eastbayjake

hace 2 mesesdiscuss

In fairness they redirect you to your bank to login, you authorize the application (which can be revoked at any time), and then they redirect you back with tokenized information. (In fact it's kind of a pain point that when I use Plaid to link my bank for eg reimbursement deposits from my FSA/HSA, it has tokenized the account numbers so I can't actually tell which account is which.) I guess I get for less savvy users why that might look scary but the alternative is... keying your account number directly into a merchant's system for ACH, which is actually scary (and the default on many government websites which I actually trust less!)

eastbayjake

hace 2 mesesdiscuss

When using a government website, you were intimidated by the security posture of... Plaid? (Genuine question, maybe this was some other provider but Plaid's aggregator tool is the most common place I see this pop up in real life for ACH)

eastbayjake

hace 2 mesesdiscuss

I really struggle with realistic use cases for stablecoin payments (many are more gee-whiz party tricks or they are reinventing the problems of traditional finance but on a blockchain) but adult content / tipping is an interesting one... small transaction size + high chargeback rate, feels ripe for this

eastbayjake

hace 4 mesesdiscuss

QuantumBlack is synonymous -- it's where all of McKinsey's AI expertise got reorganized these days, anyone working on this tool was likely doing it on a rotation in between client engagements under "QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey"

eastbayjake

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

This dynamic carries into Threads, where Meta AI slop is aggressively pushed in the feed.

There's also a significant amount of viral content that is clearly an older person's Facebook post which was intended for only friends but got pushed to the public feed of a Threads account that may have been created by accident -- or default -- when Facebook blitz-scaled user numbers after launch. The posts are always hundreds of people piling on about someone posting a photo of their teenager in an embarrassing situation, with the original poster probably blissfully unaware that they're getting publicly dragged on Threads.

Check your parents' phones to see if they're publicly cross-posting on accident!

eastbayjake

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

I'm not mixing -- if I have $0 in my bank account today and I don't get paid until Friday, I cannot buy food today with a debit card. Being able to buy things today on the promise of future cash flows is a risk-based financial product and risk comes with premiums. (Again: could you solve this problem by having more money in your account? Sure! But there are a lot of downstream consequences of every consumer and business in society operating that way and there are real trade-offs that should be discussed with more nuance than "monopoly hoard ledger boo")

eastbayjake

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

I replied downthread but I used "value chain" deliberately -- there are lots of intermediaries of which the card networks are just one link in the chain -- and the statement above is about risk being borne (and value being created for consumers) by the entire value chain that is different and difficult/impossible in a FedNow-style immediate settlement model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46964968

eastbayjake

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

I used "value chain" euphemistically because you can get really complex on this and I wanted to spare the casual reader. I meant your credit card as an end-user product in your pocket and not meaning the card networks in isolation, but the value chain is roughly:

1. Merchant (bears little fraud risk but a lot of chargeback risk)

2. Payment Gateway (little direct risk but some liability risk)

3. Merchant Acquirer (more direct risk but mostly if merchants become insolvent)

4. Card Network (Visa/MC/AmEx - less risk but significant underlying costs managing a global technology that spans the financial system and needs to be distributed to almost every merchant of any scale in America)

5. Issuers (Banks + AmEx - most risk but get a big share of interchange fees)

I've surely missed something here that the very smart (and increasingly grumpy these days!) HN community will doubtlessly pile-on to correct, so I apologize in advance for errors or omissions... and I bow down if @patio11 swoops in to tell me about the complexity I've missed in either payments or Japanese economic/cultural conventions

Will also add that the benefit of credit is not overdraft but smoothing cash flow... if I'm living paycheck to paycheck and get paid every two weeks, I will incur essential expenses at the beginning of the fortnight that I can afford but lack cash in my account to pay now. I can't overdraft because I won't have the funds to deposit into that account for another two weeks. I'm getting a service that smooths my cashflow and there's a small premium added to reflect that. (Could you save up enough to avoid needing this? Is that a uniquely American way of living? I don't know! I'm making a descriptive claim not a normative one!)

eastbayjake

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

If you'd like to get that fixed: https://usa.visa.com/Forms/visa-rules.html

eastbayjake

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

The networks allow cash discounts if it's posted clearly and the customer has an option to use a different payment method -- you see this on every gas station sign alongside every highway in America. (What's _not_ permitted is adding a secret surcharge or item mark-up for credit card payments)

eastbayjake

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

I'm a little shocked that of all the comments so far, no one has mentioned the financial risk borne by this whole value chain. OP is operating as if it's just a debit system moving money from one account to another but:

- For many consumers there isn't sufficient money in the account to settle all the one-time and ongoing transactions they are liable for -- credit cards are giving you a revolving loan, there's risk it will not be repaid, and that risk ends up reflected in processing fees

- For many _businesses_ managing cash flow is existential -- as merchants they want to be paid as quickly as possible, but as B2B customers they want to have 30-60 days to sell the input goods they've purchased so they can pay for them upstream. There is a premium for that flexibility that gets reflected in processing fees.

- For both consumers and merchants, fraud risk is real and while it's the most solvable part of all this it's a real (and costly!) factor today. That risk for fraud gets moved upstream to the networks/acquirers/processors/issuers and that premium shows up in (you guessed it) processing fees.

If you want to switch the world to a debit-based system where economic transactions are limited by cash on hand, I'd argue that's a poorer and less dynamic world than the one we're operating in today.

eastbayjake

hace 6 mesesdiscuss

It's such a broad question... are you a consumer or a merchant? Are you doing a card-present payment (eg swiping at a store POS) or a card-not-present payment (eg entering your credit card number on an ecommerce site)? Are you buying/selling a high-risk item? How much do you care about privacy? How much do you care about rewards (if you're a consumer) or processing fees (if you're a merchant)?