It costs you nothing but a few hours (heck, you may even make money on the points) to get a Discover card, which you can use on Japanese game sites that don't apply the Visa/Mastercard censorship (they have a partnership with JCB). It's a small move, but most people can't even be bothered to do that much for competition.

Hope you like carrying cash.

I think you mean Wero

They'd like to. Vending machines will no longer sell to you unless you can pay that way.

For more significant things, you can still use cash. I'd go down to my landlord's bank every three months to pay the rent.

BLIK rocks. In addition to being a payment system for goods and services it can be used for instant private money transfers between individuals.

This is indeed one of the biggest weaknesses of "pull-based" payment cards, and something most if not all natively phone-based methods do better.

The best credit and debit cards can do is PIN verification or biometrics (for Apple/Google Pay), but even there you still trust the terminal to not show you a different amount than you'll be charged (assuming the screen is even pointing towards you; I've often been asked to tap without seeing what I'm even consenting to).

Online, there's 3DS, but that's not required everywhere and for every transaction.

There once was a vision to extend both positive cardholder approval and cardholder authentication for each card transaction, but it turns out the friction of that is higher on average than just letting everything but the most egregiously suspicious fraud go through by default and handle the rest via the disputes process.

Out of curiosity:

> you open the app on your phone and it gives you a 6 digit BLIK code, you give that code to the seller

Is this the flow for online payments as well, or only for in-person payments?

I misread blik as “bilk” which is… probably the last word you’d want associated with your credit card or payment processor in English.

That's the problem. Every country has an alternative or ten, but what people actually need is one system that works across borders. That's the only way it reaches enough critical mass to be useful internationally beyond the EU, which nowadays is a requirement for it to be able to replace Visa/Mastercard in a decade or so.

Yeah but approving every purchase from a merchant I trust, like Amazon, would be annoying. Gotta allow for one tap to purchase, like eg apple pay does

6 digits effectively the time salted … the other digits are your lat long lol.

Cool, but unfortunately, it has the same same drawbacks as cash. If you get scammed, accidentally pay too much or lose your wallet you will never get it back. I sleep safer knowing that there is some protection in the banking system against losing money all of sudden.

People are downvoting you, but I can literally pay for my meal using CashApp at a diner in the middle of nowhere using Bitcoin.

Unfortunately it's also pretty clunky for tax reasons in many places and inherently deflationary (and as such problematic from an economic point of view).

Sure, great if you don't trust your government or whoever issues your local currency, but if you can, there are better alternatives. Trust is an asset, not just a liability.

The EU already managed to make card payments significantly cheaper and more secure within a few years than they'll probably ever be in the US (still no PINs and no 3DS, and interchange will probably never get regulated because everybody freelances as a severely underpaid lobbyist thanks to frequent flyer miles), to say nothing of regulating a free and instant bank payment scheme into existence while FedNow is still rolling out.

Say what you will about EU inefficiency and regulations, but in my view, at least their financial ones have been largely on point.

Wirecard was pretty good. Assuming you're Jan Marsalek.