[m11a]

I think people that feel WeChat is simply a social network don't understand WeChat. Though the article doesn't say this, the comments here and popular opinion generally think that.

From my time visiting China I'm not sure it's possible to live, in the urban areas, without WeChat. Payments are basically all through WeChat; I found places that didn't take Visa/Mastercard (or even know what those were, although that may have just been my pronunciation).

So the answer to this article is simple:

- For China: CCP approval

- For America/Europe: WeChat would never happen, unless there was severe monopolisation that allowed a company to roll something like WeChat out successfully, or the federal government / national governments mandated it

The article discusses how a WeChat replacement may be done using blockchain, not what a WeChat replacement needs to be successful (as the title would imply), or what may be the most technically viable way of doing it.

[shalmanese]

Nowadays, it's literally impossible to live in China without either WeChat or Alipay as health codes are integrated into the apps and it can be impossible to move outside without displaying your health code. Travelling on trains, planes and long haul busses now require you to have the app.

I don't think enough has been made about how extraordinary it is that a sovereign government has let such a core governmental function simply be handed over to for-profit businesses. It would be like, in the US, registering for your drivers license by Signing in with Google and being bound by the Google TOS. Commit an offense that causes Google to delete your account and now you can't legally drive anymore.

[system16]

It doesn't seem that extraordinary if in this scenario Google became an appendage of the federal government, providing it complete and unfettered access to its systems, complied to any and all requests without question, there was never concern for overreach or public backlash, etc.

[shalmanese]

People outside of China have wildly unrealistic ideas about the true relationship between large Chinese tech companies and the government.

https://www.ft.com/content/760142e6-740e-11ea-95fe-fcd274e92... is sadly paywalled but it's an excellent account of the actual negotiations that have been going on between Tencent, Alibaba and the many different bureaucratic layers of the Chinese government.

[freetrial]

Does anyone actually believe these long-winded articles that attempt to paint some sort of contentious, arms-length relationship between the CCP and their state-funded tech companies?

Obviously, the relationship is messy. But it's undoubtedly basic cronyism, and these companies succeed because they are the 'chosen ones' and their direct ties to government officials.

[tehlike]

http://archive.is/ApUOz

[rstuart4133]

So I gather in China you pay for retail purchases WeChat or Alipay and they are privately owned? It's not very different in Australia. We have Visa and Mastercard, both privately owned.

In Australia, the old rule "everyone must accept cash" has been swept away by covid-19. They've even upped limit you have at which you have to enter a PIN, so most purchases are contactless. Cash will be another casualty of covid-19 I guess. There are only two contactless platforms accepted everywhere - Visa and Master. Both are privately held. And they are head quartered in another country.

Is the USA so different?

[blackrock]

I recall, this actually happened a few months ago, but with Uber.

What happened, was Uber started dropping customers that had a poor rating. Maybe they didn’t give a $5 tip, so the driver gave them a poor rating. Who knows why.

But the result is that the public, the customer in question, can no longer use Uber’s services.

This is terrifying, in that Uber wanted to eliminate public taxi services, and privatize it on their proprietary platform.

If you think this through, then what could be the potential long term effect of this?

Possibly that we as consumers, are now beholden to some random rating system, by some private company, that has the final authority to withhold essential public services from us.

And from what we have seen, these private businesses have an effective lobbying system, that can get lawmakers to draft laws in their favor.

[whytai]

A few points. Uber drivers cannot see if individual riders have tipped them. They also cannot see your individual rating of them, nor you of theirs.

Policing their own platform works both ways. When I order an uber I expect a certain quality of service. ie a safe, comfortable ride. Likewise, when I drive for uber I expect people to respect my property (my car). I expect uber to fulfill both of these things so that it is a usable platform.

Beyond that, if you get removed from using uber can't you use lyft, didi, a taxi, or public transit?

I would hope that the long term effect of this is that people behave in ubers. I personally have had friends throw up in them or drunkenly harass female drivers.

