Americans hate american monopolies as well. Cause fuck corpos.
this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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We really do.
but have very weak laws and enforcement on anti-monopolies legislation.
Yep, these monopolies have been parasites draining the american people for decades.
Not enough americans hate them enough. Unfortunately.
TIL:
- KONEK offers Canadian online shoppers a brand-new, made-in-Canada, e-commerce payment solution from which you can pay at participating merchants in Canada using any of your eligible accounts including Canadian chequing and savings accounts, connected credit and debit cards, or lines of credit through their participating financial institution.
- JCB is short for Japanese Credit Bank
I genuinely thought JCB was something to do with the company that makes tractors and cement mixers and shit.
Where's Gnu Taler?
last I heard at Datenspuren, GLS bank will offer it in Germany, some hungarian bank and well switzerland yeah
Has any bank announced they plan on supporting it?
Not yet. It was only officially released for testing in Switzerland in May of this year.
This release is a special milestone, as with it we are ready to launch our operation in Switzerland. Starting today, Taler Operations AG is legally operating the GNU Taler payment system in Swiss Francs open to individuals and businesses in Switzerland.
I don't know how it went / is going, but given that it's a privacy respecting payment system, I do hope it will gain some traction in the opensource world - even if just for testing. If non-governmental projects started using it as a testbed for their payment integrations, it could have a big impact as a default. But I'm not a project owner nor have any financial experience, so I can't lead the charge on this.
Thank you
I havenโt heard about it.
GNU Taler is a privacy-preserving payment system. Customers can stay anonymous, but merchants can not hide their income through payments with GNU Taler. This helps to avoid tax evasion and money laundering
I would love to replace Paypal with Wero, if it was designed to also be used on desktop (/ browser in general).
First time I heard of Konek, I have been using Interact for a while but did not know they had this service.
As far as I am aware, a bunch of countries created something similar to get rid of American payment systems, like UPI in India.
My favourite so far is the Brazilian Pix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system), becoming the most used payment system in the country in the past few years. Not only because it is technically sound, but it also managed to get the Americans pissed. Credit card and tech lobbies pressuring the American government to do something about it. Meta tried to release a payment system in Brazil that failed miserable because of Pix.
Inequality is decreasing and Brazil is becoming more democratic! Well done Lula!
Are there any up and coming alternates that someone in the US can use? Would love to support something beyond visa/mastercard. Or Paypal/google pay, etc. Wero not yet accessible, Taler seems to have no providers yet?
Use as much cash as possible.
I try my best, but always worth mentioning!
+1 for this
UnionPay is emerging
That's not new
Thank you! I dont knoe if UnionPay would be better, but I did not know about it, so thank you for mentioning it!
Asia also trying their best to avoid any American payment processors. For example, Indonesian QRIS, supported by all local banks, also can be used in other Asian countries like Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, India (soon), Taiwan, and so on.
Visa and Mastercard both give you an insurance on the product or service you bought and allow you to dispute any charges. PSPs don't quite do that.
We'd need a European alternative for credit cards, and I don't see such a thing existing or in the horizon.
Hopefully UnionPay will get more popular as an alternative in the near future
A Chinese company. How on earth would that be any better?
Maybe it was a joke!
The post specifies "American companies", I provided a non-american example. Certainly I prefer the possibility of choosing from two countries.
Also, as for how China is better, China hasn't sanctioned any country AFAIK from using UnionPay unlike the USA, so it has no precedent of being used as a political tool
Making such an infrastructure change is such a heavy thing to do that frankly even if we would assume that China is somehow benevolent (an absurd claim imho but let's assume), it wouldn't be worth it.
The only alternative is a real European implementation.
At least from the wikipedia article, seems UnionPay can be used wherever Discover is accepted, as they have an inter-operative agreement.
It's true it is an alternative, but it doesnt seem like a beneficial switch either.
What do you mean by infrastructure change? UnionPay is already allowed and you can increasingly frequently find the option to pay with it in Europe
AMEN
There is also PaySafeCard. But its mostly used for online and gaming services like Steam and Spotify.
In Italy we have our payment processor called "Bancomat", but it's rarely supported outside of physical stores.
In my experience most countries in Europe have long had country-specific payment systems like that, with a few notable exceptions (like the UK) were everything operates on top of VISA or Mastercard.
The problem with those is usually to do payments without the physical card and cross-country payments.
The first problem has been address in the last decade or so with things mobile phone apps that read QR codes and are linked to a card or bank account (such as MBWay in Portugal and iDEAL in The Netherlands).
The second is still a big problem - some cross-country systems have appeared and some national systems interoperate, but that's only a handful of countries each and it's far from a pan-European system (Wero is maybe the one with the broadest geographical coverage and it still only covers 5 countries), much less something that is accepted anywhere in the World.
Wero is maybe the one with the broadest geographical coverage and it still only covers 5 countries
I have discovered Curve recently. It lets me pay through the phone's NFC where Google Pay refuses to do so. Curve is the direct payment processor.
Curve is a UK company.
Having worked in the Financial Industry in London, I wouldn't trust any UK financial solution provider (including payment processors) any more than a US one since Financial Regulation in both is a joke, both governments are in thrall to Finance and both governments are, for supposed Democracies, insanely high on civil society surveillance having things like secret information courts that can just issue secret bulk surveillance orders.
The UK might be in the European Continent, but for somebody based on the EU they provide no more rights than the US.
If one is based in the EU, it's overall safer to stick to EU based companies where one actually has some right and companies doing fishy things towards EU citizens run real risks of being heavily punished for it.
I may agree, but Wero is not available in my country. The alternative is to keep using Visa and Paypal.
Yeah ๐ And I would love to be able more vastly using even truly global currency, which is ecologically sustainable! I am using Nano (XNO), but currently not many vendors accept it.
none of them support xmr