If only there was an encrypted permissionless way of sending money instantly, it’s cryptic nobody hasn’t invented a lite coin or moneyro like that.
Don’t let the Christians get up in there and dictate what you can and can’t buy with it
Please let’s think this ALL THE WAY: it is pointless to look for alternatives to the customer facing part if the backend still runs on US software.
We need European alternatives to the 2 American duopolies: Visa and Mastercard / Android and Apple.
I heard that Norwegians managed to open the Apple Wallet, so the iPhone can have an app that does it without Apple’s stuff :)
Cashless payment is fucked. Using a phone to pay with? Sorry, only google wallet or apple pay, and in most cases only visa or mastercard. It’s only recently that that Danish “Dankortet” is getting support in those apps. Bit fucking late, but US led companies don’t give a fuck.
Samsung have their own wallet app, too. There are also a number of alternatives to Visa and Mastercard, but unfortunately, they are not as widespread or are limited to a particular countries banking system. In Canada, we have Interac, for example.
Yes it’d s called GNU-Taler, Chief
Try it, you might just like it ;-)
I really like the concept of Taler.And I hope it goes somewhere.
Deny the money changer profit.
Take market share away from these parasites.
I would love to have an EU bank card. Hope we get one soon.
Too bad about crypto.
This is the exact kind of situation it was meant to deal with: finance independent of bad entities. But it’s such a dumpster fire…
I don’t think there’s a purer example of social media engagement hype, predatory capitalism, and disinformation ruining something neat so quick.
Doesn’t work when the valuation goes up and down like a yo-yo. You need same currency.
Stablecoin is a thing. So is a system to control inflation.
The more pressing issue to me is the core premise: a totally anonymized but publicly recorded financial system makes no sense, especially when the user generally won’t grasp it. It’s just begging for thieves and scammers, and that’s what it got.
But if you can’t get rich, no one wants to buy it or use it. This is the conundrum of crypto.
Yeah, and that toxic idea has completely poisoned the well.
But you can use the technology behind it
Afaik, not really.
There is GNU Taler which is quite cool, but thats not really ready for use yet sadly.
Oh yeah, that seems really cool. The core premise is much more practical.
It really depends on the cryptocurrency in question. Some coins are much more credible than others. Lumping them all in together is like saying that the Japanese Yen and the Lebanese Pound are the same.
social media engagement hype, predatory capitalism, and disinformation ruining something
I mean, it still works for getting around Visa and Mastercard. For instance it can be used to make donations to various media piracy groups. It’s just that it’s so useful to scammers and many people see the technology as a whole as being one ‘brand’.
It’s more than a perception problem now, it’s a culture one within the crypto community (as far as I can tell).
Even if you treat the most prominent crypto as a utility, the sea of hype and speculation will affect you.
Maybe. I feel a bit out of the loop on “crypto community culture” because I understand that much of it largely exists on Twitter nowadays, and I don’t go there. Still, it is a functional solution for a money equivalent of encrypted communication.
Or Discord! And investment TV! It’s so cultish, it’s unreal.
I think this should be distinguished between “pure” crypto enthusiasts, in it for the utility, not speculation, which are probably like pink elephants now.
AI has a similar divide, where like 99% of the hype is on Twitter and TV with AI bros, but there are little niche communities messing with open weights, locally runnable models in a much more grounded way. /r/localllama used to be a hub for this (and there is a little branch on Lemmy), but unfortunately it seems to be getting strangled by Reddit enshittification .
deleted by creator
GNU Taler seems to be a good thing to look into. Not a crypto currency but a payment system which preserves anonymity of the buyer.
Yay GNU Taler is very promising, but I fear banks prefer proprietary systems.
It may become widely used if there’s strong customer demand for GNU Taler, or regulation requiring an open electronic wallet. Most banks would probably be dragging their feet.
Money changer will always go this route hence why laws must be put in place to promote this.
Practically EU can’t compete with US payment networks but I think going open source would permit them to actually compete. Not sure if there is sufficient political will to get it done.
EU governments wasted decades of spending on EU mega corps… Same way Germany wasted decades to fund Russia…
EU using all that tech spend on open source and actually using that open source could really fuck american corpos while giving us an out from dystopia they are building
It has been a while since this appeared; I wonder if it picks up steam. Now or never?
If anything, I’m really glad how Europe has stepped up and started cooperating more as a consequence of US actions these past few months.
The Chinese jokingly call Trump “Comrade Jianguo”, because of how his trade war has made China become more independent and stopped relying as much on American companies.
In the same way Trump’s latest tantrum seems to be good for the Europe.
Look into Wero. Only a couple countries and people to people payments for now, but should take off quickly as a universal Euro payement method
That’s the Trump bump! And it’s only been eight weeks.
Or is it hump 🤔?
Soon to be the Trump depression, but probably only for America.
If it is, it will be crippling. There’s enough misery on that country as it is; I don’t want to see people suffer even more. But then again, maybe a systemic shock rattles the building enough.
It’s about time.
