95
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
95 points (99.0% liked)
Gaming
32151 readers
166 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
The problem isn't that they're private, the problem is that there's not many to choose from. Visa gets to throw their weight around, because they have a stranglehold on a huge swath of banks and businesses. MasterCard has another big chunk, and the rest go to AmEx and Discover.
If there were more providers to choose from, this would be a non-issue, but that wouldn't be very capitalist (/s), and I doubt the big names would simply allow new competition.
The reason there's so few is because people don't want to have to figure out beforehand whether or not they can use the payment provider they have at the store they want to go to.
I've seen this happen multiple times especially in Japan when the barcode payment craze started. There were like 13 competing payment providers and now there are 2. Because people don't want to have to carry around 13 different types of card or payment types and have 13 different types of payments. They want one that works everywhere.
It's why there needs to be sovereign digital payment systems that are legally enforced.
Yeah, like what need is there for these intermediaries in the first place? I get that there was probably a need once upon a time, but that seems superfluous now
In Germany we usually use Debit bank cards for payment (if something like a credit card isnt included).
The GiroCard is standard across all banks and usually every shop accepts that method.
Problem is: They don't work on the interwebz.