In defense of cryptocurrencies, I’d like to push back against the “Visa is so awesome” meme that’s afflicted Twitter this past week. This is a terrible take. 1/n
-
-
Put this a different way. Has Visa’s share of the transaction fee gone down in proportion to any other high-availability communications service over the past two decades?
-
Long distance calls have gone from 25 cents per minute to “who the hell can afford to meter long distance calls”. High-availability SLA servers have gone down in price by many orders of magnitude.
-
I’m struggling to think of any fundamentally *digital* service that has held its price the way Visa share of the transaction fee has. Can you? Don’t point to cash, because that’s the wrong comparison.
-
And if your answer is “that fee pays for fraud” then you’ll have to explain how the card industry deliberately held onto ridiculously insecure magstripe cards in the US until essentially forced to add chip cards, which massively decrease fraud costs.
-
And we still don’t have chip and PIN, we have “chip and signature” because managing bails of paper with scribbles nobody ever looks at is absolutely a useful solution an efficient industry would adopt.
-
don’t blame signature (or paper checks) on Visa/MasterCard. They don’t do those in civilized (non-NA) countries

-
Don't lump Canada in with your mess. We use Chip and PIN
-
I have to take photos of checks to deposit and attend a bank physically to send a wire. It has PIN but will fall back to signature-without-pin after 3 pin failures. Canada is stone age banking too
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.