1130
Necessity is the mother of invention (europe.pub)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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Toot

Mastodon post with no text and an image showing a Monobank card strapped to the back of a Pinephone with some rubber bands. The text within the image reads "Contactless payments on PinePhone (working Google Pay/Apple Pay alternative)".
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[–] 30 points 3 months ago (12 children)

Now how about contactless payments without visa or MasterCard.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 months ago* (5 children)

    It would have been nice if crypto didn’t turn into a network of pyramid schemes.

    Like, I am sympathetic to the idea. I mined a Bitcoin a long time ago (and lost it in intervening years). But holy moly, did it erupt into a tire fire.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago*

    GNU+Linux is currently being used to kill civilians in several wars, but we don't feel the need to point that out every time somebody says they use Arch btw.

    Good tech can be used by bad people without everybody having to distance themselves from the tech itself.

    That's not to say that BTC is good tech, but it's a decent proof of concept to free digital transactions from monopolists and tyrants.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Even without the greater fool scam, it's basic physics that a some dedicated servers will be more efficient than having every computer in a distributed network process every transaction.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    And authoritarianism can be more efficient than democracy. Doesn't mean I want authoritarism though

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    It’s not democracy though.

    Whatever the ideals of cypto are, however user friendly could be made, in reality, it’s just fundamentally too easy to be abused.

    As-is, it’s one of those “it would work fine if everyone learned it in detail, and grifters would go away” ideas, and that’s not going to happen.

    Democracy is fragile and exploitable too, but it has a track record of working across general populations for reasonable lengths of time.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    What kind of abuse are you talking about? I doubt you're talking about a 51% attack, which is incredibly hard. I'm guessing you are talking about social engineering, like where some scammer gets a poor soul to leak their bitcoin wallet or something like that.

    In these cases, yes a centralized payment system can be useful, because the authority in charge can just reverse transactions that are deemed fraudulent or the result of a scam. But that same authority can do things like ban all payments to Steam for porn games (like the recent Visa Mastercard drama). That same authority can say "GrapheneOS and Pinephone users aren't allowed to make NFC payments".

    In cases like these it would be nice for there to be an alternative to centralized systems, at least for those technologically literate enough to use these alternative systems.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Non American credit cards when

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I'm European, I technically have a MC credit card which I'll use on the rare occasions I need a credit card, but the vast majority of the time it's debit card or direct transfers (what they're now calling wero).

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    France has the national CB system, independent from American systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CB_Bank_Card_Group

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    A lot of European countries have their own debit card networks. Germany has GiroCard, Italy has PagoBancomat and so on. The problem is that those are national systems that stop working once you cross a border. Most cards are therefore cobadged with Visa or MC as a fallback system.

    What's needed to get rid of the cobadging (at least within the EU) is some kind of translation layer to bring the existing European systems together.

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