[Closi]

Spending money without automated fraud checking, dispute resolution and the ability to do chargeback sounds like a great idea until you think for more than 2 seconds about why those things exist.

And I’m not sure why I would want to maintain two currencies anyway, one for small payments where for some reason I don’t want protection, and another when I do want protection. Having to hold multiple currencies dependent on what I want the level of dispute resolution to be sounds like a huge step back.

The main risk isn’t that someone wants to reverse a coffee, it’s that their whole wallet gets stolen.

[throwaway81523]

> Spending money without automated fraud checking, dispute resolution and the ability to do chargeback sounds like a great idea until you think for more than 2 seconds about why those things exist.

Sure, those things exist, and cash also exists, and in physical real-life transactions you get to decide for yourself which one you want to use. With online transactions and without crypto, for the most part you currently don't have a choice, and that's not good.

Example: if I'm storing important archive data in AWS Glacier that has to be retained for years and I have to pay monthly, I'd be much more worried about data loss due to something going wrong with one of the monthly automatic card payments than with AWS defrauding me or with Glacier itself failing. So I'd rather pay with crypto (or ideally, pay years in advance up front and not worry about monthly payments at all), than leave it up to the whims and vagaries of some damn card company's flaky software.

Yes stuff like that has happened to me more than once in real life (not with amazon but with some other hosting providers).

[herbst]

One big difference is that if i send someone Crypto they can't spend any more than i have sent them. If i give them my credit card (and they possibly even leak/loose it) i have a far bigger risk for fraud.

[Closi]

So, basically a debit card?

Or a credit card with spending limits?

In the U.K. with banks like monzo you can also raise/lower the limit instantly via an app. Also the fraud detection algorithms will automatically ask for 2FA on larger transactions or ones that look fraudulent e.t.c.

[herbst]

No not at all. No limits, actually only spending the exact amount with no way of spending more.

Yes there are modern banking solutions like this (we have instant transfers between banks with a comfortable QR scanning app just like google pay here in Switzerland) but this only works in Switzerland. For any international transfers we have to fall back to Swift transfers (slow) or credit cards (mentioned issue).

[Closi]

> No not at all. No limits, actually only spending the exact amount with no way of spending more.

Yeah you can do that exactly with a debit card - just ask your bank to remove the spend limit and give you zero overdraft.

Once you realise effectively you are describing a debit card with less options then suddenly it doesn't look like such a good feature.

[herbst]

What kind of payment gateway are we even talking about? Are you describing "Sofort/Klarna"? I am not aware of any europe wide/international payment providers based on your bank account that does what you describe without basing on SWIFT and therefore being everything but realtime.

[Closi]

Well from the consumer side it seems to work pretty well, my bank (Monzo) has wise.com integration and it all works seamlessly.

But now we are specifically just talking about international payments where you explicitly don’t want any currency conversion or buyers protection, and the use case is just getting farcically narrow.