Comment by cfontes

> The central bank controls what payments are permitted by what laws exist, not some risk management system that has decided that your legal purchase is too risky or some foreign state has applied sanctions against you.

That sounds worse to be honest. You're essentially asking for the government to be not only aware of but also able to control all digital payments. That upends how money has worked over (literally) millenia, and is an incredible risk to take. Giving someone in government the ability to block someone's payments and trusting they won't abuse it might be fine as long as good people remain in power, but do you really want to bet the entire nation's ability to live life on that?

Furthermore, wouldn't determining if a payment is legal require prying into details of the transaction that may violate your privacy? And if they make an incorrect determination based on stuff that really wasn't their business in the first place, they now have the force of government behind them, going far beyond merely declining the transaction.

I would think what you should want to advocate for is a system that cannot block payments (at least domestically) just like with cash, and enforcement either happens prior to enrollment, or after the fact through some other traditional law enforcement mechanism (warrants, etc.).

And that's the whole reason why Wero has been made I think. It's because the ECB wants to advance on their digital euro plans due to sovereignty concerns, and I think this push is to dismiss that argument.

That sounds a little authoritarian for many Western countries, I imagine.

Wero is run by the banks themselves, which are in turn controlled/restricted by the central bank. I don't think there's a meaningful difference on that front.

The European ECB isn't really in a position to directly offer services to people, and relying on every country's central banks to cooperate will take decades.

> Zero fees involved

Won’t someone think of the profits!

That is by design. It separates the payment processor so it does just that, just payments. It is like money, once you give it to someone else there is no automatic way to fish it back from their pocket to yours. The correct avenue to deal with fraud, bankruptcy and other malicious actor is the small claims court (or civil court, or criminal court).

The moment you start burdening the payment processor with the roles of judge/referee over all goods and services you end up with the mess we have with CCs where Visa/Mastercard are morality czars that dictate what goods and services are valid or invalid, nuking people and companies out of modern society for their own arbitrary reasons.

Edit: And just to add, you can have "chargeback" for PIX as a separate service, most banks offer PIX insurance that is basically CC chargeback by a different name. But the key is that it is separate from the payment infrastructure itself, it is an insurance service that you contract separately. And that separation ins very important, the insurance company can't roll back transactions arbitrarily, or deny people access to the financial system, they have to pay the victim and then claw back their money in court, which is the appropriate venue to decide who is right or wrong in a transaction.

> Bought something online and didn't receive your product? With PIX you're SOL, with Visa/Mastercard you get a chargeback.

This is no longer the case outside US. Last time I had the account of one of the few credit cards I'm using (on the Visa or Mastercard networks), for transactions I should have been clearly reimbursed / credited, as it used to be the case, actually awarded in my favor, was four years ago. Recent transactions, with proven vendor at fault, ended up with my loss. All over Europe (Im traveling a lot). So no tears shed for Visa or Mastercard losing the EU turf.

> Bought something online and didn't receive your product? With PIX you're SOL, with Visa/Mastercard you get a chargeback.

Visa/Mastercard aren't handling chargebacks, the banks are. With PIX the way to get a chargeback is the same: if you've been victim of fraud you open a claim with the bank, they'll review it, then possibly give you a charge back within a week. This review process might take longer or be denied, which requires a lawsuit.

But it's only less risky for banks to chargeback immediately on Visa/Mastercard because they make so much money from credit card fees that they can afford it.

Yes, but it's a statistically negative sum game for the customer. Visa wouldn't offer such a service if they weren't winning out in the long run, collecting rent on every one of your purchases.

Brazil has a huge advantage in that they've required full transaction-level transparency for tax authorities -- with clearly defined technical requirements -- for almost 20 years now. One can argue whether it's a pro or a con to share this level of detail with the federal government, but it certainly makes taxation easier and fraud prosecution simpler, too.

Visa/Mastercard provides that because the US is a very untrustworthy country. I don't know the situation in Brazil, but here in Europe small claims court just works fine. I think it's pretty dysfunctional to have to rely on private companies for adequate legal protection.

It's not the visa/mastercard that offer chargeback, but the bank.

This looks as a benefit on the surface, but it is not. In the end everybody loses -- the bank, the network, the customer, the merchant.

Good, that's a feature - I don't need my payment processor to have value judgments on my spending.

That has nothing to do with visa/MasterCard. (Well maybe it does in Brasil). In Poland if you use BLIK which is also a national payment network and you get scammed or money stolen from you the bank will also refund you, same as with visa or MasterCard.

Thats a good argument but those are also features that could be provided by the force of government power in a government and country where the government is not and has not intentionally been corrupted, partially for the very purpose of preventing something like digital cash that is anonymous just like cash was before people foolishly gave in to the “convenience” of cards and acting like they had money by using credit cards.

> BLIK from Poland was there earlier

BLIK was launched in 2015 according to Wikipedia; iDeal is from 2005.

I've used BLIK once, for an online payment from the Netherlands to Poland, and for that it was terrible. I assume it's much better integrated into the Polish system.

It's in theory already possible with iDeal from what I can tell (I've seen companies that use subscriptions set up an initial iDeal payment and then convert it into a regular recurring SEPA Direct Debit), but I'm going to assume that the process is kind of messy since I haven't seen many companies implement the system in that way.

Direct Debit is very nice, largely because your bank manages the subscription; companies have to declare the payment ahead of time and if you get balance mixed up for some reason, then the bank will just do the payment whenever your balance is correct if it happens within a week. I've had credit cards decline on subscriptions before because I didn't have enough loaded up on them. Never had that issue with SEPA.

Either that or "credit cards just work", so very few entities bothered until now.

PIX is for everything, but Indeed Tikkie is more a p2p tool.