The modified scrolling on the website is the worst!
messe · 13m ago
Why do designers do this?
nielsbot · 31m ago
custom scrolling: not even once
soared · 3h ago
Super interesting read! I work in payments for context and see tons of different payment methods every day. People tend to find a payment method they like, and really only ever use that one method. It’s very hard to get someone to switch - even if an alternative is better. It’s just so ingrained to swipe that same card, click the same autofill button, etc.
Digital wallets did somehow over come this, and those would be a super challenging but potentially valid approach #4. If Zenobia is in Apple Pay, google pay, link, etc it’s natural and easy for customers, saves money for merchants, and disrupts visa/etc without disrupting anything else (ie making people us QR codes).
Tough problem. You need a Jony Ive on your team to help solve it.
Or do like pix and give everyone $1500, but only if they use Zenobia :)
bruce511 · 2h ago
When you start at the wrong premise, you typically end up in the wrong place.
The premise is that credit cards (visa / Mastercard) is broken. When actually it works really well.
For starters it works everywhere. Online. IRL. In my home country, in foreign lands.
Secondly it costs the consumer nothing. The cost goes to the merchant. If anything the customer gets rewards.
Merchants might pay 3%, (and ultimately yes, that's in the price of goods) but checkout "just works". They're in the "get paid" business, not the "teach customer new system" business. They'll accept new payment options (which the POS) just provides. But they don't drive the market.
Fixing Visa doesn't work because the people that matter don't think it's broken.
vasco · 2h ago
> Secondly it costs the consumer nothing. The cost goes to the merchant. If anything the customer gets rewards.
Sellers increase the price by the fee amount, savvy consumers with rewards cards can get back around 80% of that price increase, and regular non-credit-card-with-rewards holding consumers just subsidize the whole thing by paying the extra. It's a tax on people without rewards cards.
vidarh · 8m ago
Handling cash costs more on average at least for smaller businesses than typical card fees.
It's typical to estimate the cost of handling cash anywhere from 4% to as high as 15% depending on takings and size of transactions.
Hunpeter · 1m ago
As someone with little financial knowledge, I'm curious why that is the case and how those estimates are calculated. I've seen stores offering a discount on cash payments, citing card-related fees as the reason.
conductr · 1h ago
It’s worse on business cards. I negotiated a bank contract for our corporate card program earlier this year and we get 3.5% cash back from purchases. It incentivizes us to pay every vendor invoice by card too as ACH / check actually cost us money.
memco · 2h ago
Not sure how prevalent this is now, but a few years back I was seeing a lot of "cash price" advertised for stuff that was lower by whatever the merchant didn't have to pay in fees so sometimes cash may not be subsidizing the credit industry.
vidarh · 3m ago
Handling cash costs money too. Sometimes more than handling cards. But a proportion of customers who like cash are very strongly convinced they are "subsidising" card payments, and might be attracted by pricing like that, so maybe it still ends up being a net gain.
ameliaquining · 2h ago
In a lot of cases there are regulatory or contractual barriers to doing that.
conductr · 1h ago
The card issuers used to prohibit it, not been the case in a while though. They used to prohibit having a minimum transaction amount or charging transaction fees to your customer too. It never stopped small merchants though
lotsofpulp · 22m ago
In the US, not since 2011 since the Dodd Frank act required payment card networks to allow merchants to offer cash and debit card discounts.
Are you saying that even when I pay for something in cash or using debit, because of the possibility I'd use my credit-card the merchant had +3% their price?
vasco · 2h ago
Almost but not exactly, any rational merchant would estimate how much they pay monthly in credit card fees and find a way to add that back to their revenue. For most practical cases, the business is started already after the existence of credit cards, so when modeling revenue in your business plan this should already be baked in and the prices you come up with already cover it.
So it doesn't mean they increase the price of every product by 3%. One guy might charge more just for coffee, another do some other thing. But any extra cost you put on a seller of anything, the rational seller will make that back in sales somehow.
vidarh · 1m ago
A rational merchant would know that they are also incurring costs for handling cash, and depending on the size of the business that cost can in fact be higher than the cost of handling cards.
In fact, the low end of cash handling costs for a business will almost always be higher than the card fees alone, but of course there are other costs in managing card payments too, so it's not quite that clear cut.
