore.
It merged with Mastercard almost two decades back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocard_%28credit_card%29
Eh, as an American I have to pay Visa/Mastercard fees too.
Why do European drug firms charge so much more for their drugs in the US than in Europe? That is an actual difference between what it is like to be in a consumer in US vs Europe. Even Bernie Sanders thinks it is a problem: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/nx-s1-5123689/novo-nordisk-ce...
Many European countries have a single payer system when it comes to the medical system. That gives them a big leverage in negotiations for drug pricing.
When European customers pay American firms, it's "protection money".
When American customers pay European firms, it's just capitalism, sorry bro.
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AFAIK, Medicare in the USA is forbidden by law from using its big market to drive a hard bargain like most national health services can (Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003). So its like employers paying workers less in jurisdictions where they can't unionize and strike.
That actually changed recently, but The Economist (UK newspaper) whines that Americans will no longer be footing the bill for drug development:
https://archive.is/bWwP4
We're done with Europeans treating us as suckers. Doing nice things for Europe leads to nothing but contempt from Europeans.
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How is that relevant? The US can reform its healthcare system whenever it decides to do so.
For the EU, Visa and Mastercard dependence form a duopoly controlled by a hostile foreign power. An alternative is essential.
While Master Card and a Visa there is a EU regulation limiting the fees, health insurance is mainly national level. So you could ask the question why is Ozempic cheap in Australia? But I can't answer your question.
This website appears to indicate that Visa/Mastercard fees are about 6x as high in the US vs EU:
https://wallethub.com/edu/credit-card-interchange-fees-by-co...
The EU had such a good deal with the US. But they couldn't resist making fun of us. They made fun of us for our military spending while we deterred Russia. They made fun of us for our health spending while we subsidized their drug development costs. They made fun of our long work hours, while demanding Ukraine contributions based on our high GDP (which is high in part because we work long hours). They talk so much about America's soft power in Europe, without realizing that Europe's soft power in America is practically all gone at this point.
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And the fees you pay go, in part, to fund the American War machine that is now threatening Europe. As a European, I don't want to fund your war machine.
You know that nearly nobody in the US pays the sticker price of Drugs?
They have to put an absurd sticker price on the drugs so that the "Pharmacy Benefit Manager" (an useless middlemen that only exists in US Healthcare) can "negotiate" a "discount" on behalf of your insurance (aka the real price), for which he takes a cut based on how big the "discount" is