There’s Wero, a European alternative to VISA and Mastercard.
Is it? Doesn’t look like they offer debit/credit cards.
Looks more like a PayPal alternative.
It’s based on iDEAL, which we use in the Netherlands since 2005. All the Dutch banks are connected to it and when you pay, you approve the payment in your banking app or website, after which it’s immediately deducted from your bank account and the webshop gets an instant payment confirmation. Variations of this are also used peer to peer, for example for splitting the bill or when buying second hand stuff. You send someone a payment request (url) or show a QR and payments arrive instantly on your bank account, without any fees.
So indeed, even though it’s immensely popular and widely used, it’s not a full replacement for physical debit cards and it doesn’t offer credit.
Every country in the EU has some system for direct debit payments.
Italy has Bancomat, Germany has EC/Giro, France has Carte Bleue, Belgium has Bancontact/Mister Cash (still have not figured out whether they’re supposed to be different or just different names in Flanders and Wallonia), and so on and so forth.
Does the Netherlands not have such a system?
It used to be that people would use these within their own country, but there would be Maestro for payments around Europe.
MasterCard decided to discontinue Maestro for MasterCard Prepaid which has higher fees.
The Germans whined about it a little and said that Europe should have come up with its own payment systems, but nothing came of it.
By now we are also supposed to have SEPA Instant, that should offer Europe-wide bank transfers. I still have not quite understood why a debit card system can’t leverage that directly.
For debit cards we’ve always used Maestro for as long as I can remember. Nowadays new debit cards are usually Mastercard or Visa due to Maestro being discontinued, like you mentioned. Back in the days we also had a system called Giro cards, but then I’m taking about the time when cheques were still a thing.
There’s also the option to use direct debits from your bank account, which we use for subscriptions and utilities. This can be approved using iDEAL, same as with one-time payments. This doesn’t involve Maestro, Mastercard, or any card whatsoever. Most Dutch people only use debit cards in a physical stores.
We use iDEAL to pay taxes, the invoice of your house renovation, your Spotify subscription, your utilities, you name it. Of course instant bank transfers are also an option, but that’s basically the same thing, but with more effort and room for error.
Yup that’s the current state of it. They say they’re planning to add in-store and online payment options though
It’s a PayPal alternative, but developed in tandem with most European banks. That way, it will at some point also be used as backend for your normal debit and credit card payments, instead of VISA / MasterCard. If I remember correctly.
Please expand it to Canada too. We need a real alternative to Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover.
Canada shares a land border with Denmark and a maritime border with France.
I think that is sufficient to include them in any extended EU schemes.
(To the degree that they want it, of course)
We also administer Vimy Ridge in France. While it isn’t Canadian territory, we have been granted permanent usage of it. It’s a little bit like a land border. :)
France shares a land border with Brazil, we should get them into the EU as well.
I can support this.
Brazil and Suriname back into the European world.
🇧🇷🇸🇷
Yes, more European colonialism. That worked out really well in the past…
Oh wait.
Oof, yeah, sounds bad when you phrase it like that.
Canada shares a land border with Denmark
🤔
A maritime border with France.
🤔
Hans Island in the Arctic for Denmark and Saint Pierre and Miquelon, which is a small island off the eats coast of Canada, which remains a part of France.
Canada shares a land border with Denmark
Brave men & women fought over Hans Island in the Whisky War, and the resulting land border is a testament to their bravery, livers, and the determination to find a longlasting solution to land disputes!
livers
👏
Isn’t that about that disput where everynow and then a group of military from each country would go up a hill, plant a flag and leave a bottle of booze, just for the other country to take it down and swap the bottle?
If so, I’ve seen less convoluted ways to make friends.
Yes. It was solved in 2022 by dividing the island by a natural rift. However it was also decided that anyone who come to the island can travel the entire island without border control.
Finally! Crazy bickering.
The EU plans this for many year, but the problem is every country is doing its own thing with its own standard, that is not working anywhere else. In Germany for example we have Giropay as a solution, which doesn’t work in other countries. As it turns out, people move though, that’s why for a couple of years now every bank is switching to VISA debit cards…
As far as I know, Giropay is being replaced by Wero, which is already supported by some banks in different European countries.
It is so far one if the better PayPal/Visa/MasterCard alternatives I‘ve used, but adoption is still a problem.
Yeah I’ve got a notification about Wero in my Sparkasse App but haven’t bothered checking it out yet lol
I have a couple of friends that seem to like it tho, I just rarely send any money
Annoyingly, we already have fast transactions as part of SEPA. But they’re somewhat inconvenient to do and especially not available by just holding your card in front of a sensor.
If we had a harmonized standard for that we could get rid of Visa and MasterCard. And if we had a common web interface to make SEPA transactions more convenient than manually typing an IBAN into a homebanking interface we could get rid of PayPal as well.
Yes, I know services like that exist but I really hate how the current ones expect me to type the login credentials for my homebanking into a third-party website.
Exactly. Austria has eps which works well within Austria and with Austrian companies online, but no further than that.
