alt Hacker NewsEurope's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun
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Trump is so crazy, it made Europe build alternatives to Visa and Mastercard. Unprecedented.
Trump has destroyed the US. I know it’s a generic comment but he has left us friendless, broke and eating ourselves.
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So I guess we'll have a system whose API is "open and interoperable", meaning "spread across 3000 pages of 5 ETSI TS PDfs that nobody can understand, with the only integration environment available after an expensive security audit, and requiring you to send an email to an email address that hasn't existed for the last 5 years."
/s
> Wero lets users send money using just a phone number
Of course, what could go wrong!!
Unbelievable, a chance to make a whole new standard, new system, new everything, but yet we still have the need to tie it to ancient protocols, only to find later it’s broken by design and we start adding all sort of duct tape solutions to make it “secure”..
This is either a completely and entirely stupid move by some boomers living in the 80s, or maybe, it’s intentional to enforce something insecure like a phone number/GSM as a “national ID” to easily track citizens and force them to have a phone number linked to their real life, and I think it’s the second one, the same reason why many “secure” chatting apps still require a phone number.
Once European banks realize how horrible EU is to do business with they will reunite with Visa
2026 is really the year of USA going down in history. US dollar is collapsing, its stock is having a hard time, Europe is ditching US techs like Google and Microsoft and now this.
Visa/Mastercard are the biggest evil. Why do you think Trump got pissed at Brazil having its own payment system without Visa/Mastercard network deleting billions in revenue from Visa/Mastercard
The problem major problem is already mentioned: Each EU country wanna have their own independent system. Nothing prevent the countries from doing that but it must talk within the same payment network so people in the Netherlands can buy from Italy using their own payment system.
Own payment system is different than payment network :)
Crypto gets a lot of hate... but this really puts its utility into perspective: No counterparty risk with random banks or foreign companies, near-instant settlement, vastly lower fees, immediate fx conversion.
Wirecard[0] round 2.
Whenever people say Bitcoin has no usecase, this is exactly my usecase. Of course, only in conjunction with Lightning (a layer 2 solution building on Bitcoin with anonymity and instant transaction settlement). Censorship-free, no relying on third parties, free and open source software to make and receive payments. Yes, I know, bitcoin is too volatile. The reason that it is volatile, is because it has almost no adoption compared to the Euro. But lightning can also be used to transfer stable coins - i.e USDT works via bitcoin taproot asset management. Now I don't trust a El Salvador baed company and thus not USDT, but the EU could fix this by having a central bank issued stable coin pegged to the Euro. The entire software stack would be based around taproot asset management and lightning, done in the open by the people, for the people.
I for one enjoy my cash back points with American Express. This is not a commercial.