AnthonyMouse · 11m ago
In particular, that is what happens when costs are imposed industry wide, as with credit card fees.
If the cost is only being paid by one vendor then that vendor can't raise prices or else customers would patronize one that had lower costs and passed on the savings. But if every vendor has to pay 3% then prices are going up 3%, because then the competition has no cost advantage they can pass on and people only stay in business if they're making enough to justify not doing something else. (3% is more than the entire net margin in many industries.)
mightypirate · 1h ago
the seller just charges whatever it get can get away with. 3% only has an impact when margins are closer to that percentage
conductr · 1h ago
Savvy/corporate sellers are typically concerned with margins so fees do play a role
eszed · 1h ago
Cash handling isn't free! You have to pay someone's time to count + reconcile + deposit it, or If you're dealing at any volume, you'll pay an armored car service to collect it. There's inevitably "shrinkage", or else business processes (more time and more overhead) to avoid it.
Cash is king for hiding transactions and avoiding taxes. If that's the situation then I won't say you don't deserve a cut, but for rules-following merchants taking cash isn't any cheaper than paying the credit card fees.
jader201 · 1h ago
> but for rules-following merchants taking cash isn't any cheaper than paying the credit card fees.
That’s not true at all, particularly for large purchases.
If I go to an electronics and check out with $5000 in electronics, there’s no way that handling cash incurs the same expense to the store as the 3% fee ($150).
Maybe for nickel and dime purchases, but that’s rarely the case.
Even a $50 dinner doesn’t cost the restaurant $1.50 (plus the $0.30 transaction fee) just to handle cash.
ceejayoz · 1h ago
You're not factoring in "I won't go somewhere that doesn't take a credit card".
A store that sells $5k electronics is gonna lose a lot of sales if they attempt to save that $150 by only taking cash.
AnthonyMouse · 7m ago
Which is why you take both but make the credit card customer eat the fees. Then many customers will save you (i.e. themselves) the money by paying cash and the ones that insist on using a credit card are free to pay for it themselves.
blitzar · 51m ago
Business banking != consumer banking. The bank will charge ~$0.10-$0.50 for that $50 deposit + the wages of the person who goes to the bank to pay it in (minimum $7.25 per hour).
XorNot · 52m ago
This is a huge pile of uncosted assumptions.
If you take cash it means you have to hold it on site. To be insured you have to demonstrate secure handling for the insurer, which would include security systems and limiting the amount in the safe and register. Which means routine trips to the bank, which also incurs costs.
Like...that could all be true, but the rate merchants tried to ditch ever handling physical money rather suggests the fees were worth it (not to mention all the risk mitigation doesn't cover the increased danger to ones personal safety - walking $5000 to the bank is no fun at all).
frontfor · 1h ago
Still, most consumers don’t care or notice it (we are not most consumers), so this doesn’t refute the original argument.
vasco · 1h ago
If I take your money without you noticing it won't affect your immediate behavior, but later on you'll buy less stuff, specially if I keep doing it. If nothing else because you don't have it anymore.
nojs · 12m ago
> For starters it works everywhere. Online. IRL. In my home country, in foreign lands.
Haha, if only that were true. I’d say roughly 20% of my purchases are rejected because of a badly tuned fraud algorithm somewhere.
albiinics · 2h ago
This is like says the tarrifs are paid by the other countries, not the US citizens.
In reality, there is no competition in the payment systems. Free markets mean competition.
toast0 · 31m ago
There might not be robust competition between payment systems, but when I go to a store, I've got options to pay:
Cash, credit (discover is dieing, but amex/mc/visa compete a bit), debit (several networks and all US cards have to be on at least two), I've seen PayPal as an option ocassionally, some merchants take Zelle, FedNow could if a good UX comes around (I don't think many merchants want to give out their routing and account numbers, and it's tedious to input them into my banking app anyway). Some vendors take checks and deposit them later, some take checks and process them immediately, etc.
People respond to incentives though. If merchants charge the same regardless of payment method, I'm going to use a rewards card that costs them more. When they add a line item credit charge, I'll consider cash or debit.
blitzar · 43m ago
All business costs are either paid for by the VCs or the customer. Even the VCs end up getting paid by the customers in the end.
sampullman · 2h ago
If it's ultimately in the price of goods, then it doesn't cost the consumer nothing, no matter how you spin it. It's just cleverly hidden.