[aianus]

> Uber drivers cannot see if individual riders have tipped them.

This is not true, I can see exactly which rides included a tip. However, I can't see this before I rate the rider so I can't penalize a rider for not tipping.

[shakethemonkey]

How is this different from a taxi company? A taxi company can and will blacklist your address. In fact, it may blacklist entire neighborhoods. This happens today.

[yumraj]

the for profit business has deep relationship with the government and is perhaps like its virtual arm, and it benefits the government by providing deeper access to people's activities.

[shalmanese]

A better way of describing this is, imagine that for the $1200 stimulus checks the US is sending out, the only way to receive that money would be to install a web app where your only choices are Sign in with Google or Sign in with Facebook. Once signed in, Google/Facebook would use their proprietary big data algorithms to determine if you are eligible for stimulus and, if you are, they would deposit it directly into your account via Google Pay/Facebook Pay.

If they reject you and you believe it's in error, the only way to clear up that error is to talk to a Google/Facebook employee, there's no way to directly talk to the US government.

On the one hand, it fixes one of the problems with the stimulus which is that it's not getting money into the hands of people fast enough. A Google/FB run system could have probably gotten the money into people's hands in days rather than the months it's taking the US govt. On the other hand, it's a totally wild scenario. There's no way it would even be thinkable that that's what the US government would roll out.

But that's the reality in China right now. For example, the law in Beijing right now is that you cannot check yourself into a hotel without showing a green Beijing Health Code and you can't get a health code without installing WeChat/Alipay. That's how crazy the situation is in China. Totally core government functions are being outsourced to for profit, private companies.

[mcelhinney]

Just to add that most Chinese businesses accept payments through AliPay along with WeChat.

[Aperocky]

That is the duopoly in China. Alibaba and Wechat - the 2 apps that allow you to do everything. Including paying utilities, phone bills, even taxes.

[yftsui]

Alibaba get to be endorsed by building computing infrastructure for the government, the cake is already split between Alibaba and Tencent.

There isn't much chance someone else could get a cut, even for state owned companies, I guess same applies to Cloud Computing market in China.

[izacus]

> - For America/Europe: WeChat would never happen, unless there was severe monopolisation that allowed a company to roll something like WeChat out successfully, or the federal government / national governments mandated it

Isn't Apple ecosystem basically US/European WeChat? It's not a single app, but they use tight integration and single device lock to create essentially a full copy of all WeChat services with iMessage, Apple Pay, Health, etc? Apple basically control communications, payments and health data of their users and works with other vendors to integrate them primarily as payment, content and preferred identification provider.

You get all of that nicely packaged into a single box. The only difference is that you can't use it on a cheap phone.

[sweezyjeezy]

If you go into a McDonald's in China there are self service touch screens. If you want to use these, the _only_ way to do it is with WeChat. You cannot use a credit card, if you don't have WeChat payments, you queue and pay in cash (this was my experience anyway). That's how ingrained WeChat is in Chinese society. You should think less about features and instead look at how it is actually used there.

[filoleg]

>Isn't Apple ecosystem basically US/European WeChat?

If you could only perform all your life necessities by using a single app from Apple, like taxis/medical records/paying for things/transit access/government stuff/etc., then sure. But for now, there isn't anything like this. In fact, it would not come to fruition at any point in this current timeline imo, given that for each one of those things, Apple has competitors who have offerings just as good or better for each of those categories.

Also, I heavily doubt that US would ever subject itself to every single aspect of people's lives having to go through a single private entity with no alternatives available.

I think another part of the reason it happened in China (aside from obvious ones that people already mentioned, like WeChat being de-facto pretty much an extension of CCP) is the fact that before WeChat there was nothing. So WeChat came to an empty field and filled all that vacuum. In 2020, there is no such vacuum in the US/Europe. For each of the tasks one would use their smartphone for, there are multiple competent competing entries.