I think it's close to impossible to "fix" Visa without government intervention (e.g. limit fees to a fraction of a percent), but I'm still grateful to anyone who tries.
Tor3 · 2h ago
The incentive for merchants to accept cards for payment is that it'll increase number of sales. And it does. In principle this should even out over all sales.. but cards do make it easier for consumers do purchase stuff, and I'm absolutely sure that I personally spend money way easier with a card than without (not that I spend more than I make, mind). The total number of sales go up.
I haven't used cash in my home country for the last two decades, at least. I mean, CC works even on parking meters when paying half a dollar (equivalent) for a few minutes of parking, and I can use a card in flea markets and even some garage sales.
Oh, I forgot: A lot of shops, restaurants, and other establishments have stopped accepting cash, even if it's illegal to do so (legal tender etc). That's because handling cash costs them MORE than handling credit/debit cards.
In other words: It appears that using cards LOWER the costs for the merchant, not the other way around.
EditAdd: I presume a lot of the cost saving is that paying by card is 100% electronic, just tap the card (add the pin code if it's expensive enough), and the transaction goes directly into the shop's account. With cash it's way more cumbersome. Way, way more.
(Mind, there's no such thing as signing by hand anymore. If there were paperworks involved it would be different. But there aren't any, not in Europe and not in Japan anymore either)
camillomiller · 35m ago
One thing to consider: cards solve the issue of employees stealing, which is surprisingly common from what I’ve heard especially in businesses with high workers turnover, such as seasonal bars and restaurants.
ceejayoz · 1h ago
> A lot of shops, restaurants, and other establishments have stopped accepting cash, even if it's illegal to do so (legal tender etc).
"There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law that says otherwise."
Legal tender only applies to debts. When you go to buy a t-shirt at Target or a burger at McDonalds, you don't owe a debt, and they aren't a creditor.
SJC_Hacker · 48m ago
> egal tender only applies to debts.
I used to think that was true, but try paying parking fines, etc. with pennies. Legal tender has never been challenged in court to my knowledge
dragonwriter · 37m ago
> Legal tender has never been challenged in court to my knowledge
It was challenged and upheld, both as against debts before the the legal tender acts were passed and those after, by the Supreme Court in Knox v. Lee (1871).
> I think it's close to impossible to "fix" Visa without government intervention (e.g. limit fees to a fraction of a percent), but I'm still grateful to anyone who tries.
The price is the same if you use cash or card. Really, after reward points, card tends to be even cheaper.
Visa/Mastercard/BNPL/Klarna etc. all have negotiated discounts for consumers, paid for by the merchant.
I'm skeptical that merchants would lower prices (stepping away from $x.98, etc) instead of pocketing the higher margins themselves.
victorbjorklund · 1h ago
if all customers choose to us cash the merchant could lower price with 3%. If you are the only one paying cash then yes the price will stay the same.
nottorp · 56m ago
> For starters it works everywhere. Online. IRL. In my home country, in foreign lands.
Only if Visa/MC agree with the item being sold though.
Be careful to not get hobbies that some religious pressure group hates. Today sex, maybe tomorrow rock climbing or fixing your own motorcycle.
camillomiller · 39m ago
OP wasn’t defending VISA policies, they were just realistically describing how taking on CC circuits with this premise is a risky approach that tries to fix a problem potential customers don’t have.
What you are saying is in a completely different domain.
Personally I think you’re right, but the only way to solve that is regulating the payment giants as a public utility, not picking a fight against a business model that is a lot of things, but not broken.
chrismcb · 2h ago
It costs the consumers. Sometimes indirectly and sometimes directly. I would think that this is the primary motivation to come up with a new scheme.
astrange · 1h ago
Credit cards are a huge benefit to customers because of purchase protection, chargebacks, and being able to spend money before you earn it that month. The merchants pay the fees because it gets them sales they wouldn't otherwise get.
frontfor · 1h ago
It might be one motivation, doesn’t mean it’s a good one as per the original comment if consumers don’t care.
sneak · 2h ago
> Secondly it costs the consumer nothing. The cost goes to the merchant. If anything the customer gets rewards.
Just like tariffs, right?
Visa/MC is a +1% income tax on most of the economy.