[decanus]

The article doesn't really mention blockchain other than 2 times quickly, it seems like everyone in this comment section seems to believe that though as if they said you MUST use blockchain at every step of building something like this.

[Barrin92]

The article demands decentralisation of infrastructure, which if you want to facilitate payments like Wechat does which is a large and key component of the platform, requires some sort of consensus mechanism.

Doesn't necessarily need to be a blockchain, but something similar in spirit, and this quickly falls apart because WeChat does a billion+ transactions per day, that's about tens of thousands per second and there's no decentralised, secure solution for this.

[yibg]

I think also because wechat outside of china is a very stripped down version of wechat functionality inside china. It's actually very convenient for many aspects of life there.

[zelphirkalt]

Of course it is possible to live there without WeChat. That's an illusion I get tired of hearing. Been there in 2019, done it, had no problems using cash. Probably Mastercard would also have wirked for buying a train ticket, if I had persisted and acted as if I did not have it in cash. (And no, no one robbed me.)

[verst]

No problems using cash? Sure, if you only go to the stores and restaurants catering to foreigners.

Last year I noticed I could no longer use cash to touch up my Shanghai Transportation card balance. There are still some touch up machines but they now only accept WeChat / AliPay QR codes for payment. I have to go to the one service counter in the station to use cash to touch it up and sometimes those aren't even staffed.

Not only that, but the Shanghai Metro has moved away from their own NFC Transportation cards to installing bar code scanners that directly use WeChat / AliPay QR codes when you enter and exit the station, then charge your account accordingly. They also have support for NFC and Apple Pay. But to set up the Transit Card in Apple Pay you need a China Union Bank Card. The alternative is to install the Shanghai Metro App, link that to AliPay with the new option for foreigners to add foreign credit cards (this by the way creates a virtual Chinese prepaid debit card which eventually will refund unused funds).

If you buy streetfood (from those BBQs late at night in the middle of city intersections for example in Shanghai) you now find that payment with WeChat may be the only option.

Beggars don't want cash and instead are displaying a big WeChat QR code to receive payments.

I was staying in my friend's local apartment complex. To enter the building you needed to use a WeChat app. Unfortuantely we couldn't register me because I didn't get a Chinese phone number this time. It took a lot of awkward conversations to eventually get someone to issue me a physical NFC key card, something they no longer do.

Here is also an article on the subject: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-mobile-payment-boom-chan...

[zelphirkalt]

> No problems using cash? Sure, if you only go to the stores and restaurants catering to foreigners.

Well, maybe you've been in a different region or something, but I've been in capital of a 2 provinces and quite rural areas too, no problems whatsoever. Sounds like you are talking exclusively about Shanghai. I've not been specifically to Shanghai, so who knows, maybe there it is that shitty. Not where I went though, so don't try to discredit my telling of how it is as "visiting only stores and restaurants catering to foreigners", cause that's BS.

> If you buy streetfood (from those BBQs late at night in the middle of city intersections for example in Shanghai) you now find that payment with WeChat may be the only option.

Done that, with cash, in a major city, capital of a province.

> Beggars don't want cash and instead are displaying a big WeChat QR code to receive payments.

Perhaps in Shanghai as well? I've seen them begging for cash, where I went, so that is also a quite general statement to make.

Seems your personal experience is either limited to Shanghai or simply completely different. Speak a little Chinese to the locals and they lighten up. Never on my whole trip have I encountered a single situation, where they would not take cash, while having seen a lot of different places, from capitals to villages, to street food, to little markets. Perhaps just don't go to Shanghai, if it is that bad.

I find it a little bit stupid, that people downvote a first hand account of how things are in several areas in China, as if it was something bad in a discussion about such things. This is exactly what this discussion is about, so it's on topic and adds valuable information to the discussion: Not everywhere it is as you describe it to be. Don't confuse any personal location limited experience with an overall situation in a huge nation like China.