Tor3 · 1h ago
It isn't - using cards, with fees, is cheaper than cash. I realized that when shops started to refuse cash (even if cash is legal tender and they, by law, _have_ to accept cash). The argument? Cash is too expensive.
heavensteeth · 58m ago
> even if cash is legal tender and they, by law, _have_ to accept cash
this is not true as it is not what "legal tender" means. Legal tender is something that the government must accept as payment, not private enterprise.
> Businesses don’t have to accept cash.[0]
> There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services.[1]
That depends on the country. There are many countries (including my own) where any business must accept certain parts of the cash payment system (around here a taxi doesn't have to accept the highest-value bank note, but the rest cannot be refused). And shops, of course. That's why newspapers bother to write articles about it.
SJC_Hacker · 8m ago
They have to accept cash, huh?
* Cash Payment Method Will No Longer Be Accepted
A Notice by the Patent and Trademark Office on 10/03/2017*
They only use cards because credit cards can allow them to get sales from people who wouldn't have been able to buy the product through debit itself, but they can buy it from credit.., so they are okay with eating 1-2% of costs in the fact that sale might happen and the companies will get 0.5-1% of it to you back as rewards (hopefully) and so there is incentive to buy using credit card for rewards but they might also give incentives of 1-2% if you buy through cash since they aren't eating that 1-2% cost.
And this whole network has now been built in such a way that now even debit costs the same charge just as network fees
Open sourcing this might be a step in good faith and I mean, we have UPI where I live and it has 0 fees and trust me its crazy good. I personally wish that either everybody in the world could use UPI or pixis from brazil.
Tor3 · 1h ago
The argument doesn't hold - if cards were only about getting sales which they otherwise wouldn't get - and the part about "getting sales which they otherwise wouldn't get", is true enough - then there's no reason to refuse cash payments. That's additional sales, right? But the fact is that more and more shops refuse cash payments entirely. "Pay by card or go somewhere else".
Imustaskforhelp · 49m ago
I can't comment on this fact of more and more shops refusing for cash payments entirely as I personally have NEVER seen that?
Provide me an article or some proof to this fact for me to comment further as currently we are at an disagreement on this thing which I hope we can turn into meaningful discussion.
Tor3 · 35m ago
Well.. just a quick search (as I won't be talking a walk and photograph all the "cards only" signs I now see in so many places):
Time spent totaling it, transporting it to from bank
Having to buy a register / point of sale which can handle it
Hoping you employees don’t pocket a few bills here and there
Hoping you don’t get robbed
ubercow13 · 40m ago
Of course cash is expensive, you have to handle it, count it, transport it. Haven't you ever seen those heavily armoured cash delivery vehicles? I mean just think how inefficient cash obviously is in every aspect of how it works compared to modern tech.
Tor3 · 1h ago
_Handling_ cash is expensive. I never thought of that until my SO started working in a shop. To and from the bank, with stacks of coins and notes.. and there's presumably much more than that for larger firms.
In general I rely my statement on what merchants themselves are saying. Newspapers are writing interviews with merchants who (illegally) have stopped accepting cash, even though it's legal tender. "It's too expensive. It reduces our bottom line." That kind of thing. When I look around I see "Cards only" a lot of places.
ceejayoz · 1h ago
> Newspapers are writing interviews with merchants who (illegally) have stopped accepting cash, even though it's legal tender.
Legal tender applies only to debt/creditor relationships.
Tor3 · 31m ago
The USA is not all the world. The US rules don't apply in other countries. Rules differ. In many countries _businesses_ have to accept legal tender. Including in my own. That's why it's such a big deal when businesses actually still refuse cash.
The fees are for fraud prevention and sanctions compliance. That stuff costs real money.
JumpCrisscross · 12m ago
> fees are for fraud prevention and sanctions compliance
Visa and Mastercard’s pre-tax income margins for the quarter ending on 30 June were 62% and 57% respectively [1][2]. That is $10bn a quarter in absent competition.
Maybe. But the 39 billion in profits visa made last year suggests they make a fair bit more than that stuff costs.
protocolture · 1h ago
This sounds like a post mortem disguised as marketing material.
ameliaquining · 2h ago
Two of the linked GitHub repositories don't have licenses.
jatins · 35m ago
the home page says "ZENOBIA PAY IS NO LONGER ACTIVE"
so this is a farewell post disguised as open source announcement?
kennywinker · 12m ago
It’s both? Giving up and opening the code up. Most companies should do this. Why throw away all that work and effort if it could be useful to someone else.
ceedaxp · 2h ago
US consumers are too conservative in the way they expect payments to work—checks are still in circulation and “swipe & sign” has barely been put to rest (has it?). Any system like this would require adoption by a few diverse and large-scale retail institutions to make it worthwhile for consumers to use. Or else it would be a mere alternative to “PayPal me”…
thayne · 2h ago
It is very much a chicken and egg problem. Merchants have no reason to adopt it if there aren't very many customers that use it, and customers have no reason to adopt it unless there are a lot of merchants, or at least some important frequently used merchants that use it.
I think for a new payment system to catch on it needs to either have a significant benefit for both payers and merchants, or be pushed by government policy (for example, require all merchants that meet some criteria to accept the new form of payment).
toast0 · 7m ago
> It is very much a chicken and egg problem. Merchants have no reason to adopt it if there aren't very many customers that use it, and customers have no reason to adopt it unless there are a lot of merchants, or at least some important frequently used merchants that use it.
I agree that both parties need a reason to adopt a new payment method... But the reason can't be only that there's a lot of merchants/customers that have it ... If there's benefits for enough participants, reach can drive adoption for those who don't care about the benefits, but you've got to have some material benefits to get people started.
It's got to have a good experience, too.
But from this rant, it seems like they were trying to be a middle man for instant bank payments... I don't see the value of that as a purchaser when I can use a debit card. For the merchant, running a debit card takes a small fee, but anything that needs someone to scan a QR code takes a lot of time.
nima999 · 1h ago
I totally disagree with “We proposed merchants "split the difference" in fee savings with their customer, giving customers ~1% in at-checkout "cashback". But this is just a worse version of credit card rewards.”
As a shopper, if I know that a SMB is saving 1% or even 2% on merchant fees, I would gladly choose that option, even if I miss out on rewards for that purchase.
nottorp · 57m ago
The thing is, Visa and MC are doing just fine(tm) on countries where their cut is limited by law to less than 1%. Everything else is just pure profit, no matter who runs it.
poopsmithe · 1h ago
I'm calling it-- 5 years and this will be vaporware. We live in a world where you have to 1) compete with VISA, Mastercard and 2) compete with Bitcoin Lightning Network.
OsrsNeedsf2P · 1h ago
I was an early adopter of the Bitcoin Lightning Network. If my memory serves correctly, I made one (real) payment with it. That was almost 10 years ago now, and I haven't even seen the chance to use it since.
littlecranky67 · 13m ago
Mostly because it is still innovated upon. Async payments (offline receival) and trampoline payments are in the pipeline, allowing true self-custodial wallets on the smartphone.
That aside, I only use lightning with my Bitcoin-friends to settle stuff for fun. I live in a city of 300k people, and there are 3 restaurants that accept Lightning payments. Right now it is in its infancy, but I see Lightning as the only solution to actually enable web micro-payments (which failed as a standard because no credit card can provide .10 to .20 cent payments due to high fees)
OutOfHere · 1h ago
It helps to get clued into what happened with stablecoin legalization and interest this year. Without this awareness one risks looking very foolish.
blitzar · 38m ago
> cheaper payments ... Zenobia Pay charges 1%.
5x higher than they would be allowed to charge in the EU.
> accept pay-by-bank
I am reminded of tech bros inventing the bus in 2025
poopsmithe · 2h ago
[flagged]
OsrsNeedsf2P · 1h ago
After a laggy scroll led to me being flash-banged and closing the tab, I couldn't agree more.
OsrsNeedsf2P · 1h ago
This is what product market fit looks like; everyone is trashing various pieces of Zenobia, but it's still getting upvoted because we all want the solution.
Digital wallets did somehow over come this, and those would be a super challenging but potentially valid approach #4. If Zenobia is in Apple Pay, google pay, link, etc it’s natural and easy for customers, saves money for merchants, and disrupts visa/etc without disrupting anything else (ie making people us QR codes).
Tough problem. You need a Jony Ive on your team to help solve it.
Or do like pix and give everyone $1500, but only if they use Zenobia :)
The premise is that credit cards (visa / Mastercard) is broken. When actually it works really well.
For starters it works everywhere. Online. IRL. In my home country, in foreign lands.
Secondly it costs the consumer nothing. The cost goes to the merchant. If anything the customer gets rewards.
Merchants might pay 3%, (and ultimately yes, that's in the price of goods) but checkout "just works". They're in the "get paid" business, not the "teach customer new system" business. They'll accept new payment options (which the POS) just provides. But they don't drive the market.
Fixing Visa doesn't work because the people that matter don't think it's broken.
Sellers increase the price by the fee amount, savvy consumers with rewards cards can get back around 80% of that price increase, and regular non-credit-card-with-rewards holding consumers just subsidize the whole thing by paying the extra. It's a tax on people without rewards cards.
It's typical to estimate the cost of handling cash anywhere from 4% to as high as 15% depending on takings and size of transactions.
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/new-rules-el...
So it doesn't mean they increase the price of every product by 3%. One guy might charge more just for coffee, another do some other thing. But any extra cost you put on a seller of anything, the rational seller will make that back in sales somehow.
In fact, the low end of cash handling costs for a business will almost always be higher than the card fees alone, but of course there are other costs in managing card payments too, so it's not quite that clear cut.
If the cost is only being paid by one vendor then that vendor can't raise prices or else customers would patronize one that had lower costs and passed on the savings. But if every vendor has to pay 3% then prices are going up 3%, because then the competition has no cost advantage they can pass on and people only stay in business if they're making enough to justify not doing something else. (3% is more than the entire net margin in many industries.)
Cash is king for hiding transactions and avoiding taxes. If that's the situation then I won't say you don't deserve a cut, but for rules-following merchants taking cash isn't any cheaper than paying the credit card fees.
That’s not true at all, particularly for large purchases.
If I go to an electronics and check out with $5000 in electronics, there’s no way that handling cash incurs the same expense to the store as the 3% fee ($150).
Maybe for nickel and dime purchases, but that’s rarely the case.
Even a $50 dinner doesn’t cost the restaurant $1.50 (plus the $0.30 transaction fee) just to handle cash.
A store that sells $5k electronics is gonna lose a lot of sales if they attempt to save that $150 by only taking cash.
If you take cash it means you have to hold it on site. To be insured you have to demonstrate secure handling for the insurer, which would include security systems and limiting the amount in the safe and register. Which means routine trips to the bank, which also incurs costs.
Like...that could all be true, but the rate merchants tried to ditch ever handling physical money rather suggests the fees were worth it (not to mention all the risk mitigation doesn't cover the increased danger to ones personal safety - walking $5000 to the bank is no fun at all).
Haha, if only that were true. I’d say roughly 20% of my purchases are rejected because of a badly tuned fraud algorithm somewhere.
In reality, there is no competition in the payment systems. Free markets mean competition.
Cash, credit (discover is dieing, but amex/mc/visa compete a bit), debit (several networks and all US cards have to be on at least two), I've seen PayPal as an option ocassionally, some merchants take Zelle, FedNow could if a good UX comes around (I don't think many merchants want to give out their routing and account numbers, and it's tedious to input them into my banking app anyway). Some vendors take checks and deposit them later, some take checks and process them immediately, etc.
People respond to incentives though. If merchants charge the same regardless of payment method, I'm going to use a rewards card that costs them more. When they add a line item credit charge, I'll consider cash or debit.
I think it's close to impossible to "fix" Visa without government intervention (e.g. limit fees to a fraction of a percent), but I'm still grateful to anyone who tries.
I haven't used cash in my home country for the last two decades, at least. I mean, CC works even on parking meters when paying half a dollar (equivalent) for a few minutes of parking, and I can use a card in flea markets and even some garage sales.
Oh, I forgot: A lot of shops, restaurants, and other establishments have stopped accepting cash, even if it's illegal to do so (legal tender etc). That's because handling cash costs them MORE than handling credit/debit cards. In other words: It appears that using cards LOWER the costs for the merchant, not the other way around.
EditAdd: I presume a lot of the cost saving is that paying by card is 100% electronic, just tap the card (add the pin code if it's expensive enough), and the transaction goes directly into the shop's account. With cash it's way more cumbersome. Way, way more.
(Mind, there's no such thing as signing by hand anymore. If there were paperworks involved it would be different. But there aren't any, not in Europe and not in Japan anymore either)
No. This is a misunderstanding of legal tender.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm
"There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law that says otherwise."
Legal tender only applies to debts. When you go to buy a t-shirt at Target or a burger at McDonalds, you don't owe a debt, and they aren't a creditor.
I used to think that was true, but try paying parking fines, etc. with pennies. Legal tender has never been challenged in court to my knowledge
It was challenged and upheld, both as against debts before the the legal tender acts were passed and those after, by the Supreme Court in Knox v. Lee (1871).
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/10/03/2017-21...
This is what Australia is looking at currently: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-15/rba-credit-debit-merc...
Visa/Mastercard/BNPL/Klarna etc. all have negotiated discounts for consumers, paid for by the merchant.
I'm skeptical that merchants would lower prices (stepping away from $x.98, etc) instead of pocketing the higher margins themselves.
Only if Visa/MC agree with the item being sold though.
Be careful to not get hobbies that some religious pressure group hates. Today sex, maybe tomorrow rock climbing or fixing your own motorcycle.
Just like tariffs, right?
Visa/MC is a +1% income tax on most of the economy.
this is not true as it is not what "legal tender" means. Legal tender is something that the government must accept as payment, not private enterprise.
> Businesses don’t have to accept cash.[0]
> There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services.[1]
[0]: https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/buying-products-and-servic...
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm
* Cash Payment Method Will No Longer Be Accepted A Notice by the Patent and Trademark Office on 10/03/2017*
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/10/03/2017-21...
And this whole network has now been built in such a way that now even debit costs the same charge just as network fees
Open sourcing this might be a step in good faith and I mean, we have UPI where I live and it has 0 fees and trust me its crazy good. I personally wish that either everybody in the world could use UPI or pixis from brazil.
Provide me an article or some proof to this fact for me to comment further as currently we are at an disagreement on this thing which I hope we can turn into meaningful discussion.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/mar/16/uk-high-street...
https://www.dnb.nl/en/general-news/news-2023/some-retail-sec...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20gevkx8gyo
https://www.aarp.org/money/personal-finance/no-cash-accepted...
https://educaloi.qc.ca/en/legal-news/do-you-have-the-right-t...
https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/payments-in-swe...
That's legal. https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm
Legal tender applies only to debt/creditor relationships.
> Legal tender is a form of money that courts of law are required to recognize as satisfactory payment in court for any monetary debt.
A country may separately require businesses to accept legal tender, if they feel like it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender#Status_by_country would appear to indicate this distinction is very common in the developed world.
Visa and Mastercard’s pre-tax income margins for the quarter ending on 30 June were 62% and 57% respectively [1][2]. That is $10bn a quarter in absent competition.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/V/financials/ $6.33 on 10.2bn
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MA/financials/ 4.67 on 8.13bn
so this is a farewell post disguised as open source announcement?
I think for a new payment system to catch on it needs to either have a significant benefit for both payers and merchants, or be pushed by government policy (for example, require all merchants that meet some criteria to accept the new form of payment).
I agree that both parties need a reason to adopt a new payment method... But the reason can't be only that there's a lot of merchants/customers that have it ... If there's benefits for enough participants, reach can drive adoption for those who don't care about the benefits, but you've got to have some material benefits to get people started.
It's got to have a good experience, too.
But from this rant, it seems like they were trying to be a middle man for instant bank payments... I don't see the value of that as a purchaser when I can use a debit card. For the merchant, running a debit card takes a small fee, but anything that needs someone to scan a QR code takes a lot of time.
As a shopper, if I know that a SMB is saving 1% or even 2% on merchant fees, I would gladly choose that option, even if I miss out on rewards for that purchase.
That aside, I only use lightning with my Bitcoin-friends to settle stuff for fun. I live in a city of 300k people, and there are 3 restaurants that accept Lightning payments. Right now it is in its infancy, but I see Lightning as the only solution to actually enable web micro-payments (which failed as a standard because no credit card can provide .10 to .20 cent payments due to high fees)
5x higher than they would be allowed to charge in the EU.
> accept pay-by-bank
I am reminded of tech bros inventing the bus in